Place Your Bets

[crbigband]

As the originator of this thread, I'm astonished that it is the 2nd most viewed in recent RI history and with 79 posts. Obviously it's inflamed passions from many sides.

Dismukes brings up many points with which I agree. I look forward to tuning you in for a listen. My familiarity with music from the 20's-1935 is largely limited to the Charleston and the Great Gatsby soundtrack by Nelson Riddle (1974).

Very few DJ's were around in the 1920's when commercial radio began. Music programmers today should know that by and large, music back then and through the 1940's was played by live orchestras and singers, performing in all kinds of venues (hotels, movie theatres, restaurants, clubs, etc.)

Radio went there to broadcast those performances. Back then, it was the bandleaders and musicians that decided what they would play over the radio airwaves. And - based on public response from those radio and public appearances - those bands had hits - they made money and became more successful. By and large - it was the PUBLIC that determined what songs and artists were hits. Not the radio stations and not the record companies.

After WWII and into the 1950's, all of that changed. Record companies bribed radio stations to play whatever garbage they happened to be promoting. More and more - musicians - and the public - became irrelevant to the process.

Today, agencies are the "bread and butter" for radio advertisers. Agencies bring a block of sponsors to a radio group - such as Citadel for example - and place media buys based on that great media oracle determiner - Arbitron - and which station(s) they say have the best numbers in 25-54.

It will be interesting to see what happens to all those AM's & FM's when (not if) the internet is readily - and cheaply - available in cars and ipods and people's choices are put entirely back in their hands.

Interesting indeed.

 

[little1]

It will be interesting to see what happens to all those AM's & FM's when (not if) the internet is readily - and cheaply - available in cars and ipods and people's choices are put entirely back in their hands.

Interesting indeed.

It'll be interesting to see if internet content providers can figure out a way to monetize their product in a way that doesn' twhore them out the same way radio has whored itself out. Because it won't matter if it's easily available if they can't make money from it. Somebody has to pay for the hardware, the bandwidth, etc, and at some point a website has to make money.

This isn't the Dotcom era anymore. I've heard Pandora is starting to run spots- as they get bigger and more popular, that's even more bandwidth they have to pay for, even more spots they'll need to run...

If radio ever gets out from under their debt loads, they've got a buisness model that's been successful...We'll have to see if Pandora, or ANY internet content provider comes up with a buisness model that actually pays the bills....

 

[crbigband]

Hell must have frozen over. At last little1 and I are in agreement.

Regardless of the format on the frequency, the station must be commercially viable that is, advertisers want to advertise because the station has listeners they want to reach.

It's a task all the more daunting when they are so far behind the financial 8-ball, being in debt millions of dollars (in the case of most FM's) and trying to raise ad revenue just to service the debt, let alone clear a profit.

A station playing niche format music - and I include Adult Standards here - would have to be considered too "experimental" for most broadcasters due to their debt ceiling. Agencies don't buy standard formats. So, the sales force actually has to go out and work to get advertisers - one at a time.

Internet radio is in its infancy. The question is: Will it be the future for niche formats and Adult Standards?

Only if costs can be kept low. If music streaming and licensing costs continue to rise, internet radio operators (like Dismuke) will need ad dollars to be viable and keep doing what they do - or they'll need to be independently wealthy.

But take heart all. Anything that becomes commercially viable sooner or later, someone somewhere will figure out a way to make a buck.

 

[Chuck]

But take heart all. Anything that becomes commercially viable sooner or later, someone somewhere will figure out a way to make a buck.

I was just going to say that, but you beat me to it.

At this point, I don't know anybody who is making money from Internet radio. I know that I'm not, but one of these days, somebody will figure it out and a business model will be in place. Most early broadcasters didn't make money from their broadcasts either. They were either a hobby, or a means to sell radios to the public. If that sounds like the current situation with Internet and HD radio, then you realize that history does tend to repeat itself.

 

[davideduardo]

It's a task all the more daunting when they are so far behind the financial 8-ball, being in debt millions of dollars (in the case of most FM's) and trying to raise ad revenue just to service the debt, let alone clear a profit.

That's a common misconception.

Most stations are not in debt or not in dangerous debt. A few big companies are, and some smaller or single station owners are. Most, even in this horrible recession, are either not in debt or have manageable debt in the way that most people can still pay their mortgage even though some have defaulted.

