Pete,
That's exactly my point. B91 put a dent in Hot 103's numbers in the overlapping coverage area which included the southern half of Brooklyn, parts of Staten Island and a very small part of Queens on a good day. It was a 10 watt station, not 100, that received what at the time was a checkmark or plus in Arbitron for like 12 books in a row. That, according to the Arbitron documents of the day, meant that we had 1% of the audience in the market. Dude, that was the NYC book. We couldn't tell the ratings, just the plus thing, because we didn't have the funding to pay for it. But we did have money to do a local survey and that showed that we had a weekly CUME of 250,000. That, again, was with less power that your car stereo had.
Anyone that lived in the coverage area of that station knows the story, if you don't you can see people's comments on
www.therhythmofthecity.com where people found out about the webstation and wrote about their memories. People rigging antenas to get the station. People, including some major programmers in NYC, coming down to the area just to hear what was going on. Every store that you went into had the station on. So, maybe that was just a once in a lifetime thing but I don't believe it. Stations, regardless of size, have the chance to create a great, professional experience for the listener.
Smaller stations have some great advantages as well. They can allow personality to shine, try that at most commercial stations. There's the living on the edge live element, none of our mixshows were taped and we ran them 6 out of 7 days. Most elements at a Pro station are taped. Quirky contests that bring attention to local business. They in turn expose your station to their customers. We used to do a contest (T.A.G. - Title Artist Game) that was as simple as giving away a dozen bagels every morning and the phones would go nuts as if we were giving away a Toyota.
It's about lifestyle. Let's face it, a college kid is going to be closer to the streets than most corporate execs. They have a better shot at knowing what's hot and what their demographic is going to react to. We were always first but more importantly, we were first with hit music. Hot rarely beat us to a new record that was a hit. Anyone with old DMR magazines can check that out.
This example has always shown me that the best funded stations don't always win. It's the stations that know what their audience wants that stands the best shot at winning. And you need to be putting on a format that people actually want to hear which is much more of a problem that the size of a station.
jp
