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Deleted member 76036
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I doubt it. I think @Holstead was referring to 95.7 The Spot in Houston. At this point, I believe Kylie would have better chance of popping up on 100.3 Jack FM than 98.7 The Spot.
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The Spot
- Thread starter charles1234
- Start date
That is correct. Sorry for the confusion.
IMO, The Spot in Houston now sounds a lot like Jack FM in Dallas, just with a lot less music from the 21st century, with The Spot in Dallas now sounding like what The Spot in Houston sounded like before adjusting the playlist a handful of months ago.
Isn't The Spot/Houston an adult hits station and The Spot/Dallas a classic hits station?
Houston’s Spot seems to have revamped its playlist over the long Thanksgiving holidays; it’s sounding a lot more as it did a few years ago. Perhaps the ratings plunge that coincided with recent musical changes forced TPTB at Audacy to rethink things.
The Spot in Houston has always kind of straddled the line between Adult Hits and Classic Hits, though it leaned more toward Classic Hits during its first handful of years until the current PD took over in 2021 and shifted the playlist to split the difference right down the middle of the two formats. However, they've been leaning more towards Adult Hits since the August book this year.
So what’s next for the Spot? I heard them playing “California Love “ from 2Pac earlier this morning.
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Deleted member 108832
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And there's the exact problem I mentioned previously. Jack plays that regularly, too, further illustrating the point that either 98.7 or 100.3 need to be shifted away from Adult/Classic hits.
As I've often said, songs are not exclusive to format. The same songs can be played on multiple formats as we've seen recently with Adele and Beyonce. We're also seeing it now with Shaboozey. What matters is context and presentation. The grouping of songs together is what characterizes and distinguishes a format, not the individual songs played.
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Deleted member 108832
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My point being that both stations are Audacy owned and operated, in the same market, from the same tower farm. Format semantics be damned. Having 2 of your stations stepping all over each other musically is just plain stupid. There's not a consultant alive, including you, that will ever convince me that moving KVIL this close to KJKK was/is a smart business. The same argument applies to iHeart with KZPS and KEGL, as well. If you're programming classic rock on 92.5, you sure as hell don't have a heavy rotation of the same on 97.1. It only works for Cumulus with two country outlets because they have a program director keeping 96.3 and 99.5 far enough apart from one another that they rarely clash.
Yes I know, and they are both programmed by the same exact person. So he knows that he's playing the same songs on the two stations he programs. He's doing this for a reason, and it goes back to what I said in my previous post. People listen to music differently today, and radio stations have changed the way they program based on those changes. The same thing applies to KZPS and KEGL. Both stations are programmed by the same person. They know there is song duplication. It's done for a reason. The difference between KSCS and KPLX is that one plays currents and the other plays classics. Country is not just one format.
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Deleted member 108832
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My God in heaven. If ever a pig needs a coat of lipstick, I definitely know who to contact. He's doing it to keep his position. If he doesn't look like an incompetent programmer, in this instance, then he'll simply be an unemployed one. There's no way he'd be able to sit there with a straight face and tell any of his many counterparts that this is an ingenious way to program a cluster, with two very closely formatted stations.
I'm sure this is a part of why you command the sizable salary that I'm certain you do, but some of us still do radio the right way in the small towns of America. You have to know this is bad programming, regardless of how you flip it, Big A. People are listening to music differently now, sure, but a lot of that has to do with terrestrial radio running those same people off with programming decisions like this in the first place.
Ever heard someone say "Like, all the radio stations just play the same thing over and over"? They are absolutely right because the uniqueness of OTA broadcasting has been chipped completely away over the years. Once that unique aspect of having a broadcaster/listener relationship was taken away by liner cards and digitized voices (yes, folks, that's why you don't hear newscasters ever take a breath on the radio anymore), it was only a matter of time before the average human being turned to the current technology of what's basically a portable jukebox.
Both stations are superserving different demographics. Remember that formats exist to serve sales purposes, not music genre purposes.
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Deleted member 108832
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I got you, Lance. It's a good way to combo a buy for the clients, but I simply wouldn't go about it this way, myself.
Guess this is just one of the many reasons why I don't make the big bucks.
