Noticing the list of "interviewees", I don't see anybody who was really involved in making WARM the number one cume station in the country. At one point, WARM had almost a 60 share. That was because of the personalities, not the news. No on-air personalities were listed even though Harry was just down the street. And as I've said, when WARM went talk, we committed suicide. I was the first to move on followed closely by Harry. Arbitrends had us above a 9 share after the first two months of the fall book. Then the switch to talk and the bottom fell out. Can't do a talk show with 2 callers. Frank Andrews would call in unavailable at the last minute and one of the news girls would spend 2 hours with some charity and no calls. We brought back some of the old jingles and cleaned up the music. I was MD at the time and Ron Allen PD and he wanted us to play the top 40, no exceptions. The only problem was Madonna's "Vogue"..I asked him if we wanted to go with it as Magic wasn't playing it and he said if it's on the charts, play it. Our problem wasn't the song which I actually liked..It was that it drove our compression nuts so we had to pull it. The real problem for all stations came in the late 80's when stations started selling for far more than they were worth. The old rule of thumb was 2 1/2 times billing..Suddenly it became 5 to 10 times billing. When ownership rules changed, leeches like Citadel started buying stations simply because they didn't want anybody else to own them. WEMR in Tunkhannock went for 800 thousand. Our AM was actually successful and made money and we wanted to hang on to that but Citadel said all or nothing. The would have been happy to get 3-4 hundred thousand and kissed the ground. So local stations suddenly became nothing more than translators and a drain on the corporate bottom line. FM radio will probably go through the same thing in a couple of years because there are too many other options out there. Between XM, Pandora, Ipods, etc, we can now choose what we listen to, not something they decide to play for us...
Norm, I've been watching this thread for some time now and you have absolutely hit it out of the park with this reply! Good radio happens
between the records. The unique personalities that are now so rare are really the only element of any format that competition (radio, internet, iPod, etc) can't duplicate. If you are trying to program a music intensive station today (AM or FM) you are doomed! The problem is that there is no one left to fill the voids between the music. At least not for what radio pays today. Face it, no matter how tightly formatted a station may be, there will always be clinkers in there that will not fly for everyone. On the other hand, if you put 5,000 songs in your iPod you like all 5,000 of them or they wouldn't be there. The consultant's way of dealing with this is to tighten up the playlist and go for a more defined audience. In reality, all this does is add to the perception (which is absolutely correct!) that radio has become far too repetitive and is actually driving listeners to other media choices.
