"Real" Oldies Radin in Southwest , FL.

[SpecsHowardGrad]

It boggles my mind that there isn't 1 radio station from Sarasota to Naples that plays the birthmusic of Rock N Roll. Ask yourself this question. WHEN was the last time you heard Early Elvis, Buddy Holly, The Big Bopper, Jerry Lee Lewis, The Diamonds, Frankie Avalon, The Crests, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Eddie Cochran, Freddy Cannon on the radio????? It seems that the early years of Rock N Roll have vanished from the airwaves in Southwest FL. You argue that WSRZ plays Oldies...........yes......from about 1968 to about 1988. Why do you suppose there are so many old car shows in Southwest FL. and why do you suppose that when the Diamonds play at Venice theater each year that they sell out 3 or 4 shows???? Could it be quite possibly that there is a considerable population of people who grew up with this music in the area??? You say that there isn't a market for it?? There's a guy with a stick out on city island pumping out Big Band music to people who are in Gods waiting room or who are already WITH GOD but no station is playing REAL "Oldies"????? Is there ANY station Owner/Manager from Sarasota to Punta Gorda with gonads big enough to make money with a REAL "Oldies" format??? You give me any stick from Sarasota to Punta Gorda, let me program it and I'll knock every other so called "Oldies" stations right out of the box!! Your station failing with a Talk or worse Block format where every Tom Dick and Crazy buys time??? EMAIL ME!!! There is unlimited potential between the years of 1955 to 1979 with an emphesis 1955 to 1965. My prayer each and every night is that there is some Owner/Manager not suffering from rectialcrainial inversion that wants to make $MONEY$ EMAIL ME!!

 

[SarasotaJim]

Radio is never again going to be what it once was. That is a simple fact. We should remember the old explanation for why most of America's railroads went out of business: The owners thought they were in the railroad business and forgot they were in the transportation business. We can look at radio the same way. A lot of owners think they are in the radio business and are forgetting they are in the entertainment/information business. "Change or Die" isn't just an old saying of some kind, it is a fact of business. The stand-alone AM owners who never applied for an FM license are a perfect example of people in the "radio" business. No foresight. No innovation. They are the late 20th Century's buggy makers.

[An aside, speaking of buggy makers: Here's an example of a buggy maker that realized it was in the coach/body building business, not just the buggy business. Not many people realize that one of America's premier buggy makers is still in business. They saw what was happening to their industry and started making bodies for automobiles. They were quite successful at it and the company was later swallowed up by General Motors. They still make bodies for cars but they haven't forgotten their roots. Fisher Body's logo still contains a representation of an old horse-drawn coach.]

Cox now has an incredible smart phone app. Clear Channel has managed to create a Super Brand out of I Heart Radio. These companies and a few others like them will survive traditional radio's eventual demise. Peoples' tastes change. Society changes. Music changes. And formats on major stations change out of utter necessity. I'm sure there is still a market, we could argue about how large or small, for a pure oldies station in Southwest Florida, but it would be on one of the stations whose owners didn't have the foresight to apply for an FM license years ago. Unfortunately, the market has changed over the years. There are no longer "Sarasota" stations or "Bradenton" stations. It is a contiguous market with 600,000 people. You alluded in particular to 1280 and 1490. Neither has a strong enough signal (300 and 800 watts, respectively) to effectively cover the market, especially considering the noise levels now on the AM band.

If you feel there is an oldies vacuum that needs to be filled, you might want to discuss an LMA deal for the HD channels of one or more FM stations in the region and having a go at it. If the vacuum exists at the level you seem to have determined, you should be quite successful.