I'm listening and I agree with both you and Mets18.
They don't even have an HD-2 on Z100. It's just a rebroadcast of HD-1 it's off by about 30 seconds. They should put pride radio on 100.3 HD-2 and put Dance on 103.5 HD-2 or on KTU HD-1 then they'd really be the BEAT of New York. Q104.3 HD-3 should be the Alternative Project. Put Country on HD-3 on KTU as WYNY.
iHeart can't use that call sign because it is used by an AC station in Northeastern Pennsylvania. iHeartCountry Radio is the more likely option for WKTU-HD3. As for HD2, I think that Pride Radio has an excellent variety of dance music, making it a perfect complement to the main channel.
That's an AM station though.
Would WYNY-HD3 be legal for the New York subchannel, or would it have to be WYNY-FM-HD3? (Oh boy, a call-letters sub-thread! Always a welcome diversion from a tired topic!)
You don't get to have a separate callsign for an HD subchannel.
Anybody that would be a likely target audience for a country station would have no memory of WYNY.
In fact, the station on 103.5 changed its call sign from WYNY to WKTU 26 years ago.
Markets get what markets will support. For example, the reason why there is no country station is that each effort over the decades... going back to WHN... has produced lower and lower audience shares. And local advertisers don't seem to want to buy on those stations in recent decades.
And the way country music is evolving makes it even less likely it will ever return. What doesn't sound more like rock sounds more like traditional country, with plenty of steel guitar and "hillbilly" twangy vocals. It couldn't sound any less New York if the bass guitarists and drummers were replaced guys in bib overalls blowing on moonshine jugs and scrubbing on washboards.
If you are trying to appeal solely to certain ethic groups in the city and no one else then it would be problematic. That does not mean white people in the city or region that are in significant number do not watch and listen to content related to country living.
Music on AM was a problem with WHN. WKHK would be a better example, doing about as well as WNYL. I wonder what WKHK was billing though.
WHN, despite being AM, had the higest ratings and billing of any of the instances. And it was active when AM was still acceptable, at lest to those over 30... and back then, the country average age was older anyway.
I was in my teens when I listened to WHN. After WHN became WFAN in 1987, I went on to listen to a few other AM music stations for several more years. Since I began subscribing to XM in 2003, I haven't listened to an AM music radio station on a regular basis.
New York AC and CHR stations are among the nation's most conservative when it comes to adding songs, especially ones outside the established comfort zone of the format. A country crossover would need to be a monster hit in smaller markets nationwide in order to get a spin in New York. This was true way back in the WABC days. If Morgan Wallen or Luke Combs is being played in Knoxville and Austin but not Portland and Baltimore, it's of no interest to New York radio; in fact, it probably wouldn't be of interest even if Boston and Cleveland were playing it, just as long as significant numbers of markets are ignoring the song.
New York has a high foreign-born population, so that could explain why country crossovers do not do as well on pop radio. (Ditto with Miami, and probably Los Angeles and San Francisco.)
