I thought stryker and klein worked better for afternoons than mornings anyway.
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What is kroq gonna do?
- Thread starter hotpatrick2004
- Start date
Apparently so did Stryker.
And yet they did it right this time. They let Stryker "announce" his departure. He's sticking around as they find a new replacement to launch a new show. The result: Glowing press about Stryker. A positive outcome. No angry listeners. No PR disaster that lasts months. A station icon being shown the door in a respectful manner, which listeners can see and appreciate. See, it can be done correctly. Same exact problem: A dead morning show that needed to be revamped, and a station legend that needed to be removed. But look at how you can do it and not have a PR nightmare on your hands that sets you back months. It appears Audacy learned something from last year's botched transition!
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By the way, curious if anyone has the ratings for the final few months of Kevin & Bean (September, October, November 2019) vs. the two months of "Kevin in the Morning" (January, February 2020 -- show was dumped on March 12, 2020) vs. the most recent Stryker & Klein ratings.
You can't compare the public radio data which is share, not rating, when in each of the periods the listening levels were different. Share always adds up to 100%, even if listening levels are much lower.
However, the decline in AQH persons from the average for the prior year for K&B to the start of 2020 was significant. And you can't look at current levels, as they are still affected by the pandemic.
Obviously, ownership looked at additional data, saw that the one-man show was not going to work, and decided that they had to blow up the whole station.
In 25-54, in the pre-Christmas 2019 period KROQ in AM Drive averaged around 27,000 AQH persons. In the first months of 2020 it was around 21,000. Last month it was 8,000.
Who cares? The station was not even in the top 20 in mornings, so this is the old "if a tree falls in the forest..."
No listeners at all. Nobody cares.
No, they learned that they have no audience so it did not matter.
If KROQ has no listeners how much longer does the station have to live? Does it only exist as a way to manipulate the Alternative chart spins and peaks at this point? I feel like the right questions aren't being asked here...
The station is in the middle of a conversion from what it was to something else. It's not at that new point yet. I think it will take at least a year for the full picture of where they're going to be seen. They will need to be able to hold concert events, along the line of the old Weenie Roast. And the music release situation needs to stabilize.
If that's the intent, it's not working. If they were seen to be manipulating the chart, any record company could contact the chart editor and complain, and that complaint would have to be addressed.
The impact a radio station has on the charts is weighted by that station's ratings. A 1 share station doesn't have enough impact to manipulate the chart, at least when compared to KYSR.
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Trying to rebuild a dead station with an image of "I used to listen to that station back in the day" is very hard. It is even harder during a pandemic. The owners have a lot riding on their new idea of what Alt should be and hav committed quite a few stations to it. I doubt they will do a major change while we still are in the pandemic period.
LA is the worst case, though, because the station fell on its own sword by letting Amp beat it in music for several years, making the disintegration of the morning show the fatal blow.
A station with limited audience has little effect on the charts as those are weighted for audience size. The chart is not based on market size, but on station audience size. Right now, they are at about the level of a station in Madison (and I only slightly exaggerate).
In any case, why would a radio station care what the trade charts are showing? Radio is not in the record business, and they have nothing to gain from chart positions (the only benefit to stations in normal times is to get artists for events like the Weenie Roast but that is not a factor right now).
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You all are blasting me for my assertion that they should have at least kept Kevin Ryder until November 2020, allowing a proper farewell and doing a real transition. Guess what. They only lost 6,000 when Bean left. When they fired Kevin, they lost another 13,000. Maybe they should have kept Kevin through the 2020. Done a proper farewell. Transitioned the listeners. Maybe they'd at least be double where they are now. You all are so quick to dismiss my proposal and say Entercom/Audacity did it right. But honestly, I think if they had respected the listeners, did a graceful transition from Kevin Ryder to Stryker & Klein, I bet they'd at least have 16,000 listeners. Instead, they have half. Yet you still think they handled this right?
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No, they lost audience everywhere after the format change and due to the pandemic. Bulletin: all stations are off from the pre-pandemic era, and may never recover fully.
And all stations lost around half their AQH audience levels going into the pandemic. There is still only partial recovery. You can't compare today with the same period in 2020.
Internal research likely told them that the Beanless show was a disaster. So they avoided the very high costs, knowing that the revenue loss during the pandemic would be less than in more normal times.
Why? They saw that it was not working, and was dragging the whole station down.
