Definitely a bigger signal than 94.5, especially towards the east. At one time, KBAY operated on that frequency, but not as a country station.
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K-Love Adds Third South Bay Signal With KBAY Purchase
- Thread starter lanceventa
- Start date
Definitely a bigger signal than 94.5, especially towards the east. At one time, KBAY operated on that frequency, but not as a country station.
1. True and Austin is sometimes mentioned here for growing the same way.
2. same given the attention that there were companies moving their headquarters from California for Texas in the past 6 years but startups have taken the void in the Bay Area and we had to wait for the long term effects to find out.
3. same with TV given the history of San Francisco sometimes changing DMA ranking within their history.
K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
I'd like to quickly reply to the first paragraph of this post, while generally agreeing with the rest without commenting.
Perhaps those who welcome a competitor being removed from the for-profit battle see a larger piece of a smaller pie as the difference between staying afloat and sinking.
Perhaps those who welcome a competitor being removed from the for-profit battle see a larger piece of a smaller pie as the difference between staying afloat and sinking.
The bad news is the pie will continue to shrink, so the benefit is temporary.
No it didn't. Never was. KBAY used to be on
Edit: I mistyped the original KBAY frequency.
Last edited:
The
KBAY was at 100.3
Also San Antonio. It's grown into a major market, in or near the top 10 in recent years. (And while
So Dallas, Houston, Austin, San Antonio have all been eating California's lunch over the last decade or so.
It's going to be interesting to see how many immigrants to Texas decide they like it there and want to stay, verses how many are just biding their time till they can engineer a return to the West Coast. (The smart money never minimizes the "Hotel California" effect.) Though there is the cost of re-entry, i.e. home prices. If someone was a renter, then it's a non-issue. If they owned and rented out their home while simultaneously renting in Texas, the probability's higher that they plan to return eventually. But if they cashed out and bought in Texas, they might never be able to buy back into the California housing market. (All of which presumes that current and long-time trends don't collapse.)
You're correct, I knew it was 100.3 and mistyped it anyway. Already corrected. Thank you for catching that.
San Antonio is ranked at 24th.
Also, GDP wise Dallas and Houston are not eating the Bay Area for lunch. While they are both gaining ground, San Francisco/Oakland without San Jose is 4th economy in the country. Adding San Jose it’s nearly tied with LA at 1.3 trillion.
A lot of it is taxes and cost of living. Those Californians in Texas are the reason why Texas is turning blue, and why rural Texans are trying to redistrict those cities in ways that limit the impact they're having. It's been my experience that you can move Californians to different areas, but they remain Californian culturally. Same with New Yorkers moving to Florida. It's a different kind of immigration.
Those changes are also affecting the Bay area. There was a time when a country station could be Top 5 or better in San Francisco. KSAN as a country station was huge in the 80s. There were actually two country stations in San Francisco in the 90s: KSAN and KYCY. But then the population changed and both stations went away. Just as there was an audience for KGO, but it went away.
K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
No argument from me there, and that should also be an indicator to the armchair quarterbacks who frequent RD with their own ideas of how radio is "supposed to operate" as to why we have downsizing. Why we have fully automated formats with little or no air talent. Why we will increase the length of stopsets to accommodate the local business who will actually pay for airtime. Why a lot of us have infomercials on weekend mornings. Why we program "consensus favorites" and not a lot of deeper cuts in order to hold on to what audience isn't using an app on their phone or Alexa instead of tuning in.
To those wannabes, I will say again (for about the 1,264th time) that radio is not in the entertainment business. We are in the advertising business, and those ads which you uniformly detest are what allows you to tune in and listen without a monthly subscription charged to your Visa or Mastercard. The programming is deliberately designed to attract and hold the highest amount of audience possible, to make the station more attractive as a promotional vehicle for the local businesses.
Every time you want us to add a personal favorite song that we already know is a potential tune out for the other 99.999% of the audience, every time you think station downsizing shouldn't be happening, every time a station changes formats to go after a larger part of that shrinking pie of ad dollars, you insult us with a total lack of understanding the "why" of those decisions.
Yeah, some format is going to go away in the San Francisco-San Jose market because K-Love made another acquisition. But that has increasingly become a fact of life for us ... and it should be for everyone here on RD, professionals or just fans.
Just remember: Those sales largely happen because of that shrinking ad dollar pie, because there comes a point where the operating costs exceed the size of that pie slice.
Meanwhile the ad boom is happening in social media and digital. Those of us in content creation see it. There was a time when you threw in digital as a bonus to get on-air money. That's starting to shift. Not to the point where digital is equal. It's not. But you don't throw it in as a bonus. That means you adjust your budget so you have smaller staffs for on-air, and more staff in digital. It's also part of the shift from local staff to national, because of the demise of local retail. It's all happened since covid.
No disagreement with the concept that operators like a competitor being removed. In certain markets that might be enough - maybe for years.
For instance, say you are a country station in a market with three country stations and a competitor sells to a non-comm. Hallelujah! Even there a few more people will sample alternatives now that their favorite station is gone. While the surviving country station's share went up, the ad pie continues getting smaller. Then the AC competitor takes action to cut costs and again, the pie gets smaller.
BTW, I'm not arguing with you. I'm agreeing. What gets tiresome is the kneejerk "blame K-Love" that happens by some every time there is a transaction. There are way more stations for sale than people realize and it is kind of shocking how tight things are for most operators. At the same time, I think the religious broadcasters have to be careful. If they aren't careful, there will also come a point where the FM dial doesn't offer enough choice for the people who don't like their offering. At that point, even the share gains they are seeing in recent years will begin to translate to fewer actual listeners.
I think it's already starting to affect sampling. People aren't looking for new formats on the radio anymore. The people listening now are happy with what they have. Those are the people we program to. But KBAY needs to be careful when they move the country format to a new frequency. They may lose people the way KSFO lost listeners when they moved to 810. People aren't looking for what they want on the radio. The minute their station goes away, they go to streaming. KSFO tried everything to get people to shift, and it didn't seem to work. KBAY needs to be very careful.
K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
I think you will appreciate that, even being a realist, I have a distaste for K-Love's "business model", which is to use that pile of cash they sit on from listener donations to make offers for stations they want (covet?) in a backroom deal process that excludes anyone else from outbidding them, even if they could.
Then they close the main studio, all the local employees become unemployed-ees, K-Love installs either a satellite dish or a Barix box at the transmitter site, a computer running just enough of an automation program to insert the local IDs, and then get to evade the annual FCC license fees that commercial broadcasters are still burdened with.
Brendan Carr makes a point out of stations being forced to kowtow to his definition of "serving the public interest" but I fail to see how K-Love does that, given how they operate. If I had any say in it, any non-comm broadcaster operating outside of the reserved FM band (88-92 MHz) would have to keep their commercial license status and pay the fees like everyone else. I also would make pigs fly.
I am a Christian, non-denominational, and I don't believe God needs all these transmitters to speak to the faithful. If He wants to communicate with me, He is certainly powerful enough to do it without external equipment.
True too we see these same changes on the TV side for the same reasons. But on the TV side it’s more about merging with adapting to TV apps today. I seen KTSF-TV promote the Zeam app as an indication of where their audience went and attract some of them to the app as part of the way for them to adapt to their current audiences in the Bay Area.
KTSF 26 - San Francisco, CA | Zeam
KTSF is the largest Asian-language and Chinese Mandarin / Cantonese broadcast station in the US. It streams news and entertainment programming to 1.5 million Asian Americans in the San Francisco, Oakland, San Jose, and the Northern California Bay Area.
zeam.com