What also affects the success of AAA is the ethnic population percentages. AAA gets essentially no African Ameircan listeners and vastly underperforms against Hispanics.
As an example, KSCA as a AAA station did very poorly in Los Angeles. At issue was not the quality of the programming, as most agreed that that part was done well by GWB. What was a factor back in the mid to late 90's is the 8% Black, 40% Hispanic and 10% Asian population, plus another 8% to 10% of Russians, Persians and other groups of immigrants with no prior exposure to that kind of music.
Overall, 70% of the market likely to never use the station due to ethnicity or nationality.
In general, the bigger and more successful AAA stations seem to be the ones with considerable heritage. Next are rock stations that evolved into AAA. The least successful are the ones that have tried to build loyalty and credibility as recent format launches; most of these seem not to have made it.
Overall, we see that some markets just have a mood and feel that is propitious for AAA, and in some other places the format never gained traction. Otherwise, we would have one in every market.
