I wish that religious broadcasters were limited to the non-commercial part of the band. After all, they aren’t commercial broadcasters.
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KRTY-FM Los Gatos has been sold
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How is that possible? San Francisco is over 50 miles from San Jose and the higher power stations are supposed to be Class B. One shouldn't be able to reach the other with even 60dbu! A full Class B station goes just over 20 miles!
Do you have any thoughts as to how a city of over a million people can be a part of a market, where the core city has a population of over 200,000 fewer than that?
The question is: will you support the radio formats you want just like the Christians wanting a Christian format. I suspect the answer is no. If it was yes the station would likely not sell. Before you slam those you don't care for, realize it is up to you and other fans, If you are not supporting that station and it sells, the real reason can be found in the mirror. Harsh but actually true.
Salem Media is a commercial broadcaster. That leads to a question: Should religious broadcasters make money through commercial advertising? But that's a topic for another thread.
That is a very critical statement of the beliefs of well over half of all Americans. The K-love format is, too me, unattractive and boring. But other formats that are, incidentally non-religious ones, are also unappealing to me. But I do not criticize them as I know plenty of people like them.
EMF’s K-love IS a mainstream format. It gets very good shares in the least successful markets and it gets huge shares in the best markets.
The stations and their formats that have been replaced by EMFs formats were all stations that were failing and the owner could not sell them for ongoing format operation. Whether sold for a Christian music format or for Spanish language broadcasts or for some other option, the fact is that what was being done was not working and the owner sold to get rid of the problem.
Separately, AM has declined in most places because it sounds bad and most AMs in larger markets don’t cover the full market. The decline in AM in the US in many cities has more to do with bad signals than with formats themselves, at least in the era of the 70s, 80’s and even the 90’s.
EMF is a non-profit, not a church. They provide radio programming that some Christians enjoy, and also provide counseling and local support services to listeners. In that sense, they are like Goodwill or the Salvation Army.
They have no profit to be taxed, as non-profits either use their donations or keep reserves for future use and never distribute them. This apples to EMF and to Planned Parenthood equally.
Could you kindly post some of those shares for us to see? My understanding is that they don't subscribe to the ratings in most markets so their numbers are unknown. I'd expect them to do well in places like Texas and the bible belt but last I heard not so great in, say, NYC or the Bay area.
As we learned earlier in this thread KRTY was an estate sale and presumably whoever inherited it after the owner's death wasn't interested in running it. I believe it was stated their ratings were not bad. More importantly, it had local personalities serving the community and now they all lost their jobs to this jukebox operator running a satellite feed.
AM is a wasteland and FM is on its way there.
Let's see some pictures of the homes where the executives of this "non-profit" reside.
No. Where I have the data, it is from markets I have access to but where they are not subscribed. But we can see the data on non-subscribed stations in many cases. EMF subscribes in just a few markets for evaluation. They have a small group of markets of different sizes, different areas of the country and different religious participation percentages; they use that to see how they are doing overall.
The station was way off in billings, much having to do with how very few advertisers bought San Jose separately and the fact that larger groups are not going to buy a suburban station against their ownership quota. And, other than ethnic and religious broadcasters, no smaller operator is going to want to go into a market with declining revenues and nearly no upside.
KRTY had been declining in billings for 7 or 8 years and in a percentage much greater than the market overall. Obviously, it is hard to sell country in coastal California.
The reason is that
- AM sounds bad. The FCC made things worse by allowing way too many stations, and then had to put a 10 kHz suggested cut-off on audio to avoid stations hetrodyning each other.
- The AM band was designed in the late 20's to early 30's (FRC and FCC) when cities were very compact.
- Politicians did not want high power, extended coverage AM stations as they feared they would be "worse" than newspapers in criticizing them. So they put very low power limits even on the biggest stations.
- Ever since fluorescent lamps came out, we have had more and more artificial noise generation sources, like LED light circuits, wall warts and anything with a CPU or "microchip".
Non-profits have to compete with for-profit companies to get top staff positions filled. Still, the figures for the EMF management are surprisingly low, indicating that those people are in it for the purpose as well as personal profit. In fact, they said they are moving to Nashville from Sacramento so that the staff and management could find affordable housing, better schools and a better community lifestyle.
I know one person who left commercial radio for EMF some time ago. He took about a 50% pay cut, but it was something he wanted to do and at the time Sacramento was much cheaper than the LA area where he was located.
EMF's financials are online and quite detailed.
I expect a lot of petitions to deny to be filed over this sale, because its the only country station in the market and EMF already has this market covered very well with all their other stations.
