Spot Loads

Everybody knows that as soon as your station starts an ad break, you start to lose listeners. This is a fact that every sales guy has had to contend with. Bridge ratings did a study they released earlier this year on this very phenomena. The study was not well received. But nobody likes bad news.

The study was limited to a listeners singular "favorite" radio station.

They calculated the actual pace of audience degredation. This estimates how many listeners a radio station had at the end of each ad. Everyone already knew that it dropped off. But nobody knew exactly how fast. This data Exerpted below.

Spot Audience
1..............33,600
2..............26,208
3..............19,656
4..............14,742
5..............11,057
6................8,182

By the end of the commercial break this station was left with 19% of the audience it brought into the break. remember this was their "favorite" radio station. The secondary listeners probably fade even faster. In similar studies they conducted in eight markets listener attrition occurs at the following rates:

Spot Percent Listener Attrition
1..........................20%
2..........................22%
3..........................24 %
4..........................25%
5..........................26%
6..........................25%

That's only a 6 spot ad break. I have heard a station's break run 15 or 20 solid minutes of ads! After 15 minutes there cant be anything left but crickets chirping. What's left at 20?

Radio Bites Man

Much more rare than even a case of man bites dog...














Radio towers are often massively tall structures looming harmlessly high above us. Typically they are fenced off, guy wired or otherwise far from where they can pose a danger. But sometimes things can go awry. Being a large mass of metal, radio tower make a bit of a mess when they come down unexpectedly. In the cases where they are in an urban or suburban locale
...they land on other things.

I don't want you to get the idea that this happens all the time. It usually takes something big, like a plane or a tornado to knock one over. Below is a sampling of some of the more significant falls. feel free to volunteer others I am forgetting.

KFI-AM, December 2004.The single-engine Cessna 182 struck the KFI Radio tower about 9:45 a.m. and the tower tumbled to the ground. KFI is off air for a couple hours.

WOBO-FM, August 2002 - Strong winds snapped off the upper two-thirds of a 300-foot radio tower here Sunday afternoon, sending it smashing through the roof of a youth mental health center. No one was in the Wasserman Youth & Adolescent Center at that time, and there were no injuries. The tower damaged one classroom.

WOR-AM, August 1956. After clipping the radio tower and shearing off a wing the plane hit the roof of the an apartment building, destroying the top 2 floors. The pilot and passenger Russell S. Williams (a millionaire oil company executive) were killed.

KOTC-AM, June 2005 The pilot of a crop-dusting plane was killed about 7:45 p.m. Saturday when the plane struck a radio tower near Senath in Dunklin County in the Missouri Bootheel, authorities said. The plane clipped a wire supporting the tower. The tower fall hitting a barn.

WGMX & WYNZ December 2003 A tower formerly visible in Portland along I-295. It collapsed at about 1:30 in the afternoon after a guy wire snapped. It hit no buildings but did hit multiple parked cars. Explain that to your insurance company.

More pictures of squished things here:
http://www.unc.edu/~morris/tower/

THE FIRST DJ: Reginald A. Fessenden

To me, the first DJ is the first person to broadcast voice and music over the radio and for more than one person to hear it —a true radio broadcast. It has been reported that he developed this while working for the national Weather Service But that's only if you believe one of the founding myths of radio. [More here]

If you beleive it, in an epic moment in 1900 on Christmas Eve, Fessenden transmitted the first radio broadcast in history from Brant Rock, Massachusetts. Ships at sea heard a broadcast that included Fessenden playing the song "O Holy Night" on the violin and then reading a passage from the Bible. That happened at Cobb Island in Maryland in December of 1900. His job there was to set up telegraph connections for collecting remote weather observations. Like a true geek he instead used the time and effort to explore and actually produce voice over radio. But only one person received these test signals, his unnamed assistant. This was not a broadcast. This was more analogous to the Marconi experiments of 1901. 

In 1906, Fessenden repeated the experiential voice transmission by radio between Scotland and Massachusetts. The New York Times reported on this event and it remains his earliest verifiable broadcast. Like many geniuses the potential for his inventions was not recognized early on and even his own investors weren't interested. He claimed distances of over 200 miles were possible. His work with the National Electric Signaling Company (NESCO) seems to have been rocky. He was fired in 1911. He claimed to be owed money. A lengthy lawsuit followed.

