nmoore6676 said:
I can remember far enough back to when FM licenses went to anyone who wanted one, a lot in the area I grew up in went to the Class D daytimers who wanted an after sunset presence. Then when the AM license freeze came about they assumed more value and the rise of interest in Hi Fidelity and Stereo listening further drove AM to a lessor status. The the FCC started pressuring AM-FM combos to cease simulcasting and applicants in smaller suburban communities applied for Class A FM's that were intended to serve as a local radio voice (as also were the old "local" AM 250 watt stations).
The FCC mandated that by 1967, simulcasting could no longer be employed in co-owned AM / FM combos. In other words, they forced separate FM programming in an attempt to jumpstart FM about 47 years after the first FMs went on the air. Almost all the available allocations in markets of 100,000 or more were taken by that time.
AM stations could never apply for an FM in "their community" unless the table of allocations had a channel in that community. Often, additions were petitioned for but that invited competing applications.
Now those fringe area signals surrounding a larger metro are being made into big market stations even though the cover only a fraction of the larger city.
That was the direct effect of Docket 80-90 and the preceeding actions of the Commission based on Bonita Springs. There, in the late 70's, Richard Friedman's Class A in Bonita Springs applied to become a C; at that time such a move was a change that allowed competing applications, and Friedman, who just wanted to improve his signal, lost to a consortium of the 8 to 10 parties that filed on him.
After that, the FCC decided such changes, including a change in class and a change in city of license, would not automatically be subject to a filing window for competing applications. This opened up, by the late 80's to early 90's, the opportunity for over a thousand new FMs and hundreds and hundreds of major changes in facilities such as upgraded class and change in city of license. But that is nearly 20 years ago.
Here they are being formed into a network of simulcasts because no high power signals are available.
There are very few simulcasts of FMs to cover a single market area... you can count the ones nationally in the tens, not the hundreds or thousands. In most cases, they are stations that were never viable alone, which, together, render decent service to metros that, in most cases, were much smaller when the original FM tables were created.
When everybody is trying to reach the same listeners, ethnic, demographic or whatever though at some point they will lower the overall ratings for everybody.
There are only 100 shares of listening... ever. How stations compete to get their share depends on the format, the size of the listener base and the signal as well as the skill in executing the format. Since competing head to head is so expensive, what we see today is a lot of flanking, where formats that might have had three identical stations 30 years ago now have three slightly different ones... such as AC in LA, where we have an alternative leaning one, a brighter newer one that is akin to Hot AC, and a gold based one. In the 70's, we had three or four beautiful music stations playing the same music for all practical purposes. Which is better?
In the meantime other groups like the country listeners get left out like the KZLA-KMVN flip. My contention is that the owners need to accept that not every signal will garner the top ratings and they need to make some decisions about who will listen and to what and then put that on the air.
KZLA changed format because country, with the passing of every year, got a smaller and smaller share due to the makup of the LA market. Formats that do not make much money, or ones that look like they will make no money are changed. Sol Levine was very candid in saying that classical was no longer viable in LA, and that as a single owner he could not hold on any longer and thus rationalized going country... maybe he can make it with a 1.2 share, but I suspect he may spin the format wheel again... not many years from now.
In the old days it was hard for an individual owner, especially in a market like LA to justify keeping a low rated format on but the economies of group ownership allows certain basic overhead costs to be spread out and the sales people can place ads over the cluster which should help. So if there are formats like AAA then they could find a home.
AAA went out in '97 with just over a 1 share. It may not even be able to do that today. There are many formats, like KBIG, KYSR, etc. that do not get huge shares, but do stay viable due to the economics of group or cluster operation. But at some point, a bad format is a bad format and gets changed.
By the way, when was beautiful music ever truly viable? I remember it from the days when AM-FM combos had to split and it was an easy format to automate in the technology of those times. The stations had to separate the stations and where I was at the time, the space in the building made it impossible to do live on AM and FM at the same time. If they didn't separate the FCC was going to make them surrender one license.
Those stations were the top billers in many markets through the early 80's. If you look at a median year, 1975, Beautifuls were the top FM billers in nearly every market, and in some markets, we had two of them in the top 5 FM billers (Duncan's American Radio 1975-2004). This is why companies like SRP and Bonneville and FM 100 had several hundred subscribers each. Eventually, demographics and the total cessation of instrumental recording (except custom music) killed this one, but it was the big money maker for the better part of 20 years, from the late 60's to the mid-80's.