 

[davideduardo]

After WWII and into the 1950's, all of that changed. Record companies bribed radio stations to play whatever garbage they happened to be promoting. More and more - musicians - and the public - became irrelevant to the process.

That statement is not just an exaggeration... it is quite simply untrue.

Yes, once the rock 'n roll era began, and DJs had the power to select songs, there were cases of abuse. Laws and FCC regulations discouraged that, and by the 60's most stations had taken music selection away from DJs and created playlists all announcers had to follow. And stations began doing listener based research, usually by tabulating the retail sales and juke box plays in the market... totally responsive to one indicator of listener wishes.

On occasion, a programmer would be influenced and some stiffs made it onto the air. Or a record company (this being far more frequent than payola) incentivized retailers to report movement on particular songs hoping the radio stations would research and play it. But competiton, where every significant market had several Top 40 stations, made this type of thing relatively rare.

Skipping back to the end of W.W. II, the playing of recordings was quite limited, and stations in markets as small as Chattanooga (a famous court case giving us evidence of this) had to have a live band for a significant number of hours for the AFM and Petrillo to allow them to play recordings. By the start of the next decade, recordings could be played, but were generally part of a variety format... it would not be until late 1952 that the concept we know as Top 40 was invented, at a daytimer in Omaha. The playlist was determined in part by observing juke box play.

Going ahead in time, by the late 60's the increasing viability of FM meant markets trippled and even quadrupled the number of full coverage stations. There was format fragmentation, and programmers began going directly to the listeners to find out what songs to play and which ones to kill. The listener was more in control of stations than ever before.

 

[davideduardo]

You see, you broadcast to promote a genre while most broadcasters do so to make money. To make money, we have a different set of criteria and different visions of programming than you.

Indeed. And the difference between the two objectives is HUGE. I get to enjoy a luxury that huge corporate owners with very, very deep pockets simply cannot afford: it is not necessary for me to make a penny off the thing. Not so with a corporation. Thus I can indulge in all sorts of "wouldn't it be nice if...." and "this will make it better..." type thinking.

Indeed, and that is a luxury of great proportion to commercial stations.

I can think of only one experience where a for-profit group owner created a station with no expectation of profit, and it was my personal experience. I began in radio at an FM, one so devoid of commercials that we did logs three months in advance. When, in the mid 60's, I owned a cluster of successful AMs in a million-plus market, I wanted to build the first FM there and I did it for fun. I ran it with no sales effort at the beginning, and only when it quite surprisingly became #2 in the most important sales demographic did I reluctantly accept 2 minutes of spots an hour... but I never adapted the format to any need save my own vision.

But the interesting thing about your statement and your prior post is that we are not far apart in that "vision" area but we have different financial objectives. It is as if we were looking at the same object inside a building, but through different windows!

As someone pointed out in another thread, the FM dial back in the 1960s was considered a commercial wasteland. That made it possible for worthless air time to be handed over to a bunch of mostly labor of love type programs - and music radio has never been the same since.

It's a little more complex than that. In the 60's, after nearly 3 decades of FM, many independent FMs had turned in their licences. In fact, from 1000 FMs in 1950 we went to around 600 in 1960. Many that remained were simulcasts of the AMs that paid the bills. A few stations made an income from soft instrumentals, classical or foreign language programming. The FCC, seeing that FM stereo had no real impact, decide to force stations to eliminate or almost totally reduce simulcasting, and the ruling ordering this took force in 1967. Stations were desperate to find formats, and we got everything from progressive rock to syndicated tape formats from Bill Drake. Creating new formats was important, but not hurting the big AM's ratings was too... so many formats were purposely niche endeavors... but few were labors of love. More like slave labor, in fact... low pay on the FM side, and no money for promotion.

FM thrived when progressive rock became Album Rock with Lee Abrams at the lead, when Shulke and Marlin Taylor and Darryl Peters and others created the hugely successful Beautiful Music formats of the 70's and when AM formats like Top 40 migrated to FM and did even better.

And something I am curious about is whether the status quo and programing realities you detailed in your posting will continue to be operative in a world where a new generation will, for the first time ever, have tens of thousands of niche formats and genres of every variety imaginable to choose from with equal ease of access.

