• Get involved.
    We want your input!
    Apply for Membership and join the conversations about everything related to broadcasting.

    After we receive your registration, a moderator will review it. After your registration is approved, you will be permitted to post.
    If you use a disposable or false email address, your registration will be rejected.

    After your membership is approved, please take a minute to tell us a little bit about yourself.
    https://www.radiodiscussions.com/forums/introduce-yourself.1088/

    Thanks in advance and have fun!
    RadioDiscussions Administrators

Orlando needs a triple A rocker...

D

DIZ Guy

Guest
I recently moved away from Orlando to a town that just flipped its classic rock station to a triple A format and it is GREAT!!!! I think that Orlando needs to do this to WMMO or WHTQ. There are a lot of great songs that triple A plays that you NEVER hear and I think that the rock radio audience in Orlando deserves better than awful Korn trash and overplayed Eagles songs....
 
come now DIZ...you know that corporate radio will NEVER give the listener what it wants to hear....corporate programming knows SO MUCH MORE than the listening audience...didn't you know that there are only 200 good recorded songs?..... ::)

please...i thought you were smarter than that ;D
 
Yea, I guess that you are right. I cannot WAIT to hear "Blind" from Korn for the 8th time today on WKORNRR and "Life's Been Good" from Joe Walsh for the 10th time today on WHTQ...
 
WMMO used to be a variant of AAA, albeit a "softer" one.
 
If it manages to come to life, it'll be hidden away on an HD-2 subchannel no one gets.
 
JimmyJames said:
WMMO used to be a variant of AAA, albeit a "softer" one...
Click to expand...

...and one of the more conspicuously successful ones.

Edison Media Research identified a great hole in the market, and original PD Cary Pall did a great job of positioning the station with a style and feel which drew from early progressive FMs, and emphasized "respect for the music." Up until the sale to Cox was underway, management always put adequate money into external marketing and great promotions.

I'm amazed to drive through town now and hear how much of the window dressing from the early days is still left, right down to the ID bed made from the cut-up Yes tune, even after all the cuts and homogenization. That tells me research continues to confirm those early ideals still resonate with listeners.

A3 is more of a philosophy or movement than a format, or at least it was at early WMMO. For a while, the record companies were in it with a very heavy hand. That helped with things like coverage of expenses for live showcases, but they also started treating it as a dumping ground for marginal product that didn't fit any other mold, and pushed some really weak music onto smaller stations.

I recall some controversy at the annual A3 Summit convention in Boulder, where some of the programmers of less successful A3 stations didn't believe WMMO belonged due to its more mainstream playlist, and specialty shows that would play novelty hits deemed incompatible with the format. To some people, having a 0.6 25-54 playing tight rotations of unfamiliar music was somehow more satisfying and avant garde.
 
DIZ Guy said:
The cut up Yes tune...

"City Of Love", from 90125...
Click to expand...

I'm making sure I got this right. The TOH ID has basically been the same for 20 years? Wow...

I have to say, to keep a format on the air for 20 years in roughly the same shape is pretty amazing. Other formats come and go, but its the one with the no-nonsense name and announcers that comes out on top. Pretty brilliant work...

Radio-X
 
radiodxrichmond said:
DIZ Guy said:
The cut up Yes tune...

"City Of Love", from 90125...
Click to expand...

I'm making sure I got this right. The TOH ID has basically been the same for 20 years? Wow...

I have to say, to keep a format on the air for 20 years in roughly the same shape is pretty amazing. Other formats come and go, but its the one with the no-nonsense name and announcers that comes out on top. Pretty brilliant work...

Radio-X
Click to expand...

Only the TOH ID and the robot DJ's at WMMO are the same as they once were 15 years ago. Back then the DJ's were live 24/7. Now their only live in drive time (as is just about every other station here). As for the well tested consultant approved music they play? One could set their watch by the Supertramp songs they play ;D
For a good AAA listen to the Spectrum on Sirius satellite radio.
 
You boogers. Now I had to go dig up my vinyl copy of "90125" to remember the name of the track BEFORE "City Of Love" (called "Our Song"). Part of that ID comes from that track. There are several pieces, some running backwards, used to make up that bed. (No secret messages, sorry. I probably should have had it say something like, "Go steal an Arbitron diary and write down WMMO". There's a concept that's about to be obsolete.)

