Pacifica has to want to sell for someone to buy. You... and nobody else... can convince them to sell. They consider that a "sell-out" and are adamant about keeping their stations.
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WJBR sold to VCY???
- Thread starter ashman887
- Start date
B101 sees a big ratings boost (and likely a nice revenue jolt) from its seasonal programming.
In any case, the exit of a Wilmington station that was at best a tangential player in the larger Philly market should have zero bearing on programming strategy of true Philly market stations such as B101.
In any case, the exit of a Wilmington station that was at best a tangential player in the larger Philly market should have zero bearing on programming strategy of true Philly market stations such as B101.
And they would lose 50% to 60% of their usual Christmas share. The Christmas music weeks are by far their very biggest of the whole year.
Spanish language tropical in the East is salsa and some merengue. That appeals today, mostly to people over 45 to 50... not a good sales demo for Hispanic radio where buys are mostly 18-49 or some subset.
There is hardly a market for Spanish language A/C any longer. The listeners to all the old Camilo Sesto and friends songs are in their 60's and 70's now, and pop has been replaced by reggaetón and rhythmic songs from Bad Bunny to Enrique Iglesias.
No, no and no. WJBR was not some big bad factor making the various CDs at B101 do all-Christmas. That's the default setting for many ACs. And it's the default setting because it's a big moneymaker and their target audience wants it. There will be nothing to see. Somewhere around a week before Thanksgiving, plus or minus, B101 will be all ho-ho-ho just like always. People give WJBR way more credit for influencing Philly than it warranted.
Expanded? Radio can’t generate enough revenue to support the stations that currently exist…hence the situation it’s in. Expansion would exacerbate the problem.
Radio isn’t going away. it is just playing formats that you don’t personally like.
Same. And I'm 25!
No way that's gonna happen. The only consideration B101 ever really had regarding WJBR and Christmas music was timing. It's been argued for ages that the folks at WBEB don't care at all what WJBR is doing, but they've made some decision over the years that very clearly showed that they didn't exactly love listeners being able to get the Christmas music on perfectly listenable 99.5--literally one tap of a seek button away--while they were still playing Adele.
B101's Christmas music fans--and there obviously are a ton of them--openly campaign every year for the flip, and that particular segment of the audience is also very much aware that 99.5 also plays Christmas music. All that having been said, with each passing year, management at WBEB has seemed less and less interested in what WJBR was doing. So even the matter of timing has fallen by the wayside.
Only mildly related, I wondered what Delaware station might pick up the mantle, but there doesn't really seem to be a viable station to do it. Then I realized Delaware already has an all-Christmas alternative: They'll all be listening to B101.1.
They will indeed. Or streaming. Or satellite. Or whatever. There’s no shortage of options.
With successive changes in PDs and such, it’s unsurprising different “attitudes” toward anything WJBR did evolved into a proverbial shrug. To paraphrase Sinatra, they ultimately did it their way…and let the gang in Delaware go about their merry business.
With successive changes in PDs and such, it’s unsurprising different “attitudes” toward anything WJBR did evolved into a proverbial shrug. To paraphrase Sinatra, they ultimately did it their way…and let the gang in Delaware go about their merry business.
I think another thing that helped them shrug off what WJBR was doing was realizing that their own Holiday books were repeatedly astounding, no matter what.
Is that really true? Are people actually calling them up and begging them to play Nat King Cole and Andy Williams when it's still 80 degrees outside?
I've lost count of how many radio formats launched with liners proclaiming it to be "the radio station YOU ASKED FOR!" -- only for it to bomb in the ratings and flip to something else in short order.
And so-called "all-request" shows are almost never actually all-request, because if they were, they'd be playing the same burned-out songs over and over again. Years ago I called one to request a song, and the DJ yelled at me, saying he was tired of people calling to request that song every week, and he wasn't going to play it again for a while.
If it happens to be 80º on a day in early-to-mid-November, then the answer to your question is yes. (Albeit, with a caveat: Vastly more people do their begging via socials than by phone.) 🤣 But typically, it's more like upper-50's/low 60's at that time of year.
And I don't know where outside of small and probably unrated markets, a request show in 2023 is actually programmed by requests! Even as a kid in the '90s, I knew better than to call and request a song. If there was something I really wanted to hear, I called the so-called request line and asked the jock when it was gonna play next. More times than not, he/she would take a look and say something like, "I see that one coming up at 8:53."
Of course, being a diary market, Wilmington and WJBR did not get the core Holiday weeks from Arbitron and Nielsen, as there is a hiatus in measurement... two or three weeks prior to synchronizing with the PPM schedule and now 4 weeks since 2008. So they get the tail end of the Fall book and, of course, no separate "December" book that would be partially in November.
Are they calling? Meh, who knows. But anecdotally, look at the historic social media responses they got. All things considered, there was a passionate and, um…demanding to put it politely…group that starts getting riled up somewhere around mid-October. Is it the majority that gets that engaged? Of course not. But they’re out there, they’re plenty outspoken, and it’s reasonable to assume there are some more who aren’t on those social channels who feel similarly.
Social media can easily be astroturfed. I've seen stations publish "listener feedback" that turned out to largely be from family and friends of employees, retired employees, and advertisers.
And besides, anyone who uses an Internet connection to beg a radio station to play Christmas music in early November could just as easily use it to listen to all the Christmas music they want, any time of the year!
And besides, anyone who uses an Internet connection to beg a radio station to play Christmas music in early November could just as easily use it to listen to all the Christmas music they want, any time of the year!
In some parts of the country 80 degrees is typical Christmas weather.😰🤣
Florida I-4 and south only.
Puerto Rico, Hawaii, American Somoa, some parts of South Texas, much of NM and AZ and even parts of SoCal.
You want to imagine some grand conspiracy, great. It’s not. Never mind the absurdity of wasting a moment on fake Christmas music asks.
And we know they can stream. Many probably do that. But they’re also not denizens of message boards. They’re people with varying degrees of tech knowledge. They’re people who have some degree of attachment to a radio station (and isn’t that what people on here are constantly harping on?).
These people are among us. We see the results of Christmas radio…virtually everywhere. Hallmark has built a side business churning out Christmas movies like Hershey churns out chocolate bars. Ok, so there all basically the same plot, but still…
Christmas is big business. If people didn’t want that music, do we really think we’d see the same result time and time again?
(And I happen to know quite a few of these holidayaholocs—they aren’t fake.)
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