Two thirds of radio listening is at home or at work, and in those locations the majority of people already have Internet access. In car is only a third or less of listening, and it will take 9 years (excluding aftermarket installs) to flush out just half of the cars on the road today in the US... so the in-car thing will not be instant or even felt initially.

Most web stations do not have the resources to do other than offer different blends of music. As to the entertainment and commentary shows, they will simply migrate more fully to the web and the changes may not be as radical as they would seem to be now.

 

[woodyrr]

It seems that every KAAM and standards thread eventually comes down to the conventional wisdom that listeners over 55 are not “saleable”. OK. I’m not over 55, I’m 50 but I associate with people of all age groups and for the life of me, I cannot figure out what products young people spend their money on, that older people don’t, especially the baby boomers that are almost all over 50 at least. As I said in a KAAM thread a few years ago, I can spend money with the best of them and it’s not on cruises, Cadillacs or iron lungs either.

I’ll concede: I doubt that I am a typical listener, older or younger, but then who is? I just completed filling out an Arbitron diary that encompassed the end of last week and the beginning of this week. I was pleased to find out that they were interested in satellite and internet listening as I knew that I listened to a lot of both. I already knew that I have a fairly regular schedule and that I park on a program: I don’t jump around from preset to preset. I kept the diary on a spreadsheet and did some calculations. I found out that I typically listen about 39 hours in a week. The breakdown was 39% terrestrial, 34% satellite (both XM and Sirius) and 27% internet on my iPhone using ooTunes. Conforming to the conventional wisdom, I’ll admit to being fiercely brand loyal – when I find a superior product, I reward the producer with my custom until the product is no longer superior (and that includes radio stations, by the way). I’ve always been that way, though. What spots do is serve to remind me that it has been a while since I ordered a pizza, for instance and will motivate a purchase decision. The Arbitron people are likely to be really surprised to find that a 50 year old listens extensively to XM 26 / Sirius 12 – “The Pulse – 2000s and Today”. According to the theory that people listen to what was popular when they were teenagers, I should be listening to album rock or more likely – shudder – disco (“Get up and boogie – That’s right!”). Do I want to hear Nickleback, Staind or Kelly Clarkson on a Standards station? Thank you, no! I was surprised, however, to hear Colbie Caillat of all things on KAAM when I was in Dallas.

I guess what I can’t get my brain around is: With the immense wealth and discretionary income that the baby boomer generation controls, why are they not saleable. More to the point: Is that rule of thumb applicable in the 21st century?

 

[crbigband]

Woodyrr is typical of the type of listener I've heard from through the years when on the air. When I was doing the big band show on KQUE, KAAM, KXEZ and now KZQX - I played standards and big bands. With the exception of my midday stint at KAAM this last go-around - I've had 100% programming autonomy. That is - I played what I wanted to play and mixed in listener requests. Now and then, I get a call when I'm on KZQX on Saturday nights and the listener says, I appreciate your station, I don't have a request because I'm curious about what you'll play next."

It is not the only instance or station where this has occurred.

No one behind the mic in this day and age has that kind of freedom as far as I know. Some have to read liners - there's not that many off-the-cuff remarks allowed. But this is the only radio I care to do.

Now, with an Adult Standards format of course you get everyone from 65 to dead. And that's maybe 40% of the audience.

But the other 60% (and I'm going by incoming calls from listeners when I've been on the air) are folks from their teens up to 65. Most in the 40 to 60 range. It is, by and large, an eclectic group that like much more than one genre.

Many radio-types on the DJ & programming side that read this may not find any of this this plausible. Any DJ who knows the music - of any genre - can do a better job of music mixing than some stupid music scheduler - everytime. Program Directors - let your DJ's DJ!

You hired 'em. Let them work their magic. Nothing to back this up. Just my opinion.

 

[davideduardo]

Any DJ who knows the music - of any genre - can do a better job of music mixing than some stupid music scheduler - everytime. Program Directors - let your DJ's DJ!

Spoken like a true jock. And totally untrue on any number of levels.

You hired 'em. Let them work their magic. Nothing to back this up. Just my opinion.