I built that ID track for WKLX in Rochester, NY (when it was doing Gary Guthrie's AOR-based "Classic Hits" format, not to be confused with the warmed-over oldies format that handle means today) in 1986.

We used to tell folks that WMMO was either the darned hippest AC in the world, or the most conservative AAA in the world. In 1993, I got to travel to both the AAA Summit in Boulder and the NAB Convention in New Orleans. In Boulder, they all looked at me like I was some sort of corporate suit. In New Orleans, I was treated like some radical hippie. Talk about being a square peg...

We really wanted to be a full-blown AAA, but every bit of research we did showed that there just wasn't enough of a demand in 1990 for such a thing. You can't be a success in this or any business by not listening to your customers.

Today, there are so many other places for people to get exactly the music they want, I suspect no one in radio would pursue it. It's been my experience that a market needs three things for a AAA to have a shot at survival. 1) A large liberal-socialist population, 2) a large college infrastructure, and 3) large amounts of higher-tech and white collar industry. Orlando is much closer to that model today than it was in 1990, but my guess is, not quite enough to make it worth the gamble.

One more thing: while a lot of folks who now work for Edison had plenty to do with WMMO, it was Bolton Research that did the work and employed all those fine people, including Lou Patrick, Larry Rosin and Mark Ramsey.

Hey Paul, you hit 500k on that Isuzu pickup yet?
 
Cary Pall said:
We really wanted to be a full-blown AAA, but every bit of research we did showed that there just wasn't enough of a demand in 1990 for such a thing. You can't be a success in this or any business by not listening to your customers.

Today, there are so many other places for people to get exactly the music they want, I suspect no one in radio would pursue it. It's been my experience that a market needs three things for a AAA to have a shot at survival. 1) A large liberal-socialist population, 2) a large college infrastructure, and 3) large amounts of higher-tech and white collar industry. Orlando is much closer to that model today than it was in 1990, but my guess is, not quite enough to make it worth the gamble.
Click to expand...

So places where it should work would be Boston, NoCal, Minneapolis, Austin, Seattle.... with that in mind WTTS in Indy is a bit of a surprise, I guess (at least I don't perceive that market to be like the others I mentioned... maybe I'm wrong about that?)

I actually always thought it would work in Pittsburgh, not because of any of those factors, but because the tolerance for off-the-beaten-path music is a little higher here (DVE may play the same stuff over and over, but NOBODY else plays a lot of those songs). And sitting at the Tom Petty concert last summer and hearing 50-ish guys talking about going to shows at little clubs just reinforced that image for me.
 
In reference to Pittsburgh. I used to work at the NRM downtown and was shocked at the AAA stuff guys would come in and buy. I'd constantly be asking "Where did you hear this?" and the answer was always different (friends, internet, npr). But it was stuff that DVE wouldn't touch and was too edgy for WYEP's female base, although WYEP has improved over the last couple years.

It's hard to say if AAA would work here in Orlando. I notice that a lot of AAA artists do live shows here so there must be an audience. But do these people listen to radio? I have a feeling they listen to internet radio and Ipods.
 
These days, music fans of all sorts have pretty much left radio in the dust. The people using radio are 30+ and always have used radio. The industry has done little to encourage music fans to be excited about the product. They've done little to make young people want to use the radio. My son is 28. Music on radio is, as Tony Soprano would say, "dead to him". Having been abandoned for so long, it's no wonder that iPods rule.

Re Orlando, there must be some desire for the music, as WMMO's early success was, in part, due to the AAA lean of some of the songs we played, not to mention the general formatics and attitude of the station.

As for Pittsburgh, what sells at the record store does not necessarily translate to ratings and financial success for a radio station. Radio took a quantum leap forward in the late 70s when callout research to listeners replaced charting record sales as the primary way to develop a station playlist. If AAA could make it there, it would need to be a very industrial version with a fair helping of local artist flavor from folks like Joe Grushecky, Donnie Iris, etc. The home grown music in the Burgh is more rock, more blues based, than the usual AAA fare. To my knowledge, industrial AAA has never really been tried, although WXRT in Chicago has leaned that way at different times in their history.

WTTS, based in Bloomington, the home of IU, is kind of like KBCO being based in Boulder instead of Denver. It's a different world in Bloomington.
 
Status
This thread has been closed due to inactivity. You can create a new thread to discuss this topic.


Back
Top Bottom