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Ratings continue to dip at KFRC 1550

Thanks to Michael for clarifying my point. How long do you think it would have taken to dry up Beethoven if he had to fill 24/7 with classical music! It's just too much to ask for one guy to knock out that many really good tracks. To Mr. Keller's point...actually, I could knock out two 5 hour VT shows in 40 minutes and make them sound good. That's not the issue. It took 3-4 hours of show prep time to get/write the material to do those two shows!
 
Reviving this KFRC thread to ask is anyone knows what's up with "American Top 40: the '70s"? They've been running it Sunday mornings (8-11) since True Oldies Channel started, but now that they're carrying Raiders games it has either been moved for the duration of football season or dropped altogether. Their website is useless -- the "AT40" page hasn't been updated since May (!) and they do not respond to emails.
 
I always thought someone should try specialized professional talk as a format. Don't lawyers love to talk law? So why not give lawyers a few hours a day to rap, a few for physicians, maybe some time for teachers or realtors. Give people some interesting material to start discussing, they could probably keep it all up themselves. Promote it among professionals, I think it might work. Whatever you put on a kind of hidden away frequency like that, it needs some special attraction, a special draw, to get people to bother looking for it. KKHI was kind of that way, specializing in classical, but that isn't going to happen on AM any more. It would not get particularly big mass ratings, but why care, professional publications are crammed with ads, they could be created for radio, too. Not every experiment in radio works (K-ADS) but every success was an experiment at one stage.
 
You know I have to hand it to you, with many people on the board speculatiing to be program directors on what this or that should be.....you kind'a came up with a good idea in this trouble time being an AM station. An all law and order talk station. A station you can have 24 hour advice. No, it doesn't have to be a ratings winner....but they can hire attorneys cheap , because it's promotion for their law office to answer people's problems. It's an over the air hotline format. Even focus on portions whether if it's just on real estate,labor, criminal, to small claims. Each section with a show. Then Call it K-LAW AM 1550. I think this would work. An all law channel. You never know when you need it.
 
jhimbo said:
I pick it up in Elk Grove on my Sony walkman and 50k watt kfbk@1530 doesn't splatter on it.

But Elk Grove does not count for a San Francisco Bay Area station, and in the Bay Area 1550 sucks. It's always been that way. It was built on a shoestring budget because the original owners decided that nobody would be listening to AM anymore with FM on the horizon -- and this was in what, 1948 or something? 1550 is poor, even with an excellent antenna site.

For the many years it was KKHI I don't believe they ever broke out the ratings for the AM separately from the FM (95.7), so it's hard to say if 1550 ever had any ratings to speak of. In the KOBY days it was a hot performer, but then that was then they were the first fulltime rocker. As soon as others such as KYA were doing it, KOBY went down the drain.
 
Starbucks said:
Then Call it K-LAW AM 1550. I think this would work. An all law channel. You never know when you need it.

I was just thinking, while listening to KHTK/1140 yesterday, that they sure seem to run a lot of spots for bail bonds. There may have only been two or three bail bonds spots, but they were competing agents, and they were buying time.

(Unless it was a trade-out for keeping wayward Rise Guys out of the slammer...*)

Heck, if the format works for KGO and Len ("Why Do Ya Need A Lawyah?") Tillem, then why not expand the concept? Real estate law, criminal law, commercial law -- it could all be covered in nifty little two or three hour blocks.


* -- Use of the term "Rise Guys" is not meant to imply or otherwise infer that any member of the "Rise Guys" is now, or has ever been, or may in the future require the assistance of a bail bond agent for any reason.
 
DavidKaye said:
For the many years it was KKHI I don't believe they ever broke out the ratings for the AM separately from the FM (95.7), so it's hard to say if 1550 ever had any ratings to speak of. In the KOBY days it was a hot performer, but then that was then they were the first fulltime rocker. As soon as others such as KYA were doing it, KOBY went down the drain.

KSMO/KKHI/KOBY/KQBY/KEAR was the KTRB of its day. I think the station was foreclosed on a couple of times, got padlocked, was revived under new owners, then went bust again. It was originally operated by the San Mateo Times, but then somebody decided that it would be more successful if it became a "San Francisco station."
 
BossRadioDJ said:
KSMO/KKHI/KOBY/KQBY/KEAR was the KTRB of its day. I think the station was foreclosed on a couple of times, got padlocked, was revived under new owners, then went bust again. It was originally operated by the San Mateo Times, but then somebody decided that it would be more successful if it became a "San Francisco station."

And indeed it became more successful as a San Francisco station, during the KOBY years. But, again, as soon as rock spread to other stations, 1550 was out in the cold. It's just an inferior signal. Sure, people will tune to it if it has something nobody else has. They could program in Urdu and get every Urdu speaker for 50 miles around (except in the Southbay where the signal is poor), but they're never going to go anywhere with a mainstream format.
 
Mike said:
Reviving this KFRC thread to ask is anyone knows what's up with "American Top 40: the '70s"? They've been running it Sunday mornings (8-11) since True Oldies Channel started, but now that they're carrying Raiders games it has either been moved for the duration of football season or dropped altogether. Their website is useless -- the "AT40" page hasn't been updated since May (!) and they do not respond to emails.

To answer my own question (if anyone cares): I just discovered quite by accident that KFRC has moved AT40 to Saturday mornings, 10a-1p. But good luck finding that info on their webiste.
 
I'm too lazy to go through the previous pages on this thread to find out whether it's already been discussed here, but is CBS/Infinity/Viacom's application to move 1550 AM to Fremont-By-The-Bay totally dead?

The FCC had approved the application, and -- based on my extremely limited ability to decipher these things -- it still appears with "approved" status in the FCC database.

Although a mountain of NIMBY issues blocked the construction of the Fremont facility, if the app is still active, couldn't CBS continue to work with the community to find a solution (if they were so inclined)?

I believe I read correctly that the 1550 "Campbell" application (which I think involved moving in with KLOK/1170 on South King Road in San Panty Jose) has been dismissed or simply fell by the wayside. In any event, it's not on the "approved" list.
 
I don't know if it was successful or not on AM 1550, but KKHI & Classical Music has the distinction of being the longest lasting call letters & format on 1550, Over 30 years.
 
This last time the (6+) ratings "dipped" UP - from .3 to .6 ... at least in the right direction! Maybe some of the Raiders listeners will keep listening... 8)
 
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