That's probably why a couple of markets I'm familiar with (and there are likely more) have no CHR station, with a Hot AC station serving as their de facto CHR. My home market here in Vermont is one. Springfield, MA, is the other.
-
Get involved.
We want your input!
Apply for Membership and join the conversations about everything related to broadcasting.
After we receive your registration, a moderator will review it. After your registration is approved, you will be permitted to post.
If you use a disposable or false email address, your registration will be rejected.
After your membership is approved, please take a minute to tell us a little bit about yourself.
https://www.radiodiscussions.com/forums/introduce-yourself.1088/
Thanks in advance and have fun!
RadioDiscussions Administrators
Which format will be the next to go?
- Thread starter jp1996
- Start date
CHR is definitely struggling and most of them play so many oldies they works have been considered Hot AC in the past. In the 80s it would have been unusual to hear a 5 year old song on CHR, let alone 20+ year old songs which we were here today.
The only exception would have been something that was in a movie or TV show which put it back on the TOP-40.
As for all-news, where it exists, it's successful in audience and revenue.
The only exception would have been something that was in a movie or TV show which put it back on the TOP-40.
As for all-news, where it exists, it's successful in audience and revenue.
Well, my point is that today's 12-24 listener is tomorrow's 25-44. I don't expect today's kids to start listening to the radio at 25 when they never have. I also think that CHR has adapted to the loss of listeners by playing 20+ year old songs.
Realistically no. It’s a nice enough little niche, and while Target and the like may be “selling albums,” they’re selected titles typically on an endcap or other small display space when compared to the space taken up by albums (in whatever form) decades back.
It’s a curiosity that garners attention for sure. It’s all well and good for those who indulge, but there’s no logical jump from some (and to be sure, it’s some) members of the younger generations buying a few (relative to decades ago) albums and eschewing the ability to get precisely the music they want on digital platforms for the older model of broadcast radio (however it may be delivered). There is a place for that model to this day, but it’s not going to see a dramatic rebirth because some young’uns are playing vinyl for kicks.
A lot of vinyl has included digital downloads as part of the packaging for years
I'm worried for the day that stations like Salsoul and Z-93 no longer exist because there is not enough salsa production to sustain them. The old stalwarts of salsa are going to die someday and there are not enough young guns to sustain the genre, which is such a shame.
Z-93 is already news-talk in the morning. How long until it goes the way of the similarly named station across the Mona Passage?
Z-93 is already news-talk in the morning. How long until it goes the way of the similarly named station across the Mona Passage?
I was surprised to see a large rack of LPs at the Lebanon, NH, Walmart a few days ago, several rows, sorted alphabetically, although the albums in the slots didn't always correspond to the letters on the separators. The three at the end of the row I looked at were by Tyler Childers, Reba McEntire and Jelly Roll, but I noticed pop artists as well elsewhere.
If salsa is in such dire shape, I'd imagine it won't be long. It will be like trying to find a doo-wop or a disco station -- or maybe a calypso station in Jamaica. Musical genres sometimes just die due to generational changes in taste and preference.
Flip the script and Washington DC only has a CHR. It used to have two hot ACs; one went classic hits (WIAD) and the other sold to KLove (former WRQX). Not enough signals, or interest, for a hot AC it seems.
Charleston has two CHRs but both are mostly hot AC stations that cater to adults listening around the office. I haven't heard them played around teenage hangout spots in years.
95.9 here is "adult hit music," which fits that 25-44 age set well. And more the older end of that age set. 95SX has mostly been top 40 for the last 45 years, but in the early 90s when top 40 really wasn't doing well they went hot AC for a few years. Even went to the Mix format which was big at the time. Then when top 40 got hotter again around 1995-96 they went back to it.
95.9 here is "adult hit music," which fits that 25-44 age set well. And more the older end of that age set. 95SX has mostly been top 40 for the last 45 years, but in the early 90s when top 40 really wasn't doing well they went hot AC for a few years. Even went to the Mix format which was big at the time. Then when top 40 got hotter again around 1995-96 they went back to it.
That's largely gone away. Most of the new releases I see don't have digital downloads included at all anymore...
Charlotte has two CHRs and neither is doing well. The Hot AC is the only AC because one competitor is classic hits and tries to claim it is AC when it has almost nothing from the past decade, and the other is We Play Anything.
