Radio Disney, which had few listeners, did not do the promotion they needed anyway; that is one of the reasons for ending the project.
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Radio Disney to be shuttered, KRDC to be sold
- Thread starter Sammi Brie
- Start date
My kids are in their late twenties now---so I don't know if a "Disney Channel original artist" is still a thing or not. If it is, The Disney Channel itself, YouTube, TikTok and social media spring to mind.
It was a miracle RadioDisney worked in the first place---it got a generation that could easily have ignored radio---and especially AM radio---to tune in during its prepubescence. It was never a ratings monster. But it was one way to reach out to the kids themselves rather than their parents. Today, there are many ways and they are more efficient.
It was a miracle RadioDisney worked in the first place---it got a generation that could easily have ignored radio---and especially AM radio---to tune in during its prepubescence. It was never a ratings monster. But it was one way to reach out to the kids themselves rather than their parents. Today, there are many ways and they are more efficient.
Mom controlled the car radio, not the kids. (Was there significant in-home listening to Radio Disney?) In the early years of Radio Disney, mom might have been someone who still listened to AM or had only recently switched her listening to mostly FM. Those moms are now too old to still have kids in the target demo of Radio Disney. Today's mothers of pre-teens and tweens might not even have listened to music on AM in childhood, let alone as adults. Without heavy local promotion -- billboards, for instance -- they'd never discover Radio Disney.
True. Any "Mom" of what would be the current target audience for Radio Disney would have likely been born between 1975 and 1990. AM radio was already dead as a music medium when those Moms were growing up.
If Disney is really going to promote Original artists it would be via American Idol in which ABC has broadcast rights, Disney+, or spotify, Youtube and Tik Tok as the venues.
Yeah, but that 'mom' would have been aware of radio, and Radio Disney played a lot of pop hits that were also played on CHR, which may have aided whatever ratings Radio Disney got when it was OTA.
The problem with advertising on Radio Disney is that I don't remember hearing much of it when I used to listen. Probably because the big advertisers don't really reach out to kids. The parents are the ones with the money.
Radio Disney was a 24/7 infomercial for the Disney brand. It didn't need to attract much, if any, local advertising.
FCC shows filing to duplex ESPN there.
99.1, eh? Maybe the "Hebrew Pirate" from 2005 can now have a legal station, assuming he wanted it. https://transition.fcc.gov/eb/FieldNotices/2003/DOC-262299A1.html
Perhaps, people traveling with kids liked to have it on in the car, because the content was more or less "safe," compared to the innuendoes and whatnot broadcasted over many other radio shows...
A few years back, one of my coworkers was telling me how she had Radio Disney on while dropping her grandkids off at school. At the time, most of the news stations were providing gavel-to-gavel coverage of the Michael Jackson trial, something she did not really wish her grandkids to listen to at the time.
That was 15 years ago. Radio Disney has had its run. If there was a there there, money still to be made, they’d still do it. There are few companies more devoted to making a buck as many ways as possible than Disney.
The key part of Radio Disney wasn't the AM station in LA, but the online station. When RD sold off all of their owned stations many years ago, they said the audience for this format wasn't listening to traditional radio any longer. The move to the internet was seen as going to where the audience is. Turns out there's no audience there either.
This is what they said 6 years ago:
Radio Disney to Sell 23 Stations, Lay Off Nearly 200 (thewrap.com)
It was a load of hooey then, and it's a load of hooey now. The problem wasn't the platform. This is a common problem I'm seeing. Colleges around the country are selling off their FM stations, often to EMF, saying young people don't listen to OTA radio. So the colleges think they'll be able to better serve their students with online radio. And they discover that fewer people listen to online than FM. Much fewer people.
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^^^^^ One would have thought they had done their research first. I mean, 18% of listening implies that the other 82% were already listening to Radio Disney online.
So where did that remaining 82% go? To Pandora and Spotify? OTA CHR stations in their metros? Was their programming suddenly that bad that the remaining 82% who were already listening to the stream left?
Or, even more -- where did that 18% who were listening to the Disney AM stations go?
So where did that remaining 82% go? To Pandora and Spotify? OTA CHR stations in their metros? Was their programming suddenly that bad that the remaining 82% who were already listening to the stream left?
Or, even more -- where did that 18% who were listening to the Disney AM stations go?
