The "Progressive" Promised Land
 

David Eduardo wrote:


The idea that there are musicologist-type DJs rummaging through
thousands of records is a myth, and in the few cases such exists or has
existed, most have failed.


Myth? How so? Community stations have such programmers to this day.
When I was in Top 40 (50 actually) radio in the '60s we were told where
to choose the next record from, e.g. top 10 current out of the top of
the hour ID; power oldie out of news headlines, etc. We were never
told to play a specific song at a specific time.

We had music meetings where we auditioned new records and informally
voted on them. We discovered and broke new acts. Our musical knowledge
and opinion was valued.

I blame Lee Abrams more than Ron Jacobs.

The "Progressive" Promised Land
 

David Eduardo wrote:

"dave" wrote in message
m...

http://somafm.com/

A good use for the web. .. ultra niche appeal.

From experience, I do not think one could find a sample of listeners to
that music even with 60,000 interviews in the LA market... so none of
those eclectic, esoteric or droning formats could be sustained by the
commercial radio model.

On the other hand, I fail to see the alternate business model for this
one. Per their stats, all 14 channels or stations have less listenership
than a mid-tier FM in Traverse City Michigan.


They only have 3 employees. You have to add the Shoutcast stats to the
web site stats to get a closer idea of how many people are listening.

I send them about $100 a year. They have about 20,000 listeners.

The "Progressive" Promised Land
 

"Brenda Ann" wrote in message
...

"David Eduardo" wrote in message
...
How many of those studies were done outside huge metros?

Almost every county in the US is part of some metro. The non-measured
counties are only a couple of percrent of the total US population... and
they are not measured because the ability to get a sample is very hard.


You do realize that 2% of 300 million people is a substantial 6,000,000
people?

And, to save AM from death, a slight reduction in service to them,
particularly since nearly 100% have multiple decent FM signals to listen to,
is a good trade.

And the point, as I have said and as is well documented, is moot. AM loses
more audience every year and the only format that sustains it, other than
brokered and religious and paid ethnic offerings, is rapidly moving to FM.

You did know that Seattle's biggest AM, KIRO, moved its format to FM? It
just left AM to to the static, the noise, the CFLs and computers and jumped
to a band people actually like to listen to.

The "Progressive" Promised Land
 

From: "Brenda Ann"
Subject: The "Progressive" Promised Land
Date: Sunday, July 12, 2009 3:26 AM


"David Eduardo" wrote in message
...
The 64 of KLER covers less than 9000 people, but it does cover the
market... such as it is.


Is that the current stats, or the old ones under the 100 watt signal 300'
HBAT? Gads, that was TERRIBLE.. and their engineering was atrocious... the
stereo balance severely favored the left channel.

That is today. Sounds like someone wanted to get an FM channel and keep it
from anyone else.... the AM covers about three times as many folks.

The "Progressive" Promised Land
 

"dave" wrote in message
m...
David Eduardo wrote:


The idea that there are musicologist-type DJs rummaging through thousands
of records is a myth, and in the few cases such exists or has existed,
most have failed.


Myth? How so? Community stations have such programmers to this day.

I have trouble documenting the effectiveness of this... since, even when one
creates custom geography areas, 99% of these suckers seem to have no
detectable listeners. This is, again, "if a tree falls in a forrest...."

When I was in Top 40 (50 actually) radio in the '60s we were told where to
choose the next record from, e.g. top 10 current out of the top of the
hour ID; power oldie out of news headlines, etc. We were never told to
play a specific song at a specific time.

That is how it worked even in the largest markets until computers took over
the manual job of selection. Still, you chose out of 10 songs that were on
the playlist at the top of the hour, not among thousands of songs. All you
did was manually shuffle them.

The defect is that a person given this power, as limited as it is, to
shuffle will skip the songs they don't like quite often... and never play
them, although much of the audience may wish to hear them.

We had music meetings where we auditioned new records and informally voted
on them. We discovered and broke new acts. Our musical knowledge and
opinion was valued.