Raleigh-Durham also has two CHRs and no Hot AC. I haven't looked at their numbers. Greensboro has the same situation and I think the more rhythmic of the two hasn't done so well. No Hot AC. But the We Play Everything station is doing spectacularly well 12-plus.
I changed Z-101 to all-talk back in the mid to late 1980's because of a simple fact that I explained to Bienvenido: anyone with five hundred pesos in their pocked can buy a meringue music library; no matter how well we do, someone will come on with fewer advertising minutes an hour and kill us.
But nobody could do talk as well as we did, because with El Gobierno de la Mañana we invented modern talk radio in the Republic. The old style news analysis talk of Radio Mil and the like was very AM and very old sounding.
So Zeta in Santo Domingo was changed to talk because there were too many merengue stations. That's not the same situation as exists in Puerto Rico where there is still a big amount of salsa fans... maybe most over 40.... for the next decade or so.
Here is Nielsen's data on the situation. The blue bars are 18-34 year olds and the purple bars are everyone 35 and up. Data covers all of the PPM markets.
You can see a massive chasm on the News/Talk category, and smaller gaps on All-Sports, with the younger demos preferring AC, CHR, Hot AC, Urban CHR and Country.
This doesn't seem so out of line with what you'd expect. We've spent years on here talking about how News & Talk is an old skewing format and always has been. The question is whether today's 28 year old becomes a talk listener in their later years.
Source: The Record: Q4 U.S. audio listening trends | Nielsen
You can see a massive chasm on the News/Talk category, and smaller gaps on All-Sports, with the younger demos preferring AC, CHR, Hot AC, Urban CHR and Country.
This doesn't seem so out of line with what you'd expect. We've spent years on here talking about how News & Talk is an old skewing format and always has been. The question is whether today's 28 year old becomes a talk listener in their later years.
Source: The Record: Q4 U.S. audio listening trends | Nielsen
I'm seeing purple and pink. That was confusing. But I didn't think 18-34 listeners would enjoy talk so much.
Last decade, Hot AC started resembling CHR...now it's the other way around. Z100 in NY plays Complicated by Avril Lavigne, for instance from 2002.
How many of the few Smooth Jazz commercial stations will make it until 2030?
When did that become the case? My recollection is that in the 80s and 90s the CHR target demographic was women 18-34, although by the 90s there had become a split where Rhythmic CHR tended to skew more to the 18-24 part of that demographic, and Mainstream CHR skewed more towards 25-34 yo listeners. So when did 25-34 start expanding to become 25-44? I'm not challenging or questioning your claim, I'm just curious.
That said, I guess it wouldn't be the first time that the demographic boundaries for CHR have shifted, because I'm pretty sure that if we were to go back to the 60s and 70s the demographic target of those stations included teenagers. Certainly in the seventie, judging by the steady stream of Clearasil ads that popped up on the Seattle/Tacoma AM Top 40 stations. (For that matter, I know of at least one Top 40/CHR format in the 70s and early 80s that targeted an adults 18-44 demographic -- that was the expressed target for the syndicated TM Stereo Rock format.)
But to the topic of this thread, I tend to doubt that CHR is a format that will disappear. But I do wonder if CHR and Hot AC may not merge together. After all, those two formats have always blurred together a bit, and some stations (KZZU Spokane and WKRQ Cincinnati come to mind) have drifted from being adult-leaning CHR into very active Hot ACs.
Someone else commented that 70s classic hits formats will go away, and while that is true, it seems like more of an evolution than anything else. How many stations that started as 50s/60s oldies ended up evolving over time into 60s/70s classic hits, then to 70s/80s, and now increasingly to 80s/90s? 98.7 in Dallas/Fort Worth (originally KLUV, now KSPF) has followed that path and is now to the point where even some songs from the early 2000s are creeping in.
But a format that I can't help but wonder about is political (mostly conservative) talk. The audience is aging and audience shares are declining -- unless those stations figure out a way of attracting younger listeners, I don't see how this format doesn't just dwindle away over the next decade or so. And, frankly, I don't see how they're going to attract those younger listeners when there are so many other places for them to go for political talk.
I remember hearing that teens listened to Top 40 and even the "beautiful music" stations were attracting people over 30.
no! college stations have a much wider/diverse playlist; way, way much better than the repetitious commercial stations!
- Status