Too bad hearing KRTY is dropping country music format. Its really sad and disappointing there is no more country music in the local region. Now definitely a Bay Area station will do a format change to return country music to the airwaves. The question is which one? Could it be Audacy which is 95.7? Or 105.3? Or maybe 97.3? If its Bonneville certainly its not KOIT or KBLX. Perhaps 98.5 or 99.7 but then again flipping 99.7 is a huge risk cause the station brings in ratings. If its Cumulus possibly 104.5 would be interesting since Cumulus will listen when it comes to selling off their stations and getting $$$ in return to pay off their debt. Beinteresting to see when country music will return again soon...
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KRTY-FM Los Gatos has been sold
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If people are buying a new connected car and own a $1,000 smartphone, I don't think the cost of a streaming service is a major obstacle. Everything is a subscription model now, it hasn't stopped people from subscribing to Netflix and Amazon. The music services are like $10/month...even less for the one you get with Amazon Prime. For the most part it's a non-issue. People love it.
I completely agree. It’s not by any means a one for one replacement. The “Who else is buying” thing comes to mind. Anybody else could have bought it and a lot of that could have disappeared.
An example, I won’t mention where and what, but I know a station that was sold because the local owner wanted to retire. They provided hyper local programming and as far as I’m concerned life saving severe weather information that was live. The owner sold it to a medium sized company, the company didn’t do much with the format itself, but the next time a similar severe weather outbreak happened, the station was playing music. Voice tracked from elsewhere.
KRTY was unique in the fact that it was locally owned and operated. If another company bought it, the Country might have stayed, but a lot of the community aspects likely would have been cut back. I wish there was someone else willing to carry on what was being done, there might have been, but that brings us to the next point..
EMF is usually the place people go when they want to sell a station fast. They’re always looking to reach more people, so they keep a budget for adding new signals. People rush to dump off signals to them because they know they will probably buy.
I’m pretty sure if the demand and revenue for Country is there, someone will take on the format eventually. Might not happen immediately.
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And when people come over and still see a media room and my library of physical media as well as a music server, they usually say "I can do that on my phone." My sister is hooked to her phone and said I didn't need all that stuff, but when one day when the local cell networks went down she was having withdrawals. She came over and complained "I have no music, Freakbook, etc" and I walked over and played some tunes from my music server!
They love it now. They used to love lots of things until someone gave them a reason not to like it. Popular taste is a moving target.
K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
Case in point: There was once a shortwave station with the call letters KUSW, which first began broadcasting relatively recently (December 26, 1987) with a rock format, plus news and Utah Jazz NBA games. It lasted nearly three years before selling out to Trinity Broadcasting Network, which relaunched it as KTBN December 18, 1990.
By mid-2004, they were airing desperate pleas that they were in danger of going silent because of "a lack of listener support" (I guess all those profits from the Praise The Lord television program were insufficient ... or perhaps Paul and Jan would have had to cut back on their opulent lifestyle if those funds were diverted to a service which allegedly helped people) and they removed all references to the shortwave service from the TBN website the following year.
It's last day on the air was March 30, 2008 and the equipment was shipped to Anguilla. This was TBN's contribution to the shortwave wasteland; there must be others but I haven't dug deep into the subject (yet).
Air One used to target a younger audience. They kept the name but changed to Worship Music sometime back.
There's way too much money in sports as the FM simulcast for KNBR. My guess is The Fox because it's mainly a San Jose station.
There are close to 30% of all people in many major metro areas who still use OTA TV due to the cost of streams and cable. There is a high number who don't have smartphones, and less than 15% of all vehicles have paid satellite subscriptions.
The media and advertising make it seem as if everyone is connected. They are not.
The average car in the US is now 12 years old. Nearly half of all vehicles are from the era prior to the smartphone. A recent study showed that over 30% of families are now short of funds before the month ends.
You may be able to afford that $1 kilobuck phone and a new car, congratulations. You are ahead of 95% of Americans.
The majority of SW stations were domestic and intended to use the lower bands to reach unserved areas of a nation or to provide a national service instead of local stations back when connectivity in underdeveloped nations was poor.
Commercial domestic SW stations began to close in the later 60's, and we were left with few of them and mostly government propaganda stations and religious broadcasters.
As the government stations found that the Internet along with local affiliations in friendly nations had better reach, the supply of programming fell as did the availability of SW radios.
A huge SW evangelical voice, HCJB, had to move its transmitter to accommodate the new Quito airport. They decided against rebuilding, and decided to spend their efforts on local FMs all over the world, leaving only a small SW facility in Asia broadcasting to China.
As mentioned before, I owned a commercial SW station back in the later 60's. I realized it would make no money, and I closed it and threw away the equipment.
Based on the horrible decline in revenue over the last 8 to 10 years of the station, the problem was the format and the market. This was not a situation caused by the pandemic or the Internet. The availability of local clients was disappearing and the format had less and less appeal to the changing ethnic composition of the county-.
One of my relatives worked in a small station years ago and when they got bought out they told him they were dumping the equipment. Since no one was interested I ended up with most of it. My media room has the board and some other stuff in it in operation condition. More stuff is stored in our barn.
As for the station, it was bought by a MW station for their FM outlet.
My new microwave is now online and is connected to Alexa. What would I use Alexa for? I guess if I were across room, burning popcorn, I could yell..."Alexa...Turn off microwave. lol
I do like the fact that I no longer need to set the clock on the microwave since it's on line.
I think if you were to drill down into that statistic a little further, you'd find that a lot of those viewers combine OTA with at least one streaming service and/or OTT cable replacement provider like Sling or YouTube TV. That's the typical cord cutter scenario, and the reason why OTA TV usage has grown. Sure people do this to save money but also because they get more of what they want for that money from the streaming services, which proves my point.
I question the "high number" who don't have smartphones, especially if you exclude seniors who are out of the advertising demo anyway. I'm personally familiar with some folks who don't have high incomes but they all have smartphones which they value highly.
That doesn't mean it's going to take 12 years for the switch to flip. Virtually every new car being made now has a way to connect to your smartphone at a minimum, and many vehicles offer even more advanced connectivity than that. So by your statistic, in 6 years we'll be halfway to everyone having it in their car. Less than that even, because this already started at least a couple years ago.
That's because a lot of them spend more than they can afford on nice cars and phones with these features.
Interesting that the demographic change hasn't happened in the last ten years. It mainly happened about 20 or so years ago. That's when the white population dropped and the Asian population doubled. Hispanic and black population has been fairly stable.
Contemporary Worship is mostly consumed by and often preformed by College aged adults and Millennials. I didn't think this was the case at first, but it turns out that it's actually true. In other words, right now, Contemporary Worship is basically Christian Top-40. The streaming charts and the people who attend Maverick City Music, Elevation Worship and Chris Renzema concerts (For example), reflect this.
It's been over the last 30 years, and gradual. Remember, Nielsen does not weight for Asian populations. And the Hispanic population has been growing progressively, but the turning point was when Arbitron applied an HDHA sampling to Santa Clara County.
It's for radio people important to remember that Black and Hispanic populations are not accurately weighted until there is a big enough population of either or both to warrant an HDHA or HDBA, which stabilizes the measurement of those two groups.
In the previous post you said the revenue decline was in the last 8-10 years. But the demographic shift happened between 1990 and 2000, before the revenue decline. So my sense is the revenue decline wasn't related to changes in regional demographics.
That makes Nielsen pretty useless in San Jose, where Asians are over 30% of the population.
True the KRTY case is because of the sale of Bob Kieve estate as seen in the link.
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