Exactly. People go where the money is. I get that. The money is based on advertising. There was a time when a top rated morning show in Cleveland made a lot of money. That time has passed. WGAR had a live & local morning show. It won awards from the CMA and other places. One day, the money they made was no longer enough to cover the expense. So the station replaced the local show with Bobby Bones. WGAR is still a Top 5 station. Bobby is a quality personality who does morning radio the way it's always been done. This goes back to the decline of Cleveland's market size. The advertising base can't support the kind of staffing it once did. It's great to talk about how great radio used to be when Cleveland was a bigger market and it attracted big ad dollars. That situation has changed, and radio pays people based on the ad money they attract. That's how podcasting works too. You think you can do better with a podcast? Go ahead. See if the strength of personality is enough to attract the kind of numbers you can get on the radio. Because that's how you get paid.
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WMJI's winning ways
- Thread starter johnbasalla
- Start date
Exactly. People go where the money is. I get that. The money is based on advertising. There was a time when a top rated morning show in Cleveland made a lot of money. That time has passed. WGAR had a live & local morning show. It won awards from the CMA and other places. One day, the money they made was no longer enough to cover the expense. So the station replaced the local show with Bobby Bones. WGAR is still a Top 5 station. Bobby is a quality personality who does morning radio the way it's always been done. This goes back to the decline of Cleveland's market size. The advertising base can't support the kind of staffing it once did. It's great to talk about how great radio used to be when Cleveland was a bigger market and it attracted big ad dollars. That situation has changed, and radio pays people based on the ad money they attract. That's how podcasting works too. You think you can do better with a podcast? Go ahead. See if the strength of personality is enough to attract the kind of numbers you can get on the radio. Because that's how you get paid.
Yes, but those other metros GREW while Cleveland's metro numbers stayed just about the same during the years you indicated "down 6% in 5 years. Down 25% since 2010." Once again, those are apparently the CITY figures and NOT the METRO. Also, FWTW, I have Pittsburgh metro at 1.716 but how Nielsen defines their markets is different than the official population figures. Also, Akron (Summit and Portage Counties) is its own market and their population figures are not included in the Cleveland radio figures, even though the Cleveland antenna farm is only 10 or so miles from the Summit County line and WAKS (licensed to Akron) broadcasts from the WTAM tower even though the tower also holds the WZAK antenna, which is licensed to Cleveland! More fair regarding national impact would be the TV Nielsens where Akron (and Canton) are INCLUDED which puts the Cleveland rank at #17.
The collapse of the city is why the overall market size fell. They are related. People didn't just leave the city for the suburbs. The area didn't grow, and in the world of advertising, you need to grow. That's why radio revenues in Cleveland have dropped, why the stations can no longer pay local staff the way they could 30 years ago, and why local radio sounds the way it does. If you go to a bigger market, you'll hear more local staffing and more diversity in programming. Why? Because the money is there. Go to Seattle for example. Lots of local talent and format diversity. Not so in Cleveland. Why? There's more money in Seattle.
He also VTs a shift on WGAR. WMJI listeners perhaps don't know that. Yes, he's a busy guy and there's really no need to have a dedicated programmer overseeing the music of a classic hits station. If WMJI played currents, like WGAR, then it would matter. The research on classic hits is pretty consistent, and so it doesn't need a full time programmer. If Cleveland was a bigger market, and ad dollars hadn't collapsed, WMJI would have a full time programmer.
The research on classic hits is pretty consistent, and so it doesn't need a full time programmer.
You do if the station had strong personalities who needed direction, had a station which did lots of remotes and interviews, produced specials and tossed in some "oh wow" tracks.. WMJI cut all of that stuff over the years, so -- yeah -- if all you do is play the same 200 or so classic hits you can autopilot the whole place.
They cut that stuff because the personalities who needed direction weren't attracting the ad dollars they once did. You can't pay people if they don't attract money. That's what changed. It goes back to declining market size. At one time, Cleveland had local department stores and local business that bought radio advertising. Now Cleveland is just like any other place, with national chain stores that buy advertising based on numbers.
The personalities who need direction can hire talent coaches. Lots of out of work radio programmers who now offer personalized talent coaching just like they did when they were PDs. Who am I talking about? Look at RadioInk.com. Ronnie Lane writes a column there. If you're a big dollar personality who wants to get work in radio today, you invest in yourself, rather than depend on others. Those personalities are the ones getting hired for radio jobs both in broadcast and satellite. Of course there are no personalities at Spotify or Pandora. But if personalities need direction, it's available. Just like everything else.
Yes I know, WMMS used to do lots of artist interviews. That was in the 80s when Cleveland was a Top 25 market. Try getting big music stars to visit local stations today. That access to artists dried up a while ago. Especially for classic hits stations.
One would think that a person having to take time at the end of the day and recall and write down what they listened to would imply a certain amount of attention was paid to it. However, when I saw diaries where the respondent wrote down they listened to a station that hadn't been on the air for seven years, you have to doubt if they really "listened" to what they heard.
The ratings are one tool we have to determine radio's audience but some stations and groups have stopped buying them so they apparently are not as important as they once were, or too expensive in today's market.
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Keep in mind radio stations don't buy ratings for themselves. They buy them because advertisers require them. If they don't, then why spend the money? If you have the time to make personal relationships with advertisers, then you probably don't need ratings. But if you want advertisers to find you as the needle in the haystack of ad-supported media, Nielsen is one way to do it.