The station was pretty much dead by that point. And, with the pandemic beginning, nobody was paying attention to a morning show change.
They changed format. It has not gone well, but the pandemic has not helped. No concerts, no promotions, no budget. At least they eliminated several million in salaries between the PD and the morning team.
Again, respected what listeners? They were way, way below the levels from the same time in 2019, and billing was off already. If the show was not delivering the demos and audience size needed, a "goodbye" is superfluous and disruptive.
They would not have AQH of 16,000 as that would be the pandemic era equivalent of about 25,000 in "normal" times. KYSR hits the 25,000 level in AM Drive itself in April's PPM, good for 6th... and it has been beating KROQ overall for several years.
In any case, KROQ would be at levels that are not very competitive for ad buys. A Top 5 station has around 30,000 adult listeners, and to be in the next five you'd be around 20,000. At the current 18+ level they are about 29th in AM drive. Ad buys seldom go that deep.
That's Average Quarter Hour audience 18+ 6 AM to 10 AM, M-F, LA MSA.
I wonder why they'd pick kroq djs like stryker and Kline and megan holiday to syndicate to other markets, unless their shows do well somehow?
Listen, we can debate this nonstop, but you're all radio professionals, yet none of you have mentioned the real reason Kevin Ryder and crew were fired in March 2020: Kevin Weatherly had just left. It was new management. They didn't can the show because all of a sudden things had changed, it was the same show, just minus Bean, who was 1/8th of a show with many, many players. It was new management, new choices, and they saw the pandemic as a perfect time to rip the Band-Aid. Fine. I've been waiting for someone here to point out the obvious. They acted rash, because they could, but didn't have a real plan, which is why they simply shifted the afternoon show to mornings, without any real strategy. It was a disaster. And that's my point, there was no real strategy or finesse to this, and they've been paying the price since then. Come on.
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It's a new format with a new structure, done to try to find what Alt can be successful at in the future.
The Keven & Bean show without Bean tanked immediately, dropping out of a rank position that got it on ad buys. Weatherly was on the way out already, as KROQ had billed over $40,000,000 as recently as 2013 and 2014 and was down to the mid 20's by 2019. The station was dropping very alarmingly.
This had been a while coming, but remember that we did not really know the extent of the pandemic until after the firings and the format modification. It had nothing to do with the pandemic as far as I can see. Entercom at the time was trying to find a solution for all its Alt stations, because the format was losing ground in all but the markets with little or no minority group influence on music.
LA is about 48% Hispanic in 18-49, and Alt is not an attractive format to most Hispanics. I mean, there are hundreds of rock stations in Latin America, but none is based on Alt music.
"Kevin in the Morning" had been on the air for two months. If you can determine that quickly that it's a disaster, then why bother even launching the show? How can you decide in two months that it's a failure unless you knew before hand? And if you knew before hand, then why even launch it? The show was literally on the air for 10 weeks. That is not long enough to determine the long-term success or failure of anything major like this. Unless you just want to can it. But then, why not have a PR strategy to ease a radio legend like Kevin out of it, instead of creating a PR nightmare by just exploding things? Come on, Entercom/Audacy, make it a little easier on your staff, for Pete's sake.
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Dropping from 27,000 to 21,000 is not "tanking immediately." That's an expected drop as you transition from a legacy show to a new one. That's called, "you better be careful, you already lost a chunk of audience; if you don't want to collapse, don't do anything else rash!" Then they fired Kevin. And well, fine, they did something rash, and that's when they cleared out their audience. They didn't need to go to zero, but hell, I guess they decided they didn't want any listeners.
You can't easily do research for something that does not exist; it is theoretical. However, once the show launches, you can easily do research almost overnight to see what existing listeners think. They thought it sucked.
See the above comment.
Yes it is. TV series on the national networks can be cancelled after just 4 or 5 episodes; we had such a case this season with at least one show.
What good is spending money on PR if they did not have enough audience to care about influencing. And the average listener is not that involved with radio to even care.
There was no PR nightmare. There was a declining radio station, a show that lost one of two main partners and had no prospects of doing well. And you had a station in a similar format beating it in all the music dayparts for two years or so.
That is the existing audience defecting with only half the team at the mike. And it was accompanied by perceptual research that showed it would get worse.
The station was, for sales purposes, at zero anyway. A music station outside the top 20 in 25-54 is not going to make money unless it is an ethnic niche propostion.
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