amfmsw said:
Gringo, you didn't do your homework. You talk about "perceptual studies" and "listener research", but you get a d in demo research.
The demos are easy to see. Right now, surviving 60's oldies stations have an average age of 51 to 55, and with every year that goes by, the average age goes up and the total 12+ audience goes down.
For the millionth time, oldies is NOT a 55+ demo.
Oldies, unless the playlist has been moved out of the 60's, is becoming
mostly 55+, and not enough under-55 to successfully compete for ad buys based on 25-54 or 25-49. In other words, so much of the listening is over 55, and the trend is getting older, that oldies tations can not get ad revenues without dropping rates to compete on the under-55 folks.
[/quote] It is 40-60, depending how you slant the music. [/quote]
For stations that are not driven by powerful, broad appeal morning shows (like KOOL and WMJI) the coree is 45-54, 55-64 and 65+, the typical oldies station is about 30% 45-54, 35% 55-64, and 25% 65+, with the rest scattered in the younger demos where we know someone else, generally, controlled the radio.
You give the boomers (who the oldest is only 60 years) something to listen to, we'll support it.
This is not a question of listener support. There are all kinds of formats that will get great 55+ listening. The issue is that advertisers do not want and will not pay for listeners in that demo.
The industry has been bled out by tedious research. Much of it seems to be done just to justify itself. Why do you overthink this? Listen to your listeners. Despite your reseach, we DO NOT want to hear 400 songs.
Every format has a quantifiable library of songs listeners want to hear, of songs that are neutral, and those that are negative. And each station in a format may find, in each market, a "sweet spot" of songs listeners love, songs that are great variety elements, and songs that do harm. No station sets out to reduce the playlist. They set out to find all the songs that are playable that they can find.
It is the listnership that makes the decisions based on how much they want to hear every song on the radio right now.
Don't you read any of these pages? Don't you see how much we hate narrow playlists and thinking?
These pages are a great place for thought starters and often force me to pull together data to refute a wild claim, or even to moderate or invalidate one of my beliefs. But as a source of listener input, they are worse than useless... they are dangerous.
Many have given up and moved to Satellite Radio.
No, "many" have not. There are around 14 million satellite receivers, and half the new car installs are disconnected after year one... and satellite subscribers only use satellite 25% of thier listening time. Compare to 230 million 12+ terrestrial listeners and 1 billion radios.
The selling point? They rotate thousands of oldies!
Yes, there is a tiny, thin market for this. No satellite music channel gets even a 0.01 share of listening in the total radio universe. So we are talking about how many buy a Bentley vs. a Toyota.
Your "research" has burned out us listeners, and is killing the industry as a whole.
Research is only asking the listener what they like and dislike. It is not killing anyone or anything.
Look at Philadelphia. It must be the worst major radio market in the States. 8 to 10 R&B, no modern rock, 1 alleged oldies station, 1 news station limping on it's history, 1 decent talk station. 2 sports stations, 1 true AC. All researched. Most pretty bad.
KYW is an extremely well performing news station, one of the best performing in the US. There is no modern rocker because it will not work.
There are not 8 to 10 r&b stations. I count WRNB, WDAS and WUSL. Since the market is 20% Black and 5% Hispanic, this segment is underserved.
Calling a Churban "r&b" is not correct, as they are mostly based on pop an hip hop, not r&b.
I respect your opinions and experience, but I vehemently believe "choking" formats with 400 "high scoring songs", especially the oldies format with such a rich and deep library of great music, is the disease behind the death of these stations nationwide.
Nobody, as I said, is restricting the playlists at the station end. It is the listener who tells us what to play.
