Potential shuffle as a result of 100.3/my theories

[davideduardo]

Re: Asian

Whoever buys 100.3 should take it ASIAN. Beat Arthur Liu at his own game! LA has a big enough Asian population to support an Asian FM station and the Asians are pretty upscale income wise too!

It makes PERFECT sense, which is why it won't be done!

Asian is a region or continent, not a language.

Tagalog, several Chinese dialects, Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese, Thai, etc., are just some of the languages of the larger communities in LA. Together, they are 12% of the population... but separately none is more than a couple of percent.

Korean would make sense for the next owner of 93.5 now that the site has moved to Baldwin Hills.

 

[davideduardo]

Now which FM they'd move it to is anyone's guess. If KRBV goes away, most of that audience will likely be split between KHHT and KJLH - with some going to KDAY.

I don't give KDAY more than 4 to 5 moons of life.

KHHT has shifted slightly more Urban - while KMVN is clearly much more Hispanic and tempo driven. If CC were to blow up 92.3 for Talk, they'd be giving 93.9 a pretty big hole.

As I said, the future for Movin looks mighty fishy to me at this time.

 

[nmoore6676]

Maybe KFI should move to 92.3, downgrade 640 to a class B and make the Fullerton Pilots happy because they could get the required signal for that class from a 1/4 wave antenna around 380 feet high.

I find the distinction between callers' voices and the in studio voices extremely annoying and usually tune out of the shows which extensively feature callers. That problem is mostly with cell phones, I can remember when Howard Stern refused to entertain callers on cell or cordless phones. Usually guests are better since the producer has an opportunity to get them on a land line corded phone. Then there are the jerks who don't know that breathing heavily into a phone is extremely annoying.

So I'm not sold yet but I really don't care which kind of modulation, just what it sounds like to me. Younger people preferring FM is a generational thing and like one commenter has said, good content will win out no matter where it is and good engineering can make it sound good anywhere.

By the way I have an older "wideband" AM radio but the nearby IBOC operations are making it hard to keep.

I do not think you will get any sense of dimensioning unless the method of wiring most studios changes. The mike channels are mono, feeding left and right equally. There are some places which still have pan pots which back in my day was almost always so. Today many boards made for radio don't have any as they make the boards more compact and simple to operate, yes cheaper too.

I can remember DJs in the very early days of FM stereo who used to gradually pan themselves from left to right and back as they talked.

 

[AnimatronicAbeLincoln]

After the Free-FM debacle across the country, I think Bonneville would be smart enough to not launch a new FM talk station. New talk product takes a decade to make a dent in established, familiar, successful, well-branded talk like KFI, be it on AM or FM.

All that being said, I think CC would be wise to give KFI an FM outlet and create a KFI-AM and FM simulcast thing, but there is no reason that a threat of a new FM talker should cause any concern for Clear Channel or any of the established talk stations in LA.

 

[davideduardo]

After the Free-FM debacle across the country, I think Bonneville would be smart enough to not launch a new FM talk station.

Free FM was not a traditional news / talk format. We are talking about different things. But I agree, the startup time is long, and it is costly. On the other hand, the current set of rumors has to do with Bonneville doing news, in competition with KNX and KFWB... the success of WTOP in this format and the fact that Bonneville knows how to do it make this a viable option.

Should it happen, the net circulation on the AM band (unduplicated cume) would go down, and make it appealing for KFI to protect itself by simulcasting on an FM. This could be an interesting chain reaction.

All that being said, I think CC would be wise to give KFI an FM outlet and create a KFI-AM and FM simulcast thing, but there is no reason that a threat of a new FM talker should cause any concern for Clear Channel or any of the established talk stations in LA.

If the option is news, then KFI has even more reason to look to FM.

 

[nmoore6676]

It is being reported in the news section on here and elsewhere that the buzz over 100.3 going news or news talk may have been just idle speculation. There is now discussion regarding another music format, perhaps country.

Country would be bad news for Saul Levine and though I've had some reservations about recent on air personnel changes I would rather see the little local guy succeed rather than an out of towner. I'm sure some readers and posters here feel that the big guys would do any format, not just country, better but when I sample stations that stream I find I gravitate to small owners and I enjoy what they do in many cases over the giants.

