I was looking around at station ratings today and saw that KXOS hasn't cracked a 1.0 share in three months! Which makes me think, how does a Class B with such a strong reach, that's been running for about almost 3 years, not have an audience? Does KXOS even make enough to pay the bills? What's going on with this station and can we expect a format flip soon? Did the Groupo Radio Centro just buy the station just to hold on to it to LMA it or resell it in the future?
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KXOS
- Thread starter radiojomo
- Start date
radiojomo said:
Yes, the sale deal was signed but is not yet approved by the FCC. GRC definitely has the money to pay for the station; they operated the most successful radio group in Mexico City, the world's largest market. In fact, their stations have about a 55% share of audience.
No, the current operation does not pay the expenses.
And that's why there was a management change there last week. Apparently Alfredo Alonso, former head of the Clear Channel Hispanic Initiative, and who had been management and program consultant for them, is now out. He has been replaced by Abel de Luna, who previously owned a group of smaller market stations in California and who also has extensive experience in the music industry in the US and Mexico.
You asked the question at the right time. It looks like "the winds of change" are blowing at KXOS.
36james said:
KXOS has poorly executed, in about 6 different variants, what is a very viable and interesting format: Hot AC.
Spanish language news / talk is enormously expensive. To work, it requires 100% live and local shows and a news department.
In today's radio environment, that kind of format can not work.
The demos for news / talk tend to skew older. Hispanic buys are almost all for 18-49. That format would not do well enough in 18-49 to get significant sales.
While Miami is definitely not LA, the most successful news / talk station has an average listener age of 72.
About 15 years ago, KTNQ did live and local news / talk. It had a number of books where it beat KFI in 25-54, and in 12+ was consistently a top 10 station. But the expenses were quite high, and by 2000 it was decided to change format.
KTNQ had very good TSL on relatively low cume. In today's PPM world, it would be a station with a 0.5 share and a low cume.
As a final not, some may be aware that there are far more news / talk stations on FM in the major cities of Mexico than in the US. And they are generally quite successful. But they generally get almost entirely A and B socioeconomic level listeners, and few in C, D and E. Most of the money in radio is in appealing to A and B. And those are the folks who do not emigrate from Mexico... thus there is not a huge audience base in the US for the format today... and what audience there is is mostly over 45.
Ok David, LA could probably use another hot ac format seeing how we only have KBIG, and seeing how we have 3 highly successful CHRs radio stations, that being KPWR, Amp radio, and KIIS, 2 hot ac formats could work, I had suggested in another post that the IE needed 1, but I guess KCAL likes lousy ratings, and the trend with spanish stations though is they normally don't flip back to english music format, but like you said, they tried 6 different spanish music angles, and they haven't work, so english seems like the obvious choice.
36,
I mentioned this in another thread, so I'll briefly re-iterate that the L.A. radio graveyard has a long list of dead AC stations.
Overall, generally speaking, L.A. has not been good to AC stations. In the Inland Empire, the format is about as extinct as dinosaurs.
2013 will mark the 40th anniversary of KCAL-FM being a rock station. I worked one of the last non-rock shifts at the station at the time of the switch. They changed from MOR.
It wouldn't surprise me if the present owners of KCAL would want to observe and commemorate the four decades. Some talented people came out of that station.
I mentioned this in another thread, so I'll briefly re-iterate that the L.A. radio graveyard has a long list of dead AC stations.
Overall, generally speaking, L.A. has not been good to AC stations. In the Inland Empire, the format is about as extinct as dinosaurs.
2013 will mark the 40th anniversary of KCAL-FM being a rock station. I worked one of the last non-rock shifts at the station at the time of the switch. They changed from MOR.
It wouldn't surprise me if the present owners of KCAL would want to observe and commemorate the four decades. Some talented people came out of that station.
36james said:
LA actually has 5 CHR's... you have to include KSSE and, to some extent, KXOS (Although the current KXOS variant is more Hot AC than the CHR they started with).
KSSE has been CHR for way more than a decade. KXOS has been poorly programmed, executed and promoted.
GRC is not... make that NOT... going to do anything in English. It goes against the purpose, mission and experience of the Radio Centro folks who have been astoundingly successful in Mexico City since the 50's (like on the news shows, I should disclose that, as a teen, I interned at Organización Radio Centro 49 years ago). More likely they will step out of the Pop / CHR in Spanish and go into a more Mexican format, such as a gold based or current based regional variant.
David, has PPM been as generous to Spanish variants of CHR and Hot AC as it has been to their English language counterparts?
justpassingthough said:
CHR in Spanish is not the dominant or even prevalent format that it is in English.
CHR in English banks on short listening spans and huge cumes. But a Spanish CHR can't get a huge cume because Spanish dominants are a subset of all Hispanics and all Hispanics are a subset of the total population.
Further, since the bulk of Spanish dominants come from the lower socioeconomic levels (usually referred to as C, D and E in Latin America) where the majority does not, even when young, listen to pop and contemporary music, it means the base for contemporary formats is more limited than among the general population in the US.
So, the answer is that those formats generally did not benefit from the PPM, and in many cases were hurt by the change in methodology.
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