There can be no petition to deny based on protecting a country format. The FCC has not protected any format for over 40 years, and even then it was just classical.
The EMF South Bay signals are very limited. None has a 60 dbu over all of Santa Clara County, and that is what EMF wants.
And the buyer can very accurately point to the many country streaming sources now available. I have multiple country options from Sirius / XM and even more from stuff I can ask for on my Amazon device.
Or better yet, remove the tax advantage from all religious groups. Freedom to worship is guaranteed, but nowhere does it say that organized religion can raise billions of dollars. That's not part of worship.
The issue is that you can only tax profits on income. If there are no profits (hint: that is why they are called non-coms) then there is nothing to tax.
Of course, the property that churches have is also taxable if there is no exemption. But since churches do many things beyond worship, this is an item that will never, in any of our lifetimes, ever happen. No politician who proposes taxation on churches can ever be elected or reelected, even in the most secular area of the nation.
Until our Constitution is re-written with out references to God, I don't think that there will be any change in the tax status of churches and religious groups.
If you qualify as a non-profit group, you get tax free advantages. Just like an LPFM, only full signal.
San Francisco is the central city of the Bay Area, culturally and historically.
San Jose was really small until the 1960s. Then is started to sprawl and and grew due to the high tech explosion.
Most of the media is based in San Francisco. The NBC station, based in San Jose shows the SF skyline for their backdrop on the news casts.
The immediate San Jose area which encompasses about 30 percent of the Bay Area population, is still overshadowed by SF in many ways.
City population totals are meaningless. Let’s look at some examples.
Did you know that Bakersfield is bigger the Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Cleveland and St Louis? Fresno is bigger than Sacramento, Atlanta, Miami and Oakland?
Orlando is smaller than Stockton and yet it’s the central city of a TV market, bigger than Miami’s.
I do agree about the signals. The SF market was drawn up when AM was dominant. The FM signals do reach most of San Jose when you look at Longly Rice propagation. As you can see in the ratings, Many of the SF FM stations pull in some decent numbers in the San Jose book.
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Yesterday I suggested that there was more to the story, and today Country Aircheck is reporting a lot more about this sale. See below:
So the goal had been to sell the station to the employees, but they just couldn't raise enough money.
So the goal had been to sell the station to the employees, but they just couldn't raise enough money.
David. It’s funny that in Southern California, the LA stations put a much better signal over the Inland Empire that the SF stations do over the South Bay or extreme North Bay. Yet, LA radio excludes the IE and in inner no man’a land Ontario/Fontana.
Could it be that the SF stations need San Jose and Santa Rosa to keep the benefit of being market 4?
I do know that if the LA market would be number 2 in rank and 1 in billing with or without the IE.
I don't get it. If the owner's wish was to sell it to the employees, and the employees could only raise (for example) $50,000 between them, then to satisfy the owner's dying wish it should have been sold to them for $50,000. Or whatever the employees could afford. Not to the polar opposite, a deep-pocketed distant satellite-fed godcaster who would fire every last one of them.
I understand that, but we don't know the dirty details about the estate, who was running the estate, if it was the family or other financial partners, and if the owners wish was actually written in the will. So perhaps the employees spent two years raising money, but the estate just wanted to close things out and pay off the beneficiaries. Then along comes EMF with a low-ball cash offer that will satisfy the estate and get everyone paid off. EMF plays the part of the vulture. These things happen in estate sales. Always make sure your wishes are detailed in writing.
The formula for a radio market is based on counties, and then where the majority of listening goes. So a country like Nassau in New York State is given to the NYC market as more than half the local listening when went to NYC stations when the market was drawn up.
If a county has reduced listening to the market it is in's stations, it can be dropped. This happens with Houston quite a bit with the farther out counties. More difficult is when markets are adjacent...
Case in point: Miami and Ft Lauderdale. Up until 1982, they were separate markets of Dade and Broward Counties. Then the managers of the stations in both markets voted to consolidate or not, per Arbitron policy at the time. All the FM managers voted to merge and all the AM managers voted to stay separate. The FMs won.
Nope. The SF market has been all the way from Santa Rosa to San Jose "forever" in Arbitron based on listening levels. And San Jose and Santa Rosa had embedded markets, too. Then the San Jose stations dropped out and now Eastlan apparently measures it.
It is already #1 in billing and has been for decades. The population would still be #2, so there is no gain. However, since agencies seem to be looking increasingly at impressions and not rating points, improving the number of impressions would make consolidation significant.
But none of the IE FMs covers the full LA market, and only one even comes near that coverage. No IE AM covers LA and few LA stations cover the IE as most are directional to the west. So a consolidation looks next to impossible.
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