When I "hire 'em" (makes it sound like a line from Rawhide... "move 'em out") I hire them for their talents, skills and abilities in connecting with listeners. I don't hire them because they have a PD complex, or "know what the listeners like" based on years of taking requests.

Many don't even know, yet, that the ones that have the sexy voices are huge and ugly....

If a lucky hire turns out to be multifaceted beyound clicking with the audience, maybe they get promoted.

But the "magic" that they were hired to do is between the songs. Having them worry about artist protection, horizontal and vertical rotation, appeal of each song to audience subsets and cluster groups, etc., etc., is indeed something for the PD to worry about and deal with in MusicMaster or Selector.

 

[davideduardo]

It seems that every KAAM and standards thread eventually comes down to the conventional wisdom that listeners over 55 are not “saleable”. OK. I’m not over 55, I’m 50 but I associate with people of all age groups and for the life of me, I cannot figure out what products young people spend their money on, that older people don’t, especially the baby boomers that are almost all over 50 at least. As I said in a KAAM thread a few years ago, I can spend money with the best of them and it’s not on cruises, Cadillacs or iron lungs either.

In the process of self-justification you miss the point. 55+ is not targeted by larger advertisers and agency accounts not because older persons do not have money, but because the fact that they are older creates more firmly set buying patterns and it takes lots more advertising to change those patterns. In most cases, creating a sale is so expensive that the cost of advertising is greater than the profit on the sale, so for most, advertising to 55+ is cost-prohibiitive.

I’ll concede: I doubt that I am a typical listener, older or younger, but then who is? I just completed filling out an Arbitron diary that encompassed the end of last week and the beginning of this week.

Obviously, you are in a smaller market as the top 45 or so no longer have diaries. Oklahoma City is not a Top 50 market.

The Arbitron people are likely to be really surprised to find that a 50 year old listens extensively to XM 26 / Sirius 12 – “The Pulse – 2000s and Today”.

The Arbitron people don't even look at that... they just process data. Analysis is for the main users, the ad agencies, and also for radio stations to do.

I guess what I can’t get my brain around is: With the immense wealth and discretionary income that the baby boomer generation controls, why are they not saleable. More to the point: Is that rule of thumb applicable in the 21st century?

Again, it's not about wealth... it is about the cost of advertising vs. the return on the investment, which tends to be negative.

 

[dismuke]

It'll be interesting to see if internet content providers can figure out a way to monetize their product in a way that doesn' twhore them out the same way radio has whored itself out. Because it won't matter if it's easily available if they can't make money from it. Somebody has to pay for the hardware, the bandwidth, etc, and at some point a website has to make money.

I think there is only one way that is ultimately going to happen and it isn't going to be advertising. The answer is something people have been working on for awhile now and still have not managed to bring into being: micropayments. And by "micro" I mean MICRO as in pennies or even fractions of pennies.

If my little 1920s and 1930s music station were able to charge 2 cents per hour to listen, at its current listenership, it would be bringing in a little over $1,000 per month. A thousand bucks is, of course, tiny in the grand scheme of things. But I am just some nobody operating out of his house spinning 75 - 85 year old records of bands few people alive today are familiar with. And it is $1,000 more than I am bringing in now and certainly more than enough to cover the expenses I am currently forking over to keep it going. And imagine the implications for someone streaming something that has a significantly broader appeal.

How many people are likely to say: "Gee, I am in the mood for 1920s and 1930s music today and it would sure make my 30 minute commute to work more cheerful - but, at two cents per hour, that will cost me a full penny and the wife says I really need to be more frugal and stop spending so much."

Problem with advertising on the Internet is that the audience for MOST websites is tiny compared with old fashioned mass media audiences. And with music radio, it is all over the place geographically. Who really cares where one's music originates from? As I type this, according to current listener IP addresses on my servers, I have listeners tuned in from New Zealand, Australia, Japan, Russia, Sweden, Germany and Mexico. Those listeners would be worthless to almost any advertiser. But they do scarf up bandwidth and, if I were paying per song per listener RIAA royalties, they would be upping the tab on that in a very big way. But barring artificial obstacles such as taxes and tariffs set up by politicians in the various countries, there's no technological reason why it should be significantly more difficult to charge overseas listeners electronically than it would be to charge listeners here in the USA. I regularly buy stuff from the UK and occasionally elsewhere via PayPal - I simply get billed in British Pounds and PayPal does the currency conversion for me and debits my bank account accordingly. As far as I can tell, if there is any extra fee that I am charged for that conversion service, it is so small that I've not picked up on it.

