To answer why 98.1 went classic hits, while Easy was one of the top rated stations 12+ (I remember it being #1 a few times), ad revenue was low.
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KBZT needs help.
- Thread starter 34james
- Start date
You can buy a radio station for as little or as much as you want to spend. The only thing money gets you is size.
The reason KBZT and XTRA aren't doing well isn't because there's no market for alternative here, it's because both are playing a lot of the same songs over and over with smaller playlists (though 91X has the advantage of like, 800 to 200), I live here, the alternative scene is still big here and a lot of bands always sell out here, but we're in an age where more people stream and radio isn't really as interesting as it used to be with it's variety, focus on new music (KBZT rarely focuses on new stuff, most of their currents is stuff played to death since last year), and locality that would make listeners engaged with listening to them. 91X has the locality feel still but they need some more engaging shows that includes the audience I think. When 91X did A to XYZ, a lot of the people not listening to 91X obviously was interested, they jumped ship once the station's playlist got very samey and a lot of new music was less focused on.
I mean, San Diego was pretty influential in the alternative scene in America next to Los Angeles.
I mean, San Diego was pretty influential in the alternative scene in America next to Los Angeles.
Keep in mind that the music radio stations play costs the same no matter how big the playlist, regardless of age. The only reason the playlist is a certain size and the songs are of a certain age is the people who listen respond to those songs. If bigger playlists or more new music would attract more people, the station would do it. The goal is to reach a consensus audience. the consensus isn't going to be the music on the edges.
Then how come it worked back then? Even in the 2000's this was a practice that worked. People complain about radio here for being repetitive. If anything, this is why fm radio is dying. And it also defeats the purpose of alternative, which is to be cutting edge, and there's still cutting edge acts out there.
When a dang Tiktok vid with 443K likes mocking over the top radio bumpers with the lamest song ever on repeat, it shows how much people think modern radio is a bland mockery, and that really sucks because I love radio and know it used to be better for it to not die as soon as the oldest people who helped build it's popularity pass away.
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You have to ask yourself what else changed since 2000? Has the music gotten better or has it become more diluted?
Music taste has become more insular and more individual. That's not what radio does. Radio needs consensus music, and that doesn't exist anymore in this format.
The artists know this, and that's why some of them are leaving alternative for other formats.
When you look at what people stream, their personal streaming behavior is also repetitive. People want to hear their favorite bands. Repetitive is OK when it's the music your like. So this isn't about being repetitive, because that's what radio did 20 years ago. If the music was better, people would want to hear it more often.
I went back to the XTRA playlists in R&R from 20 years ago, and they played their heavies over 40 times a week. But this is what they were playing:
Now, KBZT may play two songs 40 times a week, but most of the currents are getting 20 spins a week. And you say people think that's too repetitive. Compared to 20 years ago, it's not. They're blaming radio when what they really should complain about is the music.
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Then tell me, why is public alternative radio starting to boost in some Markets like Minneapolis, Seattle and other cities? It surely can't be because they play a lot of critically acclaimed and beloved acts that would've been beloved gold staples if it were the late 80s-90s that Audacy/Iheart will never EVER play. No, I guess it's because alternative is dead, and has been since after 1996, and music is all autotuned garbage and the future generations should just hear the good stuff from the superior 20th century. Should all of radio just be top 40 and oldies then? How is alternative going CLASSIC the future of alternative, which ironically focuses on those songs you posted (or at least most of them)? How is shoving the same popular songs over and over that I've already heard a million times better helping alternative?
Like, that's silly, and it's why streaming is HOW newer alternative and indie acts are able to attract younger listeners AND older listeners who once stuck with radio but love music to continue finding good stuff because their algorithms are more varied, more advanced, and stuff like Public Radio focuses on it and avoiding the Imagine Dragons/tiktok trend crap that a lot of stations (like KBZT) are doing, not because of the djs but because Audacy is the most soulless entity in all of radio.
You can't say "people hate radio because of the music" when millions of songs from a whole array of music genres come out every year, and radio only focuses on 200 songs, mostly old, while playing the same 10-20 recurrents/currents that makes audiences believe the false stigma that alternative isn't alternative anymore. In the 80s-2000s they focused on more new music, HELL, in the 10s they did. 2017-2018 was kind of the footnote where Audacy thought playing emo trap rap was a good idea to appeal to a younger crowd instead of something the older audience would most likely like from a young band that has younger fans and possibly grow an audience).
How is 91X, which is 95% classic alt every day, playing 500-600 new songs a YEAR (about 150 were in rotation last year, the others were played on new music/local shows), while 94.9 only played about 100, most of them they never KEPT on rotation.