So I guess we wait and see.

 

[davideduardo]

It is being reported in the news section on here and elsewhere that the buzz over 100.3 going news or news talk may have been just idle speculation. There is now discussion regarding another music format, perhaps country.

Country would be bad news for Saul Levine and though I've had some reservations about recent on air personnel changes I would rather see the little local guy succeed rather than an out of towner. I'm sure some readers and posters here feel that the big guys would do any format, not just country, better but when I sample stations that stream I find I gravitate to small owners and I enjoy what they do in many cases over the giants.

So I guess we wait and see.

I say follow the money. KZLA was below $20 million in billings. KFWB and KNX have about $55 million in billings (some is baseball, of course). Bonneville has WTOP in DC which is an all news FM, and they discovered how much better news does on FM via that station, which moved from a 50 kw AM to FM, increasing revenue about 30% in the process.

I'd much rather be a standalone news station than a standalone music station in LA.

 

[BobOnTheJob]

""""It has also been my experience that FM talk tends to sound very harsh and grating after listening for any length of time.""""

That's exactly how WIBC FM/Indianapolis sounded initially...and as an engineer, it drove me bonkers. But to their credit, they cleaned it up over a couple of months & the voice programming is now some of the finest non-NPR quality you'll likely find. Processing n/t on FM is a different challenge...one that Emmis rose to successfully.

 

[RadioStarOne]

David you've alluded to the future of MOViN as being a bit "fishy" a couple of times in this thread. Are you in tune with some future news that we haven't heard yet like maybe Salem is interested in buying the station from Emmis and changing the format to Contemporary Christian? I've been reading your posts for years now and you've never used the term Fishy one time til the last day and a half! So what gives and why are you using that term?

 

[Doctah]

Wouldn't launching a standalone news operation demand some huge upfront infrastructure costs? Hiring a complete news staff, I would think, would be crazy expensive. Unless they start slow by relying mostly on CNN...

 

[airpab]

Don't look for KFI to go FM. They have a large audience in San Diego and a large audience in the IE as well as many other outlying areas. FM would cut much of that off. It would be suicide to give up a Class A/50kw signal in an area where it covers 20+ million potential listeners! Not gonna happen.

 

[nmoore6676]

Don't look for KFI to go FM. They have a large audience in San Diego and a large audience in the IE as well as many other outlying areas. FM would cut much of that off. It would be suicide to give up a Class A/50kw signal in an area where it covers 20+ million potential listeners! Not gonna happen.

I've said that many times but you are the first person on here that gets it. To put it in other words, "if it ain't broke don't fix it."

 

[davideduardo]

Don't look for KFI to go FM. They have a large audience in San Diego and a large audience in the IE as well as many other outlying areas. FM would cut much of that off. It would be suicide to give up a Class A/50kw signal in an area where it covers 20+ million potential listeners! Not gonna happen.

Nobody has suggested KFI move from AM to FM (although moves like the one of WIBC in Indianapolis show that this would also be very beneficial) but that it cover the bases by simulcasting, a la KSL, on FM and AM in order to protect its franchise on FM for the future when AM no longer serves those under 55.

The important thing to realize is that LA stations with listenership outside the LA market (LA and Orange Counties only) make no significant money from their coverage of surrounding counties. What generally happens is that, when an LA buy is being placed, stations that have outside the market numbers use that as a "free bonus" to make their offer more attractive... just as stations that don't have that coverage offer free remotes, or spots at night, etc.

While there may be an exception or two, there is really no money in out of market coverage, becuase radio is bought by market, not by region.

In fact, KFI has been at about 25% of its normal coverage for nearly 3 years, and it has not affected revenues, which have gone up in the period. It's all about the local market.

 

[nmoore6676]

Don't look for KFI to go FM. They have a large audience in San Diego and a large audience in the IE as well as many other outlying areas. FM would cut much of that off. It would be suicide to give up a Class A/50kw signal in an area where it covers 20+ million potential listeners! Not gonna happen.

