Probably EMF for one of their other formats. Historically, religious broadcasters have been the ones buying up signals cheap in the distressed radio band until they've taken over so completely that the whole band collapses. Exhibit A...shortwave. AM is gradually becoming exhibit B. And then FM will be the last to fall, but the cracks are already forming.
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New york radio ratings
- Thread starter CassChopper96
- Start date
So then you agree that adding more full market frequencies won't really improve matters.
Mass media just does not work that way. Radio and TV are mass market media. Advertisers, particularly agencies, don't buy little stations at the bottom of the heap. On a multi-station buy, they only buy deep enough to achieve the reach and frequency goals they need. Agencies don't go thinking about whether there is a tiny niche they are not reaching because that is way to tedious and time consuming.
In larger clusters, groups can combine the best performers with mid-range ones for a more effective package for advertisers. But there is no demand for commercial niche formats other than ones appealing to small ethnic groups with their own language and community.
We actually have more mid-range formats now than in the past. For example, in 1960 in Cleveland, Ohio... then a top 15 market... there were 8 viable stations and 3 formats: Top 40, MOR and R&B. Today we have immensely more varieties of formats.
That is not what happened with shortwave. Technology killed shortwave stations.
In many lesser developed nations... all of Africa, the Middle East, many Asian nations and Latin America, smaller towns had no stations. So shortwave was needed to serve the rural areas.
By the late 60's, stations were popping up in small markets, and commercial radio was becoming the norm in most. There was no need for shortwave and stations slowly began disappearing as they were not needed.
Big nations found that shortwave radios were disappearing from homes, so they stopped spending money.
The only ones left were the preachers, and even then big operations like HCJB scaled down immensely over the last 20 years.
The reason why we have groups like EMF buying stations is that there are too many. Thank the FCC and Docket 80-90 for making "good radio" practically impossible in most mid-size and smaller markets and towns.
First, radio is not "killed". It is slowly moving from terrestrial (AM and FM transmission) to new media. However, the issue there is that music licensing fees at present don't allow for a profitable business model for audio distribution.
Stations have not paid much attention to teens for more than 20 years. There is no money in the demo from any kind of advertiser.
Top 40 (renamed CHR to promote R&R's image) targets primarily 18-34 women, with 25-44 women secondary.
And there are many more sources of music for younger persons beyond YouTube. YT is just one of them.
This is not to say that radio does not have problems and issues, starting with way too many commercials for success in the current environment. But the model of a free, curated music list is not out of fashion, particularly for adults who have better things to do with their lives than building playlists.
Shortwave in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) has been replaced by numerous small FM transmission sites. SW stations are ridiculously expensive to run. Aside from equipment replacement costs, running a high power SW station runs between $2.5M to $7M per year. A dozen or so FM stations carrying programming delivered from satellite will cost less than $100K annually.
That has been the experience of religious SW broadcasters, too. World Radio Missionary Fellowship, operators of HCJB in Quito from the 1930's onward, found that working to help set up local stations began to be the most productive road as far back as the 80's.
When Quito's new airport required moving the huge transmitter site at Pifo, Ecuador (complete with their own hydroelectric plant), the ended up downscaling almost totally leaving SW only for "talking" to nations that would not allow private radio, such as China, North Korea, etc.
In the rest of the world, they developed "packages" that involved technical assistance, actual hardware, assistance in getting licenses, and content. This gave them a local voice in hundreds of locations at a time when shortwave was dying or dead.
In 25-54, the AQH persons is off 38% compared to February. Share is irrelevant since the PUR is so dramatically changed.
That was also the experience of other shortwave broadcasters targeting Latin America, such as Trans World Radio and CVC La Voz, who found that the shortwave audience had disappeared. These operations switched to providing program content for distribution on local stations.
HCJB now has only one shortwave transmitter in Ecuador, a fairly recent 1kw unit on 6050 kHz, broadcasting in Spanish, Quechua (Runasimi) and other languages of the Andes Mountains. I believe it is the only SW broadcast operation left in the country.
HCJB Global was renamed Reach Beyond some years back, and still operates an international SW facility in Australia, targeting various audiences in Asia. It is the only international SW broadcaster left in Australia, following the demise of Radio Australia on SW in 2017.
HCJB Engineering actually used to build its own shortwave transmitters at a plant in Elkhart, Indiana. These were marketed specifically for religious broadcasters. I think these transmitters tended to be rather old-school designs, without many of the bells and whistles of the major manufacturers. With the decline and demise of shortwave, they no longer build transmitters, but do offer consulting, planning, and help with ordering from established equipment vendors.
HCJB Engineering is now called Sonset Solutions. More info is here: https://sonsetsolutions.org/ Technical services are under "Projects" in the dropdown menus. Company history is under "About Us."
It makes one wonder, even in the 1970s, who, other than hobbyists was listening to HCJB, particularly in the US. Christian radio was on the air in some form most places, though Contemporary Christian was unheard of. Interestingly enough, I got my exposure to "Jesus Rock" on HCJB, with their nightly half hour (though they still sent me one of David Wilkerson's "Rock and Roll is of Satan" pamphlets with a QSL request).
Actually, much of its SW target is in the jungles of the "East" (Oriente) where there are a number of indigenous languages that are not related to Kichwa (the new and more accepted spelling). But the station is essentially just a museum piece of what it used to be.
In the 60's, RCA built a 100 kw SW transmitter which was frequency agile. They could not make it work. HCJB got the transmitters they had in inventory free on the condition that any modifications that worked would belong to RCA. The HCJB team got them working and they ran for decades.
I got to see those transmitters thanks to friends in the HCJB engineering department who helped me design and build my first FM transmitters in Quito in 1965. They liked the idea that someone was going to build the first commercial FMs in northern South America and gave me many hours of time and help to build the transmitters out of locally available parts.
Really, HCJB was not targeting developed nations as much as what we ended up calling "the third world". They were more interested in English speakers in Jamaica and the Caribbean than ones in the US. And, of course, they had extensive services for all of Latin America.
But it was amazing to park on a street in northern Quito near the old airport and walk into a building where broadcasts in German, Russian, French and the like were being done in the many studios they had available. I think at one point I was told that they had, back in the later 60's, more than 25 different languages in use.
How long before PUR is relevant again given this is our new normal for quite some time and then some?
Not until there is a relative stability. May was well up over April, so it looks like it will be another two books at least. However, with predictions of another episode of the virus starting in the fall, advertisers may simply take to excluding the worst months (March, April, May) and doing a rolling average of the rest as they always have done.
Few buys are based on a single book. The issue will be which months should be excluded from averages.
The music is out there. Tons of it, of all genres and subgenres -- on YT and other places on the 'net. Some of it's on HD-2 channels that few listen to.
But the music industry is not interested in much of it, perhaps because everything is nichified, and they don't see an ROI.
Yet the music industry stands the most to gain by promoting it. If they don't, that's their problem, not mine.
Which makes me wonder if the music industry is in more trouble than it presently thinks.
What do you mean by "trouble?" Financially they're making more money now than they did ten years ago thanks to streaming royalties. Record labels make no direct money from radio airplay. So they focus all their attention getting their music made and placed on streaming services. The problem is they have to find a way to push people to that music, and radio can do that. So the end result is you have some artists (the ones who get airplay) making a disproportionate amount of money, compared to those who don't get airplay.
Here's a look at the music industry over 40 years:
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/music-industry-sales/
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