Here's the top 20 for 91X rn:
Here's how 94.9 looks:
You can see quite a few differences, 91X is playing more recent songs (16/20), 94.9's top 20 is still filled with 9 TIKTOK-trendy songs, songs they've been playing 40-50 times a week for 9 months (Powfu they've been playing since 2020), NEVER keep songs or shove some new songs late nights in the past when I looked at the tunegenie pages last year. And that's how a lot of Audacy/Cumulus/Iheart stations run when you look at the currents on mediabase, they all feel less like a local station whose djs are adding stuff and more like the company has more control over the DJ (94.9's adds are improving a bit though once they got the amazing Jeremy Pritchard as music director, sadly he doesn't have as much freedom yet it seems). 91X's issue is that their highest song only has 8 rotations in a week while the rest range from 1-7, because of this awful, awful direction of good classic songs playing over and over, with 10-15 of those classic artists having 5-6 songs play every 2 hours, giving no chance for a lot of the great stuff their playing to catch an audience.
A lot of good bands have came and went during the past 23 years, the billboard charts aren't the only things going on in alternative, it's why indie is the way to go. That's how alternative started, constantly discovering new music.
Also for the repetitively point, I've hold MORE gold based stuff back then with constant new music plays than I do now. As a kid in the late 00's, a lot of the stuff I hear on resurrection Sundays was stuff playing on rotation WITH the stuff on rotation now, less old songs played constantly everyday for both 94.9 AND 91X in the 00s-early 10s then how it is now post-streaming. And it's even more repetitive now when they avoid a lot of their massive libraries.
I liked KBZT better when it was "about the music". It seems like most of the new music now heard there are the same pop songs already heard on CHR stations. Neither XTRA or KBZT is breaking many new acts these days.
That's a good point. The answer, in my view, is because alternative in no longer a commercial format. It is better when it aims directly at its audience and asks them to pay for it, rather than go to advertisers for the money. The other reason is those are cities where the community is more active and expressive. It might work in San Diego, but someone would have to take a chance. In Seattle, you had Paul Allen put a lot of personal money into it, and it worked.
The music that SHOULD or COULD be heard in alternative is instead showing up in other genres because the artists can make more money that way. What's left is the music that artists self-promote on the internet, but doesn't have the power behind it to achieve consensus. The record labels aren't actively promoting it. So it ends up becoming favorites on personal playlists. Take a look at the Grammy Awards. Why didn't a current alternative band get a performance slot? Was it because of radio? No. It's because of music.
The old music gets airplay because it comes from a time when the record labels and artists knew how to promote their music and created consensus hits that everyone loves. That doesn't happen anymore. That's not how alternative works. The artists drive around in vans playing to their dedicated fan bases in 300-500 seat clubs. Meanwhile Bad Bunny is flying on a private jet and will headline Coachella.
That's why alternative is a better format for non-commercial radio. I love what they've done at KEXP. Maybe we'll see more of that around the country instead of all the religious groups buying radio stations. Maybe someday a band will break out of alternative the way they used to in the 90s.
A lot of the stuff in the library didn't age well. We see the exact same thing in classic hits, classic rock, classic country, and classic R&B. Not everything holds up after 30 years. So you pick the consensus stuff that everyone agrees on. But I looked at the XTRA playlist now on Mediabase and there isn't a single song that gets played more than once a day. In terms of radio playlists, that isn't repetitive. So I don't know where that criticism is coming from. But it gets back to what I said about alternative being a non-commercial format.
That's not how it works. The record labels are in charge of breaking new acts. That's their job. They use radio and other platforms to do it. In the country format, record labels in partnership with country radio break about a dozen new acts a year. Some of them, like Chris Stapleton, Luke Combs, and Morgan Wallen, are headlining stadium shows. That's what I call a return on investment. Each of them could have had their music played on alternative radio. In fact some alt stations still play Stapleton. He's this generation's Bob Seger.
Those are markets that have very small ethnic populations compared with ones like San Diego. It's been seen all over the US that markets with larger Black, Hispanic or ethnic populations in general affect the overall musical "texture" ranging from what small stores play in the background to the concert tours that visit.
Again, it's not that "Audacy/iHeart will ever play" some songs. It's that both of those companies are very dependent on and very skilled with research. What the don't play is exactly what will annoy a significant portion of the audience.
I have said it repeated times, and others in the business have also mentioned that alternative is very fragmented. There are broadly defined "fans" but they split into subsets where some of what one group likes another dislikes and yet another barely tolerates.
Maybe, it that is what research shows. Yet we see how markets sustain, depending on their ethnic composition, commercial stations with CHR, Hot AC, AC, Urban, Churban, Urban AC, Classic Rock, Classic Hits, Country, Adult Hits, Regional Mexican, Reggaetón, Spanish Adult Hits and a few I may have missed.
