Tami does the classic alt show on Sundays the times I have listened. It's great to hear her on a rock format again.
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Los Angeles Radio Ratings: September 2023
- Thread starter pjc1961
- Start date
I don't have info for people under age 60 specifically, but here is a snippet that Neilsen put together when Ford was considering dropping AM radio several months ago.
Quoted from: Nielsen: AM/FM Radio Reaches 91% Of U.S. Adults Each Month
Note that the data is for a month, so 33% of persons 12+ use AM radio for one quarter hour per month. For some comparison, in 2016, the figure was 21%.
Why the increase? Two things:
1. The 2016 figure was one listening incident a week, not once a month. That makes a significant difference.
2. FM translators came on the scene. Nielsen considers the FM translator a part of an AM station, not something that can be rated separately. Especially in smaller markets, AMs with translators can be pretty competitive.
OK, but what does that have to do with employing DJ's over 70, if they can relate to the audience and the music they're playing? Once upon a time B. Mitchell Reed was an old guy playing Humble Pie on KMET, but so what? In many cases these are DJ's whom today's in-demo target audience can remember growing up with, like the original Roq of the 80s KROQ jocks. Who knows that music better?
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By many, you mean few.
I generally think children begin to develop their own preferences around age 10-12. If you were 10 in 1980, you're 53 this year, almost completely out of the demo. If you were 10 in 1989, you're 44 this year.
So only the upper 1/3rd of the demo would remember anything about KROQ in the 1980s. And not all Angelinos age 44-54 would necessarily want to hear the same personalities and music that they listened to when they were literal children. But that is harder to quantify.
As is immigration... There are lots of 40-somethings in LA who didn't grow up there. To them, putting on Jed The Fish isn't nostalgic, it's just an old guy spinning records.
Elvis Duran is in his 50s and still doing the morning zoo at Z100 in NYC.
He may have seemed old to you, but he was in his 40s when he was at KMET. So was Tom Donohue. They were the same age.
I was gonna say---BMR only lived to 56. Donahue died at 46. And both those guys discovered that music and were introducing it to a broader audience.
Assuming the voice and brain hold up, I think the only place where the age of the jock mattered (past tense) was Top 40/CHR. Rick Dees was 54 when KIIS-FM dumped him. His replacement, Ryan Seacrest, is 48 now and I'm betting nobody at iHeart is thinking about kicking him to the curb in six years.
It depends. Scott Muni was still on the air, but he was replaced as PD of WNEW-FM when he was in his late 40s. Ironically around the same time Donohue died. Ultimately Metromedia flipped KMET to smooth jazz.
A lot of these guys were originally Top 40 DJs who reinvented themselves as rock DJs as the music changed.
People wonder why young people don't listen to the radio. Perhaps it's because they don't hear people like them on the air.
The way Elvis Duran handles it is he's surrounded by a team of much younger people.
Yeah, but the KMET flip was in 1987---after 19 years of freeform and album rock, 12 years after Donahue died and eight years after BMR went to KLOS. We don't know how long either of them would have stayed on had they lived.
Neither of them would have subjected the Mighty Met to Cyndi Lauper records (as was done at the end) I can assure you that.
Unfortunately the Real Don Steele only lived to 61, but he was his natural high-energy self on KRLA and KRTH right up until the day he found out he was sick and immediately retired. I thought he was at his best on KRLA thanks to their looser format and expanded music choices. Those of us who remembered him from 1965 knew he was an "old" guy, but he never sounded old to me.
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Along with the fact that the music Jed played was generally not popular or even heard in the nations where many people now in LA were born... particularly regarding immigrants.
That, I think, is the key to the whole question.
All true. And I think the rules, even then, were different on Oldies stations. Being the guy who played the songs originally had advantages with listeners who were there the first time around. Nostalgia was the point---especially at KRTH, which Bill Drake devised to be a 30-years-later victory lap for KHJ when he came aboard with Steele and Robert W. Morgan.
Back in that KRTH Drake era, if somebody had just moved to LA from East Jesus, Arkansas and had never before heard of this Steele person, assuming some familiarity with that music I think that new listener would still find his show compelling!
On that same note of nostalgia, despite the admittedly-daunting age and demographic statistics previously cited re: 80s KROQ listeners then and now, I think that unique classic alternative music format still has a lot of validity (for people who still listen to radio, at least!), especially in the key heritage market of Los Angeles which allowed a distinctly un-corporate station like KROQ to initially grow and thrive. Accordingly, just as Bill Drake recruited some of his KHJ stars for KRTH, look at some of the major Roq of the 80s jocks who are still alive and well: Richard Blade, the Swedish Eagle, and Dusty Street still churn out great radio shows for SiriusXM; Tami Heide and Freddie Snakeskin both sounded as good as ever when KROQ-HD2 employed them as hosts in recent years; hell, even the Poorman is seemingly enjoying himself doing his OC LP morning show!
Buy a station. You can listen to Snakeskin from Portland.
I never got tired of him asking "What do we know and believe?" even though I always knew the answer.
Could be a good investment, if my current video rental venture doesn't work out.
The difference is demographics. L.A. has changed dramatically and the math is against a format with marginal Latino audiences.
The city also has a much lower percentage of people who grew up there, which is why, although it had old KHJ jocks in the 90s, today’s KRTH isn’t staffed with KIIS-FM alumni.
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