That may be what's happening to him now at KOAI Phoenix. Although it's lasted 5 years.
-
Get involved.
We want your input!
Apply for Membership and join the conversations about everything related to broadcasting.
After we receive your registration, a moderator will review it. After your registration is approved, you will be permitted to post.
If you use a disposable or false email address, your registration will be rejected.
After your membership is approved, please take a minute to tell us a little bit about yourself.
https://www.radiodiscussions.com/forums/introduce-yourself.1088/
Thanks in advance and have fun!
RadioDiscussions Administrators
Kevin & Sluggo Cut At KLOS
- Thread starter lanceventa
- Start date
That may be what's happening to him now at KOAI Phoenix. Although it's lasted 5 years.
And this is what killed Mike Joseph's "Hot Hits" system of few songs with only minimal jock presence. High energy, fast movement. But it lost the adults very fast because there was "no meat in the sandwich".
I think you’re right. The audience for John’s station today has fewer options than the listeners for KHJ, KUPD, WCOZ, KDKB, WBMW and KSLX had in their day, which may help explain KOAI’s relative longevity.
And that exclusivity often means that listeners listen longer, creating faster "burn" and fatigue in regards to the individual songs.
The point is that people want to hear their favorites more than once in a blue moon. Also, every song you play should be a hit or near hit in your target demos. Cutting the size of the playlist at KSLX meant fewer reasons for the audience to tune out (in the form of fewer songs people didn’t like) and more reasons to stay (in the form of more hit songs and more favorites just around the corner).
Classic rock typically works quite well when done correctly. Correctly is a relative term. A 750 song playlist might work fine in Wichita or Omaha, but it wasn’t what the Phoenix audience wanted.
Like Sebastian, Hot Hits lasted between 5-7 years in most markets. Nothing lasts forever. You ride the wave while you can. Then the station reinvents.
Then I have been lucky with formats I created or helped create:
Mega in Buenos Aires: 24 years and still top 5
Z-93 in San Juan: 45 years and top 4 or 5
Z in Santo Domingo: #1 for 38 years.
KLVE in LA (a joint team project) Top 5 for most of last 29 years.
NotiUno San Juan: One of 5 or 6 top networks since 1973.
One of the secrets is the old "if it ain't broke, don't fix it".
I remember Audacy did that with the “2 minute promise”. But everyone seemed to hate that 🤷🏽♂️
Not meant as criticism, but for those wondering how these threads go off-topic, this is a great example, and as is often the case, I'm in the thick of it.
Someone expresses incredulity that jocks have been fired and the ratings go up at KLOS.
I give a historical precedent (John Sebastian at KSLX in Phoenix), and, purely in an effort to avoid it going off-topic with "well, yeah, but he did other stuff too", I mention the music changes.
And now, we're discussing library sizes, rotations and format longevity.
This is just natural flow and drift of human discussion.
Someone expresses incredulity that jocks have been fired and the ratings go up at KLOS.
I give a historical precedent (John Sebastian at KSLX in Phoenix), and, purely in an effort to avoid it going off-topic with "well, yeah, but he did other stuff too", I mention the music changes.
And now, we're discussing library sizes, rotations and format longevity.
This is just natural flow and drift of human discussion.
I’m curious if K.M., Michael and others believe there’s an age gap about djs. My 20-something kids both prefer all music with no commercials, while some of my retired friends including me like those we consider good djs.
Some of it is generational---those of us who first listened to radio accepted what we heard at the time as being the norm. That was my thought: "Okay, so you play records, you say funny stuff, you give the weather, the time, someone there gives you the news and you play commercials to pay for it all."
Someone joining radio in progress today as a young listener won't hear that and won't have a point of reference for it.
The other factor, though, is that the vast majority of the music radio audience has always preferred as little talk and as few interruptions as possible. My parents' generation gravitated to FM beautiful music stations---15 minute sets of continuous music (well, actually 13, but they said 15), with the bare minimum of talk and ads (usually 8 minutes an hour in four two-minute breaks) in between.
Sure, The Real Don Steele once had 40 shares in teens. That means 60 percent of the teens were listening to something else.
Keep in mind that people don't buy music anymore. The concept of going to a store to buy the latest CD or album mostly doesn't exist. The top selling album last week sold 16,000 copies nationally. Thirty years ago, it wasn't unusual for an album to sell a million in its first week. So that has changed. Instead of listening to hard copies of music, people stream. When you were listening to your albums, did you want interruptions? Of course not. So that part hasn't changed. Radio has it's place, but it's not a replacement for private listening to music.
BigA makes a good point that I'd like to expand upon.
When I first started buying records with my own money (age 11, early 1968), I could only maybe afford an album every couple of months. If I got $20 in birthday or Christmas money, I'd spend it on records (in those days, that'd buy four or five albums), but most kids I knew put that money away, saving up for a first car or something else worthwhile.