I think that this is also the only way that other content providers such as newspapers are also going to make it. The New York Times is planning to start charging a monthly fee for access to its website. They are kidding themselves if they think they are going to have anything other than a fairly small niche subscriber base. Who, in this day and age under age 40 is going to decide: "I think I am going to start using The New York Times or the Star-Telegram or Morning News websites as my source for news." I get my news from all sorts of places. I DO visit all of those newspaper's websites and dozens of other newspaper's websites from time to time - and when I do it is most often a result of either Google News search results or links that other people have put up in message boards or blogs that I follow. And if it is a story that I am REALLY interested in, I am likely to follow it though MULTIPLE news sources. Exactly how many monthly subscriptions to various online newspapers can most people afford? Sure, you get unlimited access for those monthly subscriptions. But in a given month, the Star-Telegram or Morning News might have, at best, a handful of articles I am especially interested in. The rest I couldn't care less about - and I sure am not going to spend any time looking at it to "get my money's worth" because there is already more interesting and compelling information to be found on the Internet than I could ever have time to follow.

On the other hand, imagine if every time you followed a link from Google News or a message board to an article on a news website, the website could charge you some tiny amount that was so small as to almost be insignificant to you, even if you viewed a LOT of articles. Suddenly, newspapers would be in LOVE with Google News or anyone else who sends traffic their way. News organizations could perhaps charge a higher fee for an article for the first several hours of its existence when it is still "news" and at a lower rate when it is no longer considered current hot news.

Imagine that you write some sort of article on your website that is more or less timeless - for example, a "how to" article or an essay on a subject with a certain amount of appeal - and charge a penny per view. If you only get 100 views per day, that one single article will pay you $365 per year for every year it continues to attract visitors.

THAT is how the Internet will someday be monetized.

The problem right now is twofold: the fees for processing a single transaction cost significantly more than a penny and, even if there were no fees, the time it takes you just to make a payment online for ANY amount is probably worth far more than a penny. Imagine the hassle of simply having to log into every website you visit - including sites that you have no real plans to visit ever again after you get what you need. Thus for it to work, someone would have to come up with a micropayment system that works with one single login that is good across a very, very wide variety of websites and is able to charge you for it almost instantaneously without your having to do very much other than perhaps clicking on an OK button. Or, perhaps someone could come up with a standardized system - for example, ALL streaming audio services that use, lets say, GoogleMicroPay agree to charge three cents per hour and all news organizations agree to charge a penny per story per view, etc. and it is simply understood you will be billed that amount if you access any such content while logged into GoogleMicroPay.

There are plenty of people right how who are trying to figure out how to make exactly that happen. And, eventually, someone WILL figure it out. And when that happens, THAT is when there will be money to be made providing content on the Internet.

Content in the future won't be free. But it will be ALMOST free. It is like when a house guest asks for a glass of tap water or uses your toilet. The water they consume is not free - you (or your landlord) ARE charged for it based on how much you use. Same with any toilet paper your guest might use. But who is going to worry about the bill at the end of the month based on a house guest getting a glass of water or flushing a toilet or even using the toilet paper? So you spend a dollar or so a month because you listen to this really, really cool 1920s & 1930s music station on your way to and from work every day at two pennies per hour. So what? So you are a news junkie and end up reading twenty news articles per day every day at a penny per pop. So you dropped $6 on something you enjoy. Big deal. But it will be a VERY big deal if you have a large enough audience and are collecting all the pennies.

 

[lomax]

crband started this thread with "place your bets"...96.7 is gone and KAAM is playing some wonderful music this moring. I suggest crband stay away from gamblin' casinos!

 

[Chuck]

crband started this thread with "place your bets"...96.7 is gone and KAAM is playing some wonderful music this moring. I suggest crband stay away from gamblin' casinos!

Actually, I had to drive to Dallas this morning. I tried very hard to listen to KAAM, but it was simply dreadful... I had to look elsewhere. I ended up listening to talk radio on WBAP-FM. I did hear Don Crawford Jr's editorial plea to "save "Golden Oldies" radio by supporting KAAM's sponsors. If KAAM is "the last one standing," more power to you, but by then it will be way too late.