That, in some form or another, is still how new music is picked. Only now,
we know fairly quickly with things like callout, if we had a hit or a miss.
And we get the bad songs out of the system early. 99% of "favor play" gets
nuked when the listeners vote .

I blame Lee Abrams more than Ron Jacobs.

Neither created the systems for identifying hits. And "hit" in radio simply
means any song listeners want to hear, today. And, conversely, it means any
song that a significant percentage of listeners would not like to hear and
which might cause them to tune out is not played.

The "Progressive" Promised Land
 

Nickname unavailable wrote:
who cares what some right wing lying nut cases say. the truth is,
that bush broke the law,

yes

and trampled on the constitution,

Yes

he should be in jail for high crimes.

and YES!

The "Progressive" Promised Land
 

On Jul 12, 1:42*am, "David Eduardo" wrote:
"Brenda Ann" wrote in message

...



"David Eduardo" wrote in message
. ..

The idea that there are musicologist-type DJs rummaging through thousands
of records is a myth, and in the few cases such exists or has existed,
most have failed.

Back in the day, KAPA in Raymond, WA used to have a library of literally
thousands of records, all in very nicely laid out libraries, from which
their announcers could retrieve pretty much anything they wanted to play.
The station did indeed finally fail.. but it was only AFTER it was bought
up by a corporate entity and pretty much driven into the ground.

Excellent. There are 14 thousand stations in the US, and you base your
conclusion on one of them.

The station, without knowing it, failed because it was a Class IV on 1340 in
a very sparsely populated county... where even today, a C2 FM only puts a
decent signal over 60,000 persons. And that county, unlike in the 50's, is
now invaded by many usable FMs from other nearby locations... yet it had a
monopoly when it went on in 1950.

Today, that AM is silent, like so many like it... KYOR in Blythe comes to
mind... because FMs had so much more coverage and there was no need for an
AM.

The fact that the station did not have a format did not help.



Corporate radio has ruined radio. Even in the heyday of network radio,
individual affiliate stations had their own programming, usually in the
daytime. Networks ruled the evenings with the great comedy and news
programs.

I'd suggest you revisit publications like Radex, as you can see that the
webs provided programming for much of the day, including the daytime drama
shows that evolved into soap operas. Many issues of Radex, with complete
programming schedules, are atwww.americanradio.com.

Network stations carried loads of daytime content, too.



A great many netcasting stations have thousands of tracks that they pick
and choose from. Almost none have a limited playlist (DMCA actually
PREVENTS it in cases where the stations are bothering to follow the law).

The DCMA has very few restrictions that would affect even the most limited
playlist in use today. There is a restriction on repeats, and in how many
songs by an artist that can be played together or in proximity...
specifically:

"In any three-hour period:
not more than three songs from the same recording
not more than two songs in a row from the same recording
not more than four songs from the same artist
not more than three songs in a row from the same artist
not more than four songs from the same anthology/box set
not more than three songs in a row from the same anthology/box set. "

The tightest Top 40 in the US which repeats some songs every 90 minutes
would break those rules... stations generally don't repeat an artist more
often than every 45 minutes, and they seldom would play that deep in a
particular recording or set.

So, a station with a 40 song library would be able to comply with the rules,
and they do. But since most CHRs have over 100 songs today, there is no
issue.

The problem with stations with thousands of songs is that nobody listens to
them.

you cannot have it both ways. you say that a broad selection means
that people will not listen, yet in the same breath out of the other
side of your mouth, you say people are turning to the net in droves
for just that sort of selection.
all one has to do is take a peak at a download site, its full of
music and movies, and lots of them are never seen nor heard on
american corporate owned media.

The "Progressive" Promised Land
 

On Jul 12, 1:52*am, "Brenda Ann" wrote:
"David Eduardo" wrote in message

...

The station, without knowing it, failed because it was a Class IV on 1340
in a very sparsely populated county... where even today, a C2 FM only puts
a decent signal over 60,000 persons. And that county, unlike in the 50's,
is now invaded by many usable FMs from other nearby locations... yet it
had a monopoly when it went on in 1950.

