K
k2pg
Guest
A little over a year ago, WPEN showed promise as the station where we could hear music that is rarely played by other oldies stations anymore. A similar format is very successful on sister AM station WMTR in Morristown, NJ. WMTR's high ratings prompted the New York Times to run an article about the phenomenon of WMTR as a successful AM music station. What killed WPEN?
1. Weak promotion. When WPEN flipped to oldies last year, it was left with a lot of ill will from disenfranchised standards fans. With little or no promotion, oldies fans were left to find the station while surfing the dial. I don't remember any advertising that would tell me why I should listen to WPEN, rather than WOGL. (Hint: WPEN played music that WOGL no longer plays.)
2. Inconsistent programming. "Oldies 950" just wasn't there for us on the weekends, when a lot of us listen to the radio while doing weekend chores or driving to the beach. In its place were endless, tacky infomercials by a galaxy of hucksters and charlatans peddling everything from dubious financial advice to real estate to laxatives and quack dietary supplements. Upon hearing this crap, oldies fans would quickly switch to FM, tuning to WOGL or the doo-wop and early R&B weekend programming on WRDV. Yes, infomercials make money...but they are a cyanide pill for a station that is trying to build an audience and keep it.
3. Horrible audio quality. Several years ago, WPEN rightfully took pride in being the best sounding AM station in Philadelphia. Its engineering staff always did an excellent job of maintaining WPEN and its FM sisters. When corporate decided to make WPEN into a guinea pig for the Ibiquity AM IBOC system, all of that changed on the AM side. Yes, IBOC does sound good on an IBOC receiver. But nobody, other than a handful of engineers at the "guinea pig" stations, has these receivers at this time. The rest of us still listen in good, old-fashioned analog. On several receivers, including the stock radio in my Dodge Neon, a GE Superadio, a restored Stromberg-Carlson floor model radio from the 1940s, and two communications receivers, WPEN sounded like a telephone listen line with an annoying, high-pitched hiss in the background. The hiss comes from the IBOC digital component. WPEN was painful to listen to at the times when I sampled the oldies format because the station sounded so bad. WPEN may well do better with sports talk, as rival WIP also transmits IBOC these days and, as such, offers the same lousy audio to us analog listeners.
I miss the standards that once aired on WPEN and the real oldies that aired over the now-gone WPGR as Philly becomes the home of the Incredible Shrinking Variety of Radio Formats.
Some will say that WMTR is successful because it has no competitors in its format on FM. WMTR actually built up an audience when WCBS-FM still played oldies and WMTR is heavily promoted. Perhaps corporate should make WPEN part of the New Jersey cluster, letting the people who have made WMTR successful do the same with WPEN. And get that IBOC off the air in Philly. AM IBOC is a flawed technology that degrades, rather than improves, the signal while generating interference over a 30 kHz bandwidth in a congested band.
1. Weak promotion. When WPEN flipped to oldies last year, it was left with a lot of ill will from disenfranchised standards fans. With little or no promotion, oldies fans were left to find the station while surfing the dial. I don't remember any advertising that would tell me why I should listen to WPEN, rather than WOGL. (Hint: WPEN played music that WOGL no longer plays.)
2. Inconsistent programming. "Oldies 950" just wasn't there for us on the weekends, when a lot of us listen to the radio while doing weekend chores or driving to the beach. In its place were endless, tacky infomercials by a galaxy of hucksters and charlatans peddling everything from dubious financial advice to real estate to laxatives and quack dietary supplements. Upon hearing this crap, oldies fans would quickly switch to FM, tuning to WOGL or the doo-wop and early R&B weekend programming on WRDV. Yes, infomercials make money...but they are a cyanide pill for a station that is trying to build an audience and keep it.
3. Horrible audio quality. Several years ago, WPEN rightfully took pride in being the best sounding AM station in Philadelphia. Its engineering staff always did an excellent job of maintaining WPEN and its FM sisters. When corporate decided to make WPEN into a guinea pig for the Ibiquity AM IBOC system, all of that changed on the AM side. Yes, IBOC does sound good on an IBOC receiver. But nobody, other than a handful of engineers at the "guinea pig" stations, has these receivers at this time. The rest of us still listen in good, old-fashioned analog. On several receivers, including the stock radio in my Dodge Neon, a GE Superadio, a restored Stromberg-Carlson floor model radio from the 1940s, and two communications receivers, WPEN sounded like a telephone listen line with an annoying, high-pitched hiss in the background. The hiss comes from the IBOC digital component. WPEN was painful to listen to at the times when I sampled the oldies format because the station sounded so bad. WPEN may well do better with sports talk, as rival WIP also transmits IBOC these days and, as such, offers the same lousy audio to us analog listeners.
I miss the standards that once aired on WPEN and the real oldies that aired over the now-gone WPGR as Philly becomes the home of the Incredible Shrinking Variety of Radio Formats.
Some will say that WMTR is successful because it has no competitors in its format on FM. WMTR actually built up an audience when WCBS-FM still played oldies and WMTR is heavily promoted. Perhaps corporate should make WPEN part of the New Jersey cluster, letting the people who have made WMTR successful do the same with WPEN. And get that IBOC off the air in Philly. AM IBOC is a flawed technology that degrades, rather than improves, the signal while generating interference over a 30 kHz bandwidth in a congested band.
