I think what we were talking about in #169 is bringing back those who left when commercial AAA (KFOG) went away.
It will be interesting to see if this really comes to pass, or whether KEXP gains a somewhat different audience.
Before 2017, when KFOG ditched many of the features of its previous format and essentially became "Live 105 Lite"[1], the station had become stodgy. It was beloved by its aging base of listeners. The station's imaging was strong, and it skillfully used earlier forms of social media, giving "Fogheads" a sense of belonging to a community. But it increasingly was stuck in the past. It was becoming like KGO with music[2]. The one thing that managed to stay fresh was "10 @ 10" which, by its very nature, bent the boundaries of the format. Dave Morey, the voice of the station, had long retired, too. The station became too predictable and set in its ways. Cumulus tried to shake it up, but then the need to protect the KNBR money cow arose, and 104.5 became the frequency sacrified for that purpose.
The switch to KNBR-FM did gain some attention, often along the lines of pining for
the fjords the way KFOG was, not what it had become in its last couple of years. In that, one could detect that the gray-ponytail crowd was wistful but had already moved on.
It seems to me that KEXP tries to appeal to a younger, more diverse audience. Probably the closest appeal in over-the-air radio in the Bay Area today would be the nightly DJ sets on KALW, but that isn't quite what KEXP does. KFOG also existed within the boundaries of consultancy and research [3]; I suspect KEXP isn't as tightly bound to such things.
Footnotes (because I've been overusing parentheses):
[1] This is not meant to denigrate a valiant effort to modernize the station. But it was trying to become a younger, alternative station while KITS was still around; admittedly Live 105 was in a decline in those days, but still, it was a head-to-head match that might have succeeded 10 years earlier, given enough time. Cumulus didn't have time and the overall context had changed.
[2] KGO also had its audience that loved the station, and would love the station until those listeners took their last breaths. But not enough newer, younger listeners were coming in. KFOG had the same problem. It's notable that Cumulus ended up with a couple of stations in the Bay Area that ended up with demographic dead-ends, i.e., it was a weakened cluster even before over-the-air radio's severe challenges of the last few years.
[3] Lee Abrams came up with the format; it was installed by General Electric. This makes it even more amazing that the station managed for decades to project the image of an independent broadcaster. In many ways, the KFOG imaging was better than the music.
It will be interesting to see what develops. For my part, I'm trying to avoid preconceived notions - if I still lived in the Bay Area, I might actually have given into some of those notions.