 

[LibertyNT]

I think Even my Little Part 15 Oldies Station is better than KAAM...

The Mixture of 40's 50's 60's and 70's don't seem to flow well.
Big Band followed by Rock and Roll just isn't appealing to me.

There was a time however that KAAM was true to what they did and did a good job at it.

I still Love their Saturday night Oldies thing though.

 

[crbigband]

To the KAAM Apologist who calls himself "Lomax". A question ???

Do you believe airing daily infomercials/talk programs in the middle of the weekday on any music format station is good radio? -- Yes or no?

 

[dismuke]

The Mixture of 40's 50's 60's and 70's don't seem to flow well.
Big Band followed by Rock and Roll just isn't appealing to me.

This identifies the problem very precisely. It is obnoxious to people who like big band but not rock and it is obnoxious to people who like rock but not big band. I suspect it is also obnoxious to plenty of people who can appreciate both but find it difficult to abruptly switch from one to the other.

There was a time however that KAAM was true to what they did and did a good job at it.

Exactly. I didn't always enjoy everything they play as I am mostly into pre-war stuff. But at least it flowed and it was something that I was capable of listening to if I had no other source for music at hand besides the radio. Even back then they played stuff I didn't especially care for - but I was able to sit through and tolerate it knowing that something better would soon come along.

As a result of this thread, I tuned into KZQX's online stream one evening about a week or so ago. I wasn't on for too long - maybe 20 or 30 minutes. I also put KAAM on the other day at work for the first time in I would guess a few years and kept it on for roughly the same amount of time. There was a VERY noticeable difference.

I can't say that I was wildly enthusiastic about any particular recording that KZQX played during that time. But all of them were tastefully selected and were entirely compatible with each other - and for post war "easy listening" stuff, some were actually quite decent. I basically became busy with something else and the music more or less slipped into the background - which, under the circumstances, was kind of nice. If it was the sort of music I am extremely passionate about it would actually have been distracting as my entire focus would have been on the music. And it if was the kind of music I actively dislike, it would have been extremely irritating.

My similar experiment with KAAM, on the other hand, was not so positive. Here, I was at work and was busy with different things. Some recordings were ok and had more or less the same effect that KZQX had. But others were SO mismatched that they immediately caught my attention - and not in a good way. Taken as a whole, it was rather grating.

I would have no problem listening to KZQX in a car or at work as background music. I stopped listening to KAAM in part because of such inconsistencies and because they played the same songs over and over year after year to the point I eventually became nauseated by even the better ones.

I did hear Don Crawford Jr's editorial plea to "save "Golden Oldies" radio by supporting KAAM's sponsors.

Or perhaps gold-plated oldies with the plating starting to tarnish and flake off.

Crawford Jr. came along after I stopped listening so I only know about him though other people's comments on the Internet. I wish him and KAAM nothing but success. I am very grateful to the station's previous incarnations for providing a radio home for a number of years to the late Jim Lowe and Charlie The Collector who forever impacted my life in a very huge and wonderful way by introducing me to pre-World War II music when I was still in grade school when they were on KERA-FM. I listened with profound sadness as a kid during their final program on KERA after it had been canceled - which, for me, was the start of an extremely long drought in terms of being able to experience the music I had fallen in love with. There was no Internet back then and AM/FM for me was nothing but a musical wasteland. Many years later as an adult I listened with sadness to what was, for me, ultimately their final program when the 620 frequency was sold. I remember listeners calling in on the air being utterly heartbroken at the demise of both the 1310 and 620 incarnation. After all that, it would be sad to see it go.

And kudos to Crawford for still having live personalities instead of just running an automated jukebox or a satellite feed. But I have a feeling that the infomercials are a sign that the end is near. That's suicide for a music format, I suspect.

Out of curiosity, I looked to see what their ratings were relative to other stations and here's what I found:

http://www.radio-info.com/site/markets/grid/dallas-ft-worth

Click on "cume" for January 2009 so that the grid sorts by cume in descending order. Here is where KAAM stands in relation to the two stations that come immediately before it:

KEOM-FM 242,200
KNON-FM 213,300
KAAM-AM 146,400

All I can say is: Good God!

