Winter 2002 P2 Arbitrons: San Diego (March 27, 2002)

Let's take a look at period two of the Winter radio station race, not to be confused with the ratings of radio stations you should be listening to (Premium 92.1, Sets 102.1, KOZT Ft. Bragg, WKIT Bangor, ME, DFSX Radio). This is a sample of people who have those radio diaries and, for lack of better knowledge, select from the sad lineup of San Diego radio stations whose cookie cutter mentality (Bryan Schock, Diana Laird, et. al.) insults the intellectual citizen with depressing Alicia Keys clones that put the Americans closer to eternal weepage and untalented hard grunge bands such as Linkin Park who add nothing to the listener's brains except a splitting headache.

San Diego radio people have lost all personal sense as they continue to program the same old recipe of formats based on a single genre from a period piece whose limited playlist provides the listeners only a scratching of the surface of what the period the music came from really sounded like. The researchers that put together the limited oldies playlists are likely clueless when it comes to selecting what songs to include and exclude on the playlist while they insult the oldies format further by limiting the number of genres to just two or three per format.

A period-piece programming format is suitable only for specialty radio shows playing just the same hits once every two months while the music listener remains unfulfilled by listening to the same 300 songs repeated everydy on an outdated 24 hour/7 day format consising solely of songs from a period piece. It is the variety of genres spanning many decades (four to five at