The problem with this audience is it's a moving target. Pre-teen kids then are late-teens now. So they're certainly no longer listening to Disney. I'm starting to notice that pre-teen audience is getting smaller as media targeting kids becomes more pervasive. Disney doesn't have the monopoly it once did. This may become a long-term problem for Disney. A day will come when a new generation won't know who or what Disney is.
TheBigA hits the nail on the head, but let me amplify:
Radio Disney started in 1996, and 100% of its listening would have been over the air, because that's all there was in the beginning.
By 2014, 82 percent of its audience was online. There was nothing sudden about it....it happened over 18 years. And it wasn't necessarily bad news. Disney actively promoted its presence on other platforms---very likely anticipating the day when even nine-year-olds wouldn't tune to AM if you paid them. It created an audience, it promoted its product and it helped its audience migrate to platforms with a longer life expectancy.
You have to give Radio Disney credit. Most stations aim at a fairly broad demographic (18-34, 25-54)---Radio Disney was probably 6-11---a fraction of the window other formats have to build and retain listeners. They built a format with constant churn---where nobody was going to listen for more than five years----and they kept it alive for 24.
That's a good point, and what used to drive their young audience to the Disney brand? Creating and cross-promoting music/entertainment stars like Hannah Montana and alike. Those were all stars on what amounted to RD's 'hit parade'. Seems like Disney's focus has shifted to bolstering their film acquisitions like Lucas Films and the money-losing Pixar.
That's what's missing now. We all know what happened to Hannah Montana when she grew up. Who is the new Hannah for the next generation? Same with Nickelodeon: Who in the new SpongeBob? The content creation stopped 25 years ago. For an industry that's built around something new, that can be a problem.
For years Radio Disney was a rounding error of a rounding error from a cost/revenue perspective. The idea was to hook younger listeners and keep the idea of visiting Disney theme parks top of mind. (aka 'Mom can we do to Disney Land/World and see?...). As with most entertainment and media companies, when the Covid shutdowns started, everyone was overturning sofa cushions looking for loose change. Radio Disney finally was discovered, equivalent to some pennies, and shut down RD as cost savings.
I also think Radio Disney was also used as an automatic airplay promotion tool for Disney's crop of young singing stars. I noticed this when I discovered them in 2011 and 2012. They had a lot of their own stars' output mixed in with standard CHR fare.
A lot of the pop music they played wasn't played on standard CHR. It was Disney-only. And that pop actually was quite good. So Radio Disney kept those stars, and the potential sales of those stars' music, in the ears of their target audience. When RD went off the OTA airwaves, I lost track of them, never using their stream. Their HD went off the air shortly after I got my first HD radio, so I really don't know if they were still producing singing stars later on after 2016. If they weren't, I suppose there was no more need for RD.
I doubt covid would have made that much of a difference. I mean, RD wasn't bringing in advertising dollars, ever, from what I can ascertain. But if Disney was no longer producing new singing stars, or promoting Disney's own pop music, what need was there for a stream, especially if that stream's audience moved on to OTA CHR and Pandora and Spotify?
A lot of the pop music they played wasn't played on standard CHR. It was Disney-only. And that pop actually was quite good. So Radio Disney kept those stars, and the potential sales of those stars' music, in the ears of their target audience. When RD went off the OTA airwaves, I lost track of them, never using their stream. Their HD went off the air shortly after I got my first HD radio, so I really don't know if they were still producing singing stars later on after 2016. If they weren't, I suppose there was no more need for RD.
I doubt covid would have made that much of a difference. I mean, RD wasn't bringing in advertising dollars, ever, from what I can ascertain. But if Disney was no longer producing new singing stars, or promoting Disney's own pop music, what need was there for a stream, especially if that stream's audience moved on to OTA CHR and Pandora and Spotify?
But that in itself still doesn't explain why the streaming platform didn't grow as expected after they left the airwaves. There had to have been another factor involved in RD's demise. As we have just seen, that longer life expectancy for RD's stream is ending at the end of this month. Pandora and Spotify are still going, and possibly growing. CHR radio is still alive and well. Somewhere along the line, decisions made at the corporate level determined that Disney pop singing stars were no longer a priority. Or maybe whatever acts they were promoting just didn't have the same pull as what your average pre-teen can hear on CHR or OTA hip-hop radio.
But -- not really having followed Disney as a whole, that's just a guess.
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