The irony in your statement is that Colin Blunstone of The Zombies, Peter Noone of Herman's Hermits, Carl Giammarese of The Buckinghams, Gary Puckett, Frankie Valli and Bill Medley of The Righteous Brothers all did terrific phone interviews with Denny Sanders when he did his show on Kool Kat Oldies circa 2021-2022. They are on his website. The reason why you don't hear interviews like that anymore is not the inaccessibility of these classic performers, but the lack of people at radio stations who have the chops to conduct such an interview. As far as current acts are concerned, they just don't think that radio is that important anymore to their target audience to bother with an interview, even on the phone. And it is not just Cleveland, but virtually every market.
Another reason is because interviews are a massive tune-out for PPM stations. Much easier to do interviews for internet radio where stations aren't judged by Nielsen ratings. It doesn't matter how great the interviewer or how big the star. We used a top rated morning DJ in 2008 interviewing the biggest star in his genre, and you could see the audience drop as the interview continued. PPM ratings killed these kinds of things in all formats of radio. Interviews are great for fans of music who also want big playlists. They are a small fraction of the radio audience. This kind of thing works better in non-commercial radio, where they don't depend on ratings.
You can't attract ad dollars when your major employers no longer exist. Steel factories, mostly gone. Auto plants, DOA. Rubber factories in the Akron area. Goodyear still here, the others are gone and none of them are making tires around here anymore. I'm sure there are more. They employed thousands. I'm sure a few employees stuck around when they shuttered but I bet a majority of residents uprooted and moved or found jobs that pay them way less then what they were making at the factories. Less income, less discretionary spending, so why spend ad dollars if the people you're aiming for don't have the extra dough to spend? 55 years ago when the old man was transferred up here from the south, the place was, more or less, booming. 5 years later, things started going to crap and people started leaving and it's been going downhill since.
Cleveland transitioned to PPM in 2008. By that logic, Lanigan should have collapsed in the ratings at that time and not retired at the top of his game with an all-talk show on an oldies station. But here we are.
Pretty sure it only takes minutes to lay down VT tracks and if you have the show prep in front of you, you could be a presenter in practically any format. He's also VTing in unrated dayparts on WMJI (overnights) and WGAR (evenings).
Fairly confident WMJI would have met this fate regardless of the market size. It's more economical for a company like iHeart to have music logs sent down from servers in New York City and no middleman.
One of the reasons is that interviews have loads of pauses. No place to put the PPM coding.
On the other hand, when Arbitron was demonstrating the early PPM results in Philadelphia in the earlier 2000's, they used several powerful Stern interviews to show that one good interview could make a huge spike in those hours and, thus, rise the whole daypart for a week.
No, they killed dull interviews. Most radio interviews have always been artist related, and most artists that sing or play well don't necessarily interview well. Ever heard a Bob Dylan interview? Excruciating.
Agree here. Most interviews don't carry anything of interest and are mostly "I'll be at the stadium tonight so come and see us". Few have any interesting value.
At some leading stations in San Juan we prohibited interviews. A sign said, "Unless it is the second coming of Christ, we don't interview anyone!". What we did was have the artist answer listener calls for an hour and give away CD's (back in the day) or T-Shirts or whatever today. The station got the advantage of having the artist there giving stuff away, but without the deadly interview.
I started doing personality shows with voice tracking back towards the end of the 70's. It would take about an hour to an hour and a half to do a four hour show if it was done correctly. For example, we had the tips and tails of all songs available so the jock could match the segues with the right pace and energy.
It's been my experience that heritage talent can break all the rules, and the audience will stick with them. Not so for the next generation. Same thing applies to Howard Stern. He broke every possible PD rule in the book, and his fans stuck with him. Today will never stack up to what people did 20 years ago.
Probably. Consider the PD of WCBS in NYC also hosts the morning show. Once again, the bottom fell out of ad-supported media a couple years ago. The budget is the budget. You can't spend money on staff that doesn't exist. How much time does he spend massaging music logs? Probably not a lot. But the ratings are still Top 5, and that's all that matters. They were able to weather the retirement of Scott Shannon. Those are some big shoes to fill.
How much of that was about Howard? People listen to Howard interviews because of Howard more than the guest. Joe Rogan gets that same treatment. Again, that's why they get paid the big bucks, and why they don't do local radio anymore. Lanigan was just a few years too soon. Had he started in the 2000s, he could have been a major syndicated national host. If you're really talented, you want to play for the biggest audiences. You don't just want to do small theaters. You want to play stadiums. After that, you want to sell out a week of stadiums. Same with radio.
The main thing that changed is that radio interviews are mostly pre-taped. That way the station controls the length and topic. If people in Cleveland want to hear interviews on the radio, listen to WGAR. Bobby Bones does them all the time. Sometimes they'll even include a live performance. But Bobby does a currents-based show where artists want to promote their current music. Elvis Duran does them at WAKS, but most of them end up on his podcast, where he doesn't have to answer to Nielsen.
And remember, Lanigan left and went to the Tampa Bay market......where he bombed. So, going national doesn't mean you'll be a hit in every market. When Stern went to satellite they replaced him with David Lee Roth, Adam Carolla and, in some markets, Rover's Morning Glory. David Lee Roth & Adam Carolla didn't last very long before they were gone. I think Rover is the only one left still doing radio and I'm not sure how many markets he's in. As far as Lanigan in Florida, don't know if people just didn't get his humor, if too many restrictions put on him by PD/owners or what the problem was. Two years later he was back in Cleveland on WMJI.
I, for one, couldn't stand Stern. It doesn't take much talent to talk nothing but "tits and ass" each morning. He went the easy way out with that crap.
These are national shows. I don't think that there is anyone left on Cleveland radio who could do a proper interview with a musical performer. But yes, these are different times and with the growth of the internet and podcasts, that is where to hear an artist interview. The thing missing is the local references and specific conversation related to Cleveland, but between the behavior of the PPM logger and the more discriminating music fan pretty much abandoning radio, it is no wonder that local interviews with national stars are no longer done.