KEOM is owned by the Mesquite ISD and is operated by high school students.

KNON breaks just about every rule that exists in terms of conventional wisdom of how to run a radio station or build an audience. Look at their schedule - it is all over the place in all sorts of utterly incongruous and wonderfully eccentric ways: http://www.knon.org/schedule Everything they do is aimed at very tiny niches. And yet more people apparently listen to it than KAAM. My gut feeling is that the problem is not so much the format but rather with how it is executed.

Here is where WRR stands:

WRR-FM 364,800

I see no reason why a properly executed standards station shouldn't be able to attract an audience size similar to WRR's. It might not have as desirable demographics. And WRR probably has an advantage by having an FM signal. But we are talking about an audience that is more than double KAAM's. Like I said, I hope they are able to turn things around.

 

[MikeShannon914]

I did hear Don Crawford Jr's editorial plea to "save "Golden Oldies" radio by supporting KAAM's sponsors. If KAAM is "the last one standing," more power to you, but by then it will be way too late.

Yeah, I heard that too, the other day. Junior even mentioned PLATINUM 96.7 by name. That was kinda strange.

 

[dfaulkner]

Listened to KAAM during afternoon drive yesterday. Off & On at least. Had to change stations every time they played something that was to me jarringly out of format. When I think of "Great Standards" or "The Music Of My Life" "Southern Nights" by Glenn Campbell is not what comes to mind. I did hear Jo Stafford, Patti Page & Andy Williams. Didn't hear anything from Sinatra, Ella, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis jr, Nancy Wilson, Dinah Washington, etc. Did hear "The Plea". Didn't hear any newscast at the top of the hour. It was drive time. While I'm on my rant, "I Can Help" & "Just My Imagination" aren't "The Music Of My Life" either. How 'bout some great instrumentals from the 50's & 60's ? Jack Davis was giving some excellent background
on some of the songs, that kept me listening much longer than I would have otherwise...

 

[crbigband]

I've read the last posts from casual observers here and I agree with all of you and you're very close to the mark. Dismuke hit about 3 or 4 Bullseyes in his last post.

I have witheld the details of my ouster from KAAM and resisted being as critical of KAAM as I might because I thought such disclosures would be considered "sour grapes" by those who read them. But I can tell you that I am VERY glad to longer be working there and, if asked there is NO WAY I would ever go back or work with Crawford & McCoy again.

Sure, it's a financial struggle but my family and I somehow manage to keep our heads above water and, I'm much happier trying to get the big band work and doing my Saturday night thing at KZQX.

I believe radio-info has rules about "airing dirty laundry" on these posts so all I feel comfortable about saying is that it's a real toxic environment over there. I was relieved the day I was fired and have never had a moment of regret since.

I must also confess that I can count on one hand the number of times I've listened to the station since I was stopped working there. So, I really can't speak to some of these posts. I haven't heard Don's latest commentary for example.

But as far as I'm concerned the buck stops with McCoy - he's the PD. But I know that about a week before I was fired there was a staff meeting about the playlist that neither Jack Davis or I attended. But the sole sales lady did, and McCoy, Crawford and the receptionist!

Now McCoy likes a variety of music - rock, country, the stuff he grew up with is the 60's. But with the exception of the odd big band tune here and there he's not a fan of big band music or any music from the 40's for that matter. He programs what he likes - and what Don tells him too. They stopped playing Harry Belefonte years ago because Belafonte called President Bush a terrorist!

And, like a lot of other radio types, McCoy believes that big band music is dying as the WWII generation dies. So I really don't know where Crawford ends and McCoy begins. I know Jaan would NEVER program infomericals in the midday on his own, though. This was strictly a decision based on raising revenue to replace advertisers that have already bailed due to ill-advised programming that has alienated listeners.

Dismuke is right on another point: This is the beginning of the end. As more talk shows wave bigger amounts of money at KAAM they'll continue to sacrifice the format for the money. And, when finally, they have no listeners at all, they'll abandon music programming altogether and they'll justify it by blaming the music format for the station's demise. My only question is: Why wait? Just dump the format and be done with it. Make your money and stop acting like you care how the listeners feel. Not that you have that many anymore anyway.

Thank God I was fired!