• Get involved.
    We want your input!
    Apply for Membership and join the conversations about everything related to broadcasting.

    After we receive your registration, a moderator will review it. After your registration is approved, you will be permitted to post.
    If you use a disposable or false email address, your registration will be rejected.

    After your membership is approved, please take a minute to tell us a little bit about yourself.
    https://www.radiodiscussions.com/forums/introduce-yourself.1088/

    Thanks in advance and have fun!
    RadioDiscussions Administrators

Religion gets another AM 540 WLIE

William C. Walker confirmed:

If the programming still stinks, people are not going to suddenly tune in just because the programming now sounds like well crafted garbage in hi fidelity.

Of course, that is presuming you can even get a lock on the "hi fidelity" AM HD signal. Here in the big apple, it's awfully difficult to accomplish that.
 
I'm easily distracted, but I keep giggling wondering who the hell would CHOOSE to have "LIE" in the call letters?! Perhaps that decision marked the beginning of the station's undoing! On the other hand, if ever a set of calls begged for the likes of Limbaugh and Hannity...
 
StephanieNYC said:
They'd be smart to return to WLUX. At least that they can tie into something like "The Light 54" or whatever.

Or maybe LUX Radio...we clean your brain out. :D :p

I remember often listening to 250 watt 540 WLIX daytime 100 miles away. It was a great station, especially considering it's power.
 
Why hasn't anybody on this thread has noted the success of Radio Disney with listeners so young that mainstream radio doesn't even pay attention to them?

"High School Musical 2" set a record for the size of a cable show audience back in August, and the "Hannah Montana" concert tour is about the hottest ticket around today (just ask the scalpers!).

Not your cup of tea? Not mine either. But Radio Disney is an integral part of the Disney Corp. marketing machine that creates these marketing phenomena. And Radio Disney is only on AM stations! (And never the best AM signal in the market, though usually not the very worst.)

These AM's have a devoted young audience for a music-driven format.

When those kids graduate from grade school to middle school, or certainly by the time they graduate from middle school to high school, they'll be ready to graduate to a somewhat more sophisticated, if still youth-oriented, format -- much the way most teens graduated from Top 40 AM to Progressive FM during or just after high school back in the Sixties and early Seventies.

But what is there for today's "tweens" to graduate to? At the moment, just the web and their MP3 players.

Nothing on AM or FM!

Radio has already lost the older teens and Generation Y. And now the suits at the big outfits are going to ignore this cohort and allow them to become irretrievably lost to terrestrial radio as well?

If that's what happens, the medium is doomed, and "HD" wouldn't be able to save radio, if even if it were everthing its dwindling band of supporters claim! (And it clearly isn't!)

(BTW, Mike Walker, I couldn't agree more with what you said in Reply # 21 above!)
 
Radio Disney is only there to promote the Disney company, brand and its products. I doubt it turns much of a profit.
It's more of an in-house promotion machine.

Although if anyone knows what the billing numbers for that network are, I'd love to know. I've just never head much in the way of commercials for non-Disney products on my local AM 1560.

And once kids enter their teens, they start listening to pop-CHR and hip hop stations like Hot 97 or Z-100.

P.S. Has anyone noticed that Radio Disney is very female oriented? Do young boys listen to this stuff? ???
 
Mike Walker said:
I'm easily distracted, but I keep giggling wondering who the hell would CHOOSE to have "LIE" in the call letters?! Perhaps that decision marked the beginning of the station's undoing! On the other hand, if ever a set of calls begged for the likes of Limbaugh and Hannity...

I suspect nobody on Long Island would confuse the initials LIE with "lie."
 
StephanieNYC wrote,
Radio Disney is only there to promote the Disney company, brand and its products. I doubt it turns much of a profit. It's more of an in-house promotion machine.

Although if anyone knows what the billing numbers for that network are, I'd love to know. I've just never head much in the way of commercials for non-Disney products on my local AM 1560.

And once kids enter their teens, they start listening to pop-CHR and hip hop stations like Hot 97 or Z-100.

P.S. Has anyone noticed that Radio Disney is very female oriented? Do young boys listen to this stuff?

Your points are well taken, Stephanie. But remember, I only alluded to Radio Disney’s role as “an integral part of the Disney Corp. marketing machine.” It obviously serves Disney well in that capacity. And if advertisers who want to reach the demo that Disney has pioneered for radio aren’t buying Radio Disney, that’s more of an indictment of media buyers’ hidebound thinking than of Disney’s successful operation.

Most important, it’s working on second- and third-rate AM signals that Disney was able to buy at fire sale prices because nobody else saw the potential in them!

Now, the Disney audience may temporarily become part of the audience for pop-CHR and hip-hop stations, but only until they have enough time and money (or enough ingenuity to avoid paying for music) to load up their MP3 players with what they want from the Internet. I can say categorically that whatever stations they do listen to don’t mean nearly as much to them as our favorite stations did to us when we were their age.

Finally, yes, Radio Disney is indeed very female-oriented. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. When I was in grade school back in the late Fifties (yes, I’m 60!), it was the girls who couldn’t wait to get home from school to watch Bandstand, and it was also the girls who first wanted the primitive transistor radios of the day to listen to Top 40 “Wibbage” (WIBG) in the Philadelphia area.

And of course, it was the girls who bought all those dreadful records by the “boys of Bandstand” – the borderline talents signed to the labels that Dick Clark or one of his associates had a financial stake in (or labels that had their records pressed by Clark's Mallard Pressing Co.!). Most of my male classmates were oblivious to all that. (Personally, I was interested in music, but my taste in Top 40 tended to run to the some of the more authentic rockabilly artists – and probably would have included Elvis Presley’s Sun sides if I had been familiar with them; I think RCA’s A&R people and that bogus “colonel,” Tom Parker, ruined Presley -- but my tastes ran even more strongly to some of the great black vocal groups and the best of their white imitators – what some people call "doo-wop." But by middle school, I was also a confirmed Sinatra fan!)
 