I still love what I do, though.
He is not unique. It's being done by lots of people at lots of radio stations owned by lots of different companies. Once again, you have to look at the research on what people do. Personal taste in not logical. People like what they like, regardless of whether or not it fits a format. These stations aren't programming for themselves or for their bosses. They're programming to reach specific demographics, which means people who fit certain characteristics. The way to do that is come up with personal profiles based on research, and then look at the music those people like. The result is what you hear on the radio. If you don't like it, then you don't fit the profile.
Nope, it has to do with personal taste that's created based on music that they like. As Lance says, they're not programming for music fans. Based on our statistics, music fans make up less than 10% of the potential audience. It would be crazy to program to the smaller potential group. Hopefully, those people are PAYING for some personal service, so the musicians get paid. There are lots of places for music fans to go, and one of those places is non-commercial radio.
Because people have other options that they didn't have 30 years ago. The minute music lovers had other options, they left. Radio doesn't program to people who don't listen. So when they left, radio changed the way music was programmed. As I said, if you don't like it, that's because you're no longer in the target audience.
You're welcome to do whatever you want for whoever you want. But I'm explaining why the big stations do what they do. I listen to my personal favorites on my own time.
If the format is hot, providing your own competition can be an effective way to control that segment of the market and ward off someone else from encroaching. Most efforts to do that ultimately don't end up successful, but Audacy is clearly happy with its current cluster. Both stations have been billing relatively well, and blowing up one or the other wouldn't likely double the other's shares, even if no competitor tried to replace the station that went away. So, it would seem to be working, and, if it ever stops, Audacy is likely to make changes quickly.
The PD of the Spot and Jack is running two of the Top-200 billing stations in the entire country. KJKK was also one of the highest margin stations in the company at one point a year or two ago. I wouldn't call that incompetent from a programming standpoint. If I were him, you could call me an idiot all day long, and I'd be grinning as I brought in the money.
I'm glad you're doing radio the way you like, and I hope you continue to be successful at it. You know the saying. Do what you love, and you'll never work a day in your life. Plenty of what I consider bad programming makes money. If it's meeting the financial targets the people at the top want, they'll argue it's not bad programming.
I've never understood this argument. Terrestrial radio didn't run its audience off any more than the buggy and whip industries did after the automobile became affordable. What people want is more control over their own music experience. Unless you have an audience of one, you can't really do that with a transmitter. If you want to make the case that people who had been in the business for years should've been able to accomplish that on a new platform, I can see that argument. That four entities who weren't even in the business 30 years ago (and only one even existed at the time) command the bulk of the on-demand streaming audience and left the old guard entertainment industry in the dust is somewhat mindboggling. The same, however, has happened in retail. If you'd told me when I was in college 30 years ago that brick and mortar retail would be largely replaced by online ordering, I probably would've believed it, but I would've sworn Sears would've been the company to pull it off. I would never have believed a company that didn't even exist would do almost $1 trillion worldwide in a single year when the company that had perfected the mail order catalog had a big head start.
For the most part, radio always did play the same songs over and over. People want to hear their favorite songs. The only way to deliver that is to play them. I've mentioned several times that, when I go to visit my mom, I get a handful of stations that are nothing but servers at the transmitter site. Since this past summer, another cluster is also either just a sales office or has all of its sales staff working remote while the programming originates studios about 45 minutes away. Only two operators, three full power FM's between them, have any dedication to local at all, and neither is as local as it used to be. I get why people complain about and dislike it, but we're seeing more of an effect than a cause. Listeners started spending more time with Spotify, Pandora, Google, and Apple Music long before the local staffs got blown out. If "local, local, local" were truly the answer, the two locally focused operators would be getting all the audience, but they're not.
Exactly. It's why they call it Top 40. The number refers to the number of songs in the playlist. Before that, there was My Hit Parade. That was an even smaller list. The idea of playing the same songs goes back to the beginning of radio. The way it was done has changed, but it's still the same basic concept. Most people like a certain level of familiarity. That's what leads to them remaining married for so long. The minute a partner does something out of the ordinary, it usually leads to divorce court over "irreconcilable differences."
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