Nobody has suggested KFI move from AM to FM (although moves like the one of WIBC in Indianapolis show that this would also be very beneficial) but that it cover the bases by simulcasting, a la KSL, on FM and AM in order to protect its franchise on FM for the future when AM no longer serves those under 55.

The important thing to realize is that LA stations with listenership outside the LA market (LA and Orange Counties only) make no significant money from their coverage of surrounding counties. What generally happens is that, when an LA buy is being placed, stations that have outside the market numbers use that as a "free bonus" to make their offer more attractive... just as stations that don't have that coverage offer free remotes, or spots at night, etc.

While there may be an exception or two, there is really no money in out of market coverage, becuase radio is bought by market, not by region.

In fact, KFI has been at about 25% of its normal coverage for nearly 3 years, and it has not affected revenues, which have gone up in the period. It's all about the local market.

What is "out of market"?

KFI rates high in Orange County and San Diego, I think they also get listeners in Ventura County. I give you that the night time potential coverage hasn't mattered much since the baby chicks and patent medicine days. Historically, when WLW had 500,000 watts at night their advertising rates were comparable to network rates at that time but that will never happen again. If you look at the advertising literature for most stations anywhere, somewhere there is a coverage map included.

Advertising on KFI gets sponsors more bang for the buck and I'm sure they don't forget to mention that. I doubt that their loss of coverage affected much of their regular listeners, except maybe San Diego. Of course now that they are on the temporary alternate site that is probably not true. I noticed last week when I was near Riverside that they were a little fuzzy.

 

[davideduardo]

What is "out of market"?

"Out of market" means outside the Arbitron defined MSA (Metropolitan Survey Area).

KFI rates high in Orange County and San Diego, I think they also get listeners in Ventura County.

Orange County is part of the the LA metro. While it can be broken out of the book in Maximiser, it is not a separate market. Ventura / Oxnard is a separate market, as is San Diego. So is the Riverside / San Bernardino (Inland Empire) market.

Advertising on KFI gets sponsors more bang for the buck and I'm sure they don't forget to mention that.

You are correct. The extra coverage is what is known as "value added" and it helps them get on 25-54 buys a little. But, at the end of the day, LA is bought separately from the IE, Ventura, San Diego, etc.

I doubt that their loss of coverage affected much of their regular listeners, except maybe San Diego. Of course now that they are on the temporary alternate site that is probably not true. I noticed last week when I was near Riverside that they were a little fuzzy.

Again, the important point is that the out of market listeners don't contribute much to ad sales.

 

[radiosanchez]

Surprised alot of the speculation here has been on the possibility of KFI 'going FM', and not whether or not CBS may try to pre-empt a Bonneville move themselves by putting either KFWB or KNX on one of their underperforming FMs.

As I said elsewhere, what would take Bonneville days or weeks of planning would be as simple for CBS as potting up something on the board or pulling a patch cord.

 

[Shoot From Hip]

So which of their "underperforming FMs" do you want to blow up to undertake this brave experiment? KRTH outbilled KFWB last year, and likely will outbill KNX and KFWB this year. All the other FMs outbill both AMs.

 

[radiosanchez]

So which of their "underperforming FMs" do you want to blow up to undertake this brave experiment? KRTH outbilled KFWB last year, and likely will outbill KNX and KFWB this year. All the other FMs outbill both AMs.

including KTWV?

 

[davideduardo]

So which of their "underperforming FMs" do you want to blow up to undertake this brave experiment? KRTH outbilled KFWB last year, and likely will outbill KNX and KFWB this year. All the other FMs outbill both AMs.

KRTH and KFWB were essentially in a tie; KNX was up and did several million more than KRTH which just had its lowest year of the past 7.

What seems vulnerable in LA is the combined near-$50 million billing of the two news stations which have very old demos. An FM news station, with younger demos, could really challenge KNX and KFWB, neither of which in my opinion is at the top of its form.

 

[davideduardo]

So which of their "underperforming FMs" do you want to blow up to undertake this brave experiment? KRTH outbilled KFWB last year, and likely will outbill KNX and KFWB this year. All the other FMs outbill both AMs.

including KTWV?

KTWV is the 7th billing station in the market, and the third highest of CBS.