The millions who happily tune in each day without complaint? The millions who are documented and certified in ratings reports every month? Why yes. Yes I do. Those are the millions I speak for. We have a product that people have chosen. They could easily pay $14.95 a month for satellite, but they tell the Sirius people, "Why pay when I can get the same for free." I know what works. I also know what doesn't work, because I've tried it, and I've studied it. I have 60 years of history to draw from. It's amazing what you can learn from others' mistakes.
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Where the hits REALLY came from. Two books that tell the truth.
The millions who happily tune in each day without complaint? The millions who are documented and certified in ratings reports every month? Why yes. Yes I do. Those are the millions I speak for. We have a product that people have chosen. They could easily pay $14.95 a month for satellite, but they tell the Sirius people, "Why pay when I can get the same for free." I know what works. I also know what doesn't work, because I've tried it, and I've studied it. I have 60 years of history to draw from. It's amazing what you can learn from others' mistakes.
If that is something people want, why do deep cuts stations uniformly fail?
Stations test this sort of concept all the time. In fact, a few years back the Clear Channel Format Laboratory had quite a few channels that were, in some ways, along the lines of what you describe. None was deemed even good enough to put on an HD-2 channel.
So put your idea in writing. Build a music library. Do some demo segments. Add the talent or personalities you feel fit the concept and pitch it to radio groups with under-performing stations. Or to one of the syndicators. Or XM/Sirius.
Then get back to us.
(I know, they will turn you down, and you will blame the antiquated thinking of people in radio. As far as I know, making money is not yet antiquated)
My faves are the retro AT40 countdowns, and occasionally, Sunday night vinyl, when they are tracking an album that I am interested in. They even tracked George Harrison's All Things Must Pass album a few weeks ago. All six sides of it! Took them, with commercials and chatter, about two and a half hours to play that one through! Last year they played on old AT40 countdown that I remembered from back in 1977, that I did not get to hear all the way through back then because it was interrupted by coverage of a fire at a furniture store downtown. So I finally got to hear it all the way through, last year!
Sure......
Avid, it's no use. DE has his set ways
Solution: Win the lottery or gather up 40K and build your own small station, get a frequency in a small town and play everything. And watch the ratings grow over time as people become fixated with your presentation and realize that THIS IS RADIO, and RADIO that plays real music. Try Part 15 first to get a feel.
I totally agree with you.
Solution: Win the lottery or gather up 40K and build your own small station, get a frequency in a small town and play everything. And watch the ratings grow over time as people become fixated with your presentation and realize that THIS IS RADIO, and RADIO that plays real music. Try Part 15 first to get a feel.
I totally agree with you.
Oldies, you may be on to something! $40K will get you about 45 days of operating expenses, if you really, really run a tight ship. The average small town spot may be $10 if you can get that much. Of course this means you just stepped into a fully operational radio station that had all the equipment and transmitter just ready to go! IF not, add a couple of years of FCC hang ups or figure you will pay $400k to several million for the station. You might be able to find a bank to loan it to you, but the SBA probably won't because of their red tape and radio stations are not good assets for banks, so you may have to raise it yourself with partners that will probably need to understand they may not get paid back usually for a while, if ever. It usually takes a couple of years to break-even, so I think you would need about $400,000 minimum to get you through the rough start up time. Of course the format would be an interesting sell, because advertisers in small towns can easily monitor their returns and your growth. You would probably be competing with two or more stations that would already have the popular formats. You could pay some talent to VT for you and keep your payroll to a minimum, though. Maybe have one live morning host. You may not really need a general manager or sales manager, so you could do that for free. Then just have a couple of sales people pounding the streets, while you programmed everything, produced and added the commercials, VTing, did traffic, added all the new music, created all of the giveaways, remotes, advertising, customer relations work, maybe even fixed the equipment. You would need to spend a lot of time looking for new sales people, because the turnover might be tough, but the payroll would be less that way and so would all of the bill writing and paying. You might need to win at least $500,000 or more. Plus about $25,000 for gin or vodka. I am not sure you would get much free time to listen to your station, but it would be fun!