StephanieNYC said:
DavidEduardo said:
I suspect nobody on Long Island would confuse the initials LIE with "lie."

Of course we do. Calling the LIE an expressway is a frigging lie! It's the world's largest parking lot. ::) ;D
Yes it is a lie for another reason as well. A limited access road (no driveways) with at-grade intersections (cross traffic and/or traffic signals) is called an "expressway". A limited access road with no at-grade intersections (no cross traffic) is called a "freeway". Since I-495 is constructed to Interstate standards and lacks at-grade intersections, the correct term would be "Long Island Fwy."
 
awj223 said:
StephanieNYC said:
Of course we do. Calling the LIE an expressway is a frigging lie! It's the world's largest parking lot. ::) ;D
Yes it is a lie for another reason as well. A limited access road (no driveways) with at-grade intersections (cross traffic and/or traffic signals) is called an "expressway". A limited access road with no at-grade intersections (no cross traffic) is called a "freeway". Since I-495 is constructed to Interstate standards and lacks at-grade intersections, the correct term would be "Long Island Fwy."

Depends on where you live. NYC must use the same terminology as Chicago, where the word "Freeway" isn't generally used. Chicago's Dan Ryan, Kennedy, Stevenson, Eisenhower, and Edens Expressways are also freeways by the west-coast definition of the term.

And I'm sure they don't call I-495 "The 495" either, like they would if that road was in LA or Phoenix. ;D
 
KeithE4 said:
Depends on where you live. NYC must use the same terminology as Chicago, where the word "Freeway" isn't generally used. Chicago's Dan Ryan, Kennedy, Stevenson, Eisenhower, and Edens Expressways are also freeways by the west-coast definition of the term.

And I'm sure they don't call I-495 "The 495" either, like they would if that road was in LA or Phoenix. ;D
I'm aware of the Chicago terminology, having visited that city twice. They also like using the words "inbound" and "outbound" rather than the cardinal directions. Fortunately I spent the plane trip studying a map of the area and wasn't confused by traffic reports mentioning the "inbound Kennedy" and "outbound Eisenhower".

However, the terms "expressway" and "freeway" were defined by the predecessor to AASHTO and are now part of the FHWA's Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices. http://mutcd.fhwa.dot.gov/HTM/2003r1/part1/part1a.htm
Expressway—a divided highway with partial control of access.
Freeway—a divided highway with full control of access.

Some local governments continue to abuse the terminology for reasons unknown to me.

I guess the term "expressway" is accurate to the extent that freeway is the more restrictive term (subclass). Just as all expressways are roads but not all roads are expressways, all freeways are expressways but not all expressways are freeways.
 
StephanieNYC said:
DavidEduardo said:
I suspect nobody on Long Island would confuse the initials LIE with "lie."

Of course we do. Calling the LIE an expressway is a frigging lie! It's the world's largest parking lot. ::) ;D

Haha. As anyone who has tried to get to JFK at rush hour knows.
 
In 2002, I worked a few weeks at 2 places on LI, one in Brentwood, another in Bethpage.
I mentally catalouged LIE as "largely ineffective expressway".
 
Mike Walker said:
Here's an idea (off the top of my head). Approximately 10 percent of the population is gay. Is there a station specifically programmed to gay people in your market? TEN PERCENT is pretty freakin' great market share! In certain markets the Muslim community represents a double-digit market share. Is anyone attempting to program to them?

You aren't going to get conservative, flag-waving, offend-nobody Corporate America to spend a penny advertising on those stations, no matter how many potential ears those stations might reach. Let's say Target decides to take a chance and launch an ad campaign on your hypothetical Muslim station. Muslim station then airs an interview with someone with al-Qaida sympathies and the program host lets him have his say and either doesn't question him or lobs softball questions at him. (I'm assuming the host wouldn't publicly agree with him.) Bloggers latch on to the audio and put it on the Internet along with the Target ad that ran right after the interview. Fox News picks up the story and runs with it; more negative publicity for Target. Suddenly, conservative blog readers and Fox News junkies across the country, not just in the station's local market, start going to Wal-Mart instead of Target and telling their like-minded friends what they just heard/read "about Target and al-Qaida." How quickly does Target pull its ads? Yesterday, if it could?

Better to sell the station to Salem or Multicultural, who let the programming pay for itself, than try to convince advertisers who want everyone, regardless of belief/politics/sexuality, to buy their products and have a clean, positive mental image of their brands to risk having their sales pitches associated with programming that gets a significant number of Americans boiling mad, justifiably or not.
 
Or you could try aiming at some of the other groups I mentioned (or some that I didn't think of). Those just popped into my head as groups not being served..sizable ones in some instances.

You may have a point about a station aimed at Muslim listeners, but i'm not so sure about a station, or network aimed at gays. Will and Grace was hugely successful, and had no trouble getting sponsorship from "conservative corporate America". That's the thing about "conservative" business people...when there's money to be made, the "conservative" thing to do is to make it!

Younger people are more tolerant of differences in sexuality than are people my age (almost 50) and older. I didn't know any gay people growing up. Or so I thought. It turns out that one of my mentors in radio was gay, as he told me not long before he died. It didn't affect my estimation of his worth as a person one tiny bit (despite the fact that I am NOT gay...and will celebrate my 30th anniversary in November). He was a wonderful person, generous with his time and friendship. Much of my love of production came from him...as he was the first genuine "production wizard" I ever met. We all know someone like that. We just may not realize that we do.
 
Status
This thread has been closed due to inactivity. You can create a new thread to discuss this topic.


Back
Top Bottom