Did I mention he discovered the Heterodyne principle? By fixing the beat frequency between the incoming carrier and the local oscillator to a fixed intermediate frequency (IF), most of a radio receiver can be constructed so that it can be used by any incoming radio signal. Only the local oscillator is tuned to produce a beat frequency equal to the fixed IF frequency. Before this development, a radio could only be used on ONE FREQUENCY in sending or receiving.

The Beautiful Music Radio Format

What a freak show this was...
It starts innocently enough on WDVR near Philadelphia in 1963. Then Music director Jerry Lee created a format that miled the new high fidelity of FM stereo sound. Within four months they were #1 in Philly. Then Jim Schulke arrived on the scene. He was not from radio, he was from TV. But with the ideas he had you'd have thought he was from the CIAs MkUltra department.
http://www.michael-robinett.com/declass/c000.htm

Jim Schulke, an ex Paramount TV executive and harvard MBA had this idea. He would design his playlist of Muzak to effect human behavior with through the tempo. The clock was divided into 15 minute music blocks in a process he called "matched flow." modulated the tempo of music to improve work place productivity. It gradually increased tempo from morning until the lunch hour then started the process again after lunch. The point was that each musical peice should flow together like one long song. It was desribed as almost hypnotic. But that was the idea right? And it worked! The TSL (time spent listening) was great, with led to a nice AQH and grat ad rates as well.

Jim Schulke started the company Stereo Radio Productions (SRP) and offerd the above format. His format control was absolute. To be an SRP client the staiton owner had to agree to a number of restraints. There were certain changes to the EQ, and no compression was allowed. They were limited to 6 minutes of ads per hour. Commercials had to be run at a reduced volume. Spots had to be dry read, no bed music. The music they shipped to station was on tape reels, and was also proprietary. major labbels jumped on the fad and well.. you find Living Strings LPs at the salvation army all the time right?

This was a cult. They even beleived that the demographics on a specific SRP station were directly related to the EQ manipulation. More bass for males, less for females... etc.

Shortly after all this set in, Bonneville introduced their own Beautiful music format as did others. The new format providers were not as obsessive about EQ, compression, spot loads or spot volume. This was easier to implement, and equally popular. Of course this was SRP's undoing. If the audio paranoia wasnt related to numbers, why do it? A coalition of independant beautiful music staitons popped up: Independent Beautiful Music Association (IBMA) Some of these were actually in Europe this was branded as "Beautiful Hits." It was about then that Cox bought SRP. This was 1978, there were hundreds of these stations. As many formats do, it reached some form of critical mass and the statiosn shifted their formats away from each other. New formats cropped up. Smooth Jazz, Sunny, Soft AC, Easy Listening, Magic, Soft Hits... etc.

CURRENT STATIONS CLAMING TO BE BEAUTIFUL MUSIC:
WOEZ 88.3 Knoxville, TN http://www.woez88.com/
WKTZ 90.9 Jacksonville, FL http://wktz.jones.edu/
WMUU 94.5 Greenville, SC http://www.wmuu.com/main.asp

NOTE: about 5 years ago some christian music stations began co-opting the branding.

What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.

This one is by memory so bear with me...
The Vegas Lounge format, is not quite Triple A and not quite Nostalgia. They mix the obvious casino-crooners: Sinatra, Dean martin, Sammy Davis Jr., etc. with a cross-over mix from a respectable Triple A: Ben Folds Five, Michael Buble, Norah Jones etc.

Then just out of sheer balls they mix in the rejects from that 1990s swing revival: cherry poppin daddies, big voodoo daddy, Brian setzer etc. The mix is eccentric, but it works. On the same radio dial that spawned Jack-FM, the jump from Etta James to Norah Jones isn't an impasse. The format is young, cool and I like it.

WRDA has had the higest profile by far within the format, but I think KKZZ-AM was actually the first to debut it. Great related article here: http://www.acradio.com/INSIDER_ARCHIVE/mk048.html

There are ONLY three stations braving the waters of this format.
WRDA 104.1 FM St. Louis, MO http://www.red1041.com/
KKZZ, 1590AM Ventura, CA http://www.1590kkzz.com/
WTRI-AM 1520 http://www.vegasradiowtri.com/
*thanks to Scott Tilde for the correction