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Great idea. Ask the KFEZ people how it's working out for them.
Tibbs knows someone who did that. It's not really cheaper because of digital music royalties. And the really big issue now is how to pay for songs before 1972. Then there's the issue of getting people to find you in cyberspace. But the people who do it do it for the love.
And who pays them? Of course, the station operator. That's my point. It's not really cheaper.
It depends on which broadcast package you use. In my case I am on the X5000 plan, so it only costs me $200 a year.
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There are no numbers for radio stations that have done a good job of promoting their new formats because there are no radio stations (at least that I've ever encountered) who do any kind of a decent job at letting potential listeners know what they are broadcasting. No one can possibly know how well a station does at attracting listeners through a well-done, effective promotional campaign until someone actually tries it.
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Bad promotion. I don't know anyone who just blindly tunes in stations at random, hoping for a good one.
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Actually, I have my own radio station. It broadcasts over 87.9, though it only covers about ten feet. It's the MP3 player in my car. I load a thumb drive with what I want to hear, and that's what I hear. I often have friends and coworkers riding with me in the car, and invariably they ask what station I'm listening to with such a great mix of hits, deep cuts, and new songs and no DJ chatter. I still sample OTA radio to get traffic reports, and sometimes I forget to bring my thumb drive. It's a nightmare trying to find a station that I can just leave tuned in.
Stations do extensive promotion for format launches in many cases... but those campaigns are targeted using media that consumers of the station's particular format would see.
A recent launch of a South Bay (San José) CA rhythmic CHR got national attention by stunting with a particular Nelly song and it trended very high on Twitter and FaceBook where extensive support was given to the launch. There was probably no 18 to 34 year old in the South Bay that did not know, within a few days, that there was a new music choice that included today's hits and lots of throwbacks and old school as well.
Perhaps you are not in the target for new launches, and the stations are, intelligently, using highly targeted media that you don't consume.
The reason you don't know about it is it hasn't worked...not that it hasn't been tried.
Lots of stations have used TV ads and billboards to promote what they're doing. It happens all the time. However, while you can lead a horse to water, you can't make them drink. I know of one classic hits station that spent a lot of money with TV and outdoor ads, even got the local TV station to do interviews with the DJs, and it never got them anything. They had well-established local personalities too. After about a year, the station changed formats.
$40 k? As Tibbs2 stated, try ten or twelve times that.
It takes years to get a new station license, and if it is FM in a community that big enough to sustain a station, you will pay several hundred thousand at the FCC auction for the CP alone. Then it may take $100 k to $200 k to build the station plus start up costs and burn capital until you can get some revenue.
As to AM, there are no daytimers being licensed, and designing and building a new directional fulltimer is cost prohibitive.
So you have to buy an existing facility. Anything that would be useful for a music format has to be FM, and you'd need to be in a market that can sustain a station. You are talking of over a half-million at minimum.
Do you see in all this the reason why small owners don't try risky, unproven formats? There is too much at risk... often a person's life savings and a mortgage on their home!
I would take it a step further, and say that nearly ALL "brick-and-mortar" businesses require that type of investment. Last I heard, a McDonald's franchise costs $650,000, but that was several years ago, so it is probably much more than that now.
Even with an established station, I would not want to step in and become GM. The GM at the first station where I ever worked full-time did all of the following:
morning talk show host
news reader (although not news director)
ad sales (although apparently not GSM)
producer (although not production director--that was me while I was there)
high school football and basketball play-by-play (no sports director at this station)
Saturday morning sports talk show host
various remotes, usually on the weekends
maintenance, and probably some engineering duties
He could certainly have delegated some of that, but apparently chose not to. Needless to say, he was also "on-call" if anything went wrong. (If I was going to be "on-call," I would just go ahead and become a doctor.) He probably never has a day off, but probably also does not have much of a life, outside of radio.
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