Point being that most of us growing up in the late 60s/early 70s might only own 15 or 20 albums by the time we graduated high school, and that number built over time. Radio brought us variety from what we already owned.
A $4.98 album in 1970 is $40.40 in today's money. But Spotify gives you access to everything currently licensed in North America for $11.99 a month in today's money---with the first three months free.
If I'd had access to all that music for a third of the price of a single LP each month (and hadn't gotten a job in radio at age 15), I might NEVER have listened to the radio---there'd be too much at my fingertips that I was paying for.
When I first started buying records with my own money (age 11, early 1968), I could only maybe afford an album every couple of months. If I got $20 in birthday or Christmas money, I'd spend it on records (in those days, that'd buy four or five albums), but most kids I knew put that money away, saving up for a first car or something else worthwhile.
Point being that most of us growing up in the late 60s/early 70s might only own 15 or 20 albums by the time we graduated high school, and that number built over time. Radio brought us variety from what we already owned.
A $4.98 album in 1970 is $40.40 in today's money. But Spotify gives you access to everything currently licensed in North America for $11.99 a month in today's money---with the first three months free.
If I'd had access to all that music for a third of the price of a single LP each month (and hadn't gotten a job in radio at age 15), I might NEVER have listened to the radio---there'd be too much at my fingertips that I was paying for.
That's the thing a lot of boomers don't understand. They see this all as a radio problem, that if DJs were just better, people would listen to the radio. But it ignores that the main attraction for music radio was the MUSIC. So when the way people get music changes, it changes the way they use radio and what they expect from radio. The fans know everything they need to know about their favorite stars. They usually know more than the DJs. So once that happens, what could a DJ possibly add to the equation? Other than a show that has nothing to do with music, which is what most DJs do now.
The logic behind entertainment and personality shows is that people could effectively make their own playlists at the record store (back then) or Spotify (now). So they had no reason to listen to the radio otherwise. DE always tells the story about how he gradually changed the format of a popular station in the DR from tropical to news-talk for this reason.
Stations in Puerto Rico, USA mix a lot of talk with their music. The first one to do it was WPRM, which DE also programmed. Although that one had a salsa format that was becoming niche and older-leaning, even younger-leaning, CHR stations have been doing the same thing.
It's not the size of the library, it's what you do with it
K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
I will answer by building on what my good friend Mike already said, so as not to be too redundant. (He and I happen to think alike as programmers.)
This is a good point because almost literally always, those who complain about radio today are the people who grew up in the big top-40 era, where air personalities had a lot to do with enhancing the presentation. And because that was the way it was, we not only accepted it but it became what we defined as the medium.
To the Baby Boomers (which Mike and I are) that was what we remember radio as being and today's presentation is something we had to adjust to. For people in the business, the adjustment came as gradually as the changes themselves. But for the average Boomer listener, the contrast is more obvious ... and then nostalgia sets in and here come the complaints about radio "not being as good as it used to be".
Include in that group every generation that listened during the transitory years from "personalities" to "shut up and play the music" and you nailed it.
Absolutely true. I started in radio working weekends during my senior year of high school, and everyone in my class knew it. This was 1973-74, and I lost track of the number of times I answered the question "why do the DJs alwaya talk over the beginning of the records?"
Mike will no doubt remember that before Rick Carroll was hired at KKDJ, the format was automated with an AOR-like presentation of four songs in a row followed by a backsell. When that changed, EVERYONE noticed because it was such a jarring contrast.
Thanks for reminding me that when I got an unheard of 23 share in afternoon drive on Y97 in Santa Barbara in the Summer 1988 book, even though that was phenomenal, it meant 77% of the audience was listening to other stations.
But that's always been the case. No station ever gets literally all of the listening. Individual tastes in both music and presentation will always prevail and the reason the shares no longer routinely hit double digits is due more to the higher number of stations than it is a question of whether the previous on-air models worked better.
K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
Very, very, VERY true.
A 450 song active library may only have 100 to 125 high rotation songs (I am obviously talking Classic Hits here). If those are half of the spins in a typical hour, that means the rest of the library is going to play around 75% less than those Powers.
That's a big part of why those Powers have to be the biggest consensus favorites. They are the ones the listeners hear most often.
But he’s got a point. People also want quality. I’m not implying you’re saying this. But, the notion that people don’t care about anything other that music just isn’t true. Listeners demand talent don’t talk “as much”. Listen to Hot 107.9 in Atlanta. Their afternoon show has perfect formula. Bits that don’t go over a minute and actually lead into songs. Why do music stations fluctuate ratings? If a DJ gets canned for poor ratings and then their replacement gets better ratings for same time slot, what does that say?
The company found that people want to hear music in the afternoon and not two old guys chatting. I think it’s as simple as that.
- Status