1) *KAPA was a damn fine station, with great local flavor and a good
community presence. I listened to it while I lived there most of the time,
even though KOL in Seattle put in a very good signal to the south, and
continued to listen when I lived in Astoria, because the signal they put in
there was quite good, and they had a better program than the (then) two
locals and a semi-local (KVAS, KAST and KSWB).

2) To quote a certain shill person "nobody listens to radio outside the
64dBu city contours" and "stations don't care about anyone outside their own
city contours... they do not count in the ratings." *I know there was other
BS in there somewhere..

when i was a kid, there was a radio station in of all place, little
rock arkansas, i am in minneapolis/st.paul, that rock station would
come in late at night, and really good if it was a clear night, and
they would play all sorts of rock music that was obscure, and that was
back in the 60's and 70's. i really miss them.
they used to play a song about hemp rope, and the hippe that craved
the rope, it was hilarious. today if you dare criticize a
conservative, you are banned from air time, censored like the nazi's
used to do. conservatism, just say no, its the healthy thing to do.

The "Progressive" Promised Land
 

On Jul 12, 2:10*am, "David Eduardo" wrote:
"Nickname unavailable" wrote in message

...

PARIS -- As the death toll in the American newspaper industry mounted
this month, the German publisher Axel Springer, which owns Bild, the
biggest newspaper in Europe, reported the highest profit in its 62-
year history.

Death toll? How many US papers have closed this year, to date? One in
Tucson, one in Denver, one in Seattle... and a couple more. In 1967, we lost
about 30 daily metro papers... all were either evening papers, which
succumbed to the Huntley Brinkley Report and to TV evening news in general,
or were the second paper in the morning in a metro. Guess what, the ones
that I named were all second papers, and there is not enough money for them.



then it shows you that concentration had to start somewhere. last
time i checked, oslo norway, pop. a little over 3 mil. still has 3
dailys.

So the article starts with an inaccurate statement, as if hundreds of papers
had closed when it is barely a handful.



nope, if there is only daily, and its gone, then cities have one less
source of information. did you read the complete article?


And Axel Springer is expanding in things like controlling a major share of
online classifieds in his markets, as well as profitable specialty
magazines, radio, TV, the German equivalent of Amazon.com, etc., etc, etc..
All the revenue growth is in electronic media and new media.

did you read the article. they are looking for papers and magazines
to purchase.

The "Progressive" Promised Land
 

On Jul 12, 2:15*am, "David Eduardo" wrote:
"Nickname unavailable" wrote in message

...
On Jul 12, 1:09 am, "Brenda Ann" wrote:

"David Eduardo" wrote in message

correct, go get the shill. i was in a local station more than once in
my youth, and i got to pick my own playlist from 1000's of 45's. then
the jockey played them.

Must have been a bad station in a small market or a really bad on in a
bigger one. In any case, nobody who knows radio would call the person on the
air a "jockey." Jockeys ride horses. Disk Jockeys may be called DJ's or
Jocks, but they ain't called jockeys.



minneapolis/st.paul. hardly small. it was am radio then. today they
are talk, but back then, they were the rock power house.

today, corporate america has ruined not only radio, but t.v. and the
papers. they have loaded them up with debt, and severe restrictions
that make them bland, conservative in nature, safe.

There are 14,000 radio stations in the US, and perhaps 1000 are burdened
with seemingly irresolvable debt issues. None would have had any trouble
were it not for the recession, so you are doing the equivalent of blaming
debt for the failure of Chrysler and GM, when it was the perfect storm of
labor commitments, bad designs and horrible quality that came about due to
the recession.



and most are owned by a few companies, that loaded them up on debt
because of the purchase price, and gave us a bad product, a product
that was costing them customers before the recession. and as we always
see with conservative economics, they cannot pay their bills. who
would have ever thought.


Yes, a few companies are in trouble in radio due to debt. Most are not.

we shall see.