Yet formats that have limited appeal or which appeal to groups advertisers don't seek, often find ¿homes on non-commercial stations. When even that fails, you still have Internet streams.
Radio is not in the music business, it is in the advertising business. When the newer material is fragmented in appeal and can't generate sizable audiences but the older songs have more consensus, then guess what radio plays?
Again, they have asked listeners what they can play, and the consensus shows that what you are talking about does not work well enough to sustain commercial radio stations.
Revelation: even in the smaller markets, the "DJs" don't pick or program songs. It's done by the PD with the help of research.
Again, the issue is the "indie" is fragmented, and there is little consensus on nearly all the newer stuff.
And in the reggaetón world, where we are talking about 20 countries in out hemisphere, there are even more new acts that break out every year because the artist and their labels work together with radio and new media. And the music is not broken into tiny subsets that hate the songs the other sets like.
In that area, the field is broad and unified. Even though there are no international trade magazines and little or no cross-nation monitors (i.e. no Billboard and no MediaBase) stations and streamers follow trends and the record labels give broad, multi-national promotion to the songs that are breaking and the artists that are emerging.
It's obvious that the labels, given the limited international appeal of alternative rock and its niche market in the US, sort of "toss the kid into the pool to see if he can swim". Little unified, strong promotion. Look at urban, CHR, reggaetón, country, regional Mexican, and you see unified promotion in all media in all applicable markets.
I'm an everyday listener on 91X, sure, the gold based doesn't play twice a day (I've seen some old songs play twice in a 7 hour span at like, 10PM-5AM a couple times, but a lot of the same old songs will play on loop every 1-2 days which I feel there's hundreds of deserving spots for other songs to play that doesn't get played frequently anymore like they did pre-format flip, where no one would complain. They could just use the A to XYZ playlist that was so beloved with the fans as the placeholder playlist with new music and I would actually be good with that. It doesn't take away the many popular top 91 stuff from the 2000s-10s away and has some extra classics. XYZ list is like 2,200 songs.
At least up the new music to 2-3 times per hour instead of one, or bring back recurrents. Would make them more current and interesting.
I'm looking at Mediabase, and their most-played song is Loser by Beck. Eight spins a week, 1 in AM drive, 1 in mids, 3 in PM drive, 2 in evenings, and 1 in overnight. That's it during a week. Next in INXS New Sensation, also 8 spins a week, 4 in overnight, 2 in AM, 2 in mids, and none in afternoon. I don't see anything wrong with that. This is certified airplay, not based on memory.
XTRA has a 900 song playlist, which is unheard of for a commercial station. That's twice as big as KBZT. Half of the songs in the playlist get ONE SPIN a week. No repetition.
With the time spent listening to OTA radio being shorter than ever, that is just not appropriate. The bulk of listeners want to hear favorite and familiar songs every time they listen. And in every format it has been seen that there is a tipping point on new music, where playing too much too often tends to make no songs become hits.
With average listeners only listening about 3 to 4 hours a week, you can't make hits playing them once a daypart each week. What you end up with is a lot of songs nearly nobody ever gets familiar with.
Back in the day of Top 40 when stations had double digit shares and weekly TSL was 10 to 12 hours to a top station, it took about 30 to 40 plays a week and around 120 plays total to be able to determine if a song was a hit... and, it if was, to make it a hit. Today, with lighter use of radio and mostly deep-list streams, it takes longer for a song to "break" and, due to simple math, once proven, hits last much longer.
In some formats and music genres, we are deceived by multiple repeat plays of new songs by big artists (or even the occasional binge playing of "made on TikTok" hits) and can't see that the market is absorbing fewer songs and they hang around for more time.
Much of this is not new. When I was about 13 or so, I'd buy a 45 and take it home and listen to it over and over for an hour or so, and in the first few days would play it perhaps 50 or more times. Today, that repeat binge listening is seen in streaming calculations but it does not indicate what radio should be doing.
And if this were a positive quality, the station would outperform KBZT. In 25-54, it does not, based on multi-book rolling averages. And it has a slightly lower cume, as well.
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Because it's old songs that could be given for new music, or a song from Beck or INXS that used to be played a lot that isn't anymore, or a 2000's band that deserves it, or an older band that deserves it. These songs have been spinning nonstop since february 2022.
It's not a currents-based station anymore. They changed format a year ago.
And that was a bad idea. Ratings went back to where they went, XYZ was the only gap breaker because that was varied and fun.
Now it's the station where they got you covered if you want to hear Nirvana and grunge bands every 2 hours with Lust for Life by Iggy Pop and Loser by Beck over and over again.
They'll go back to currents though, and the day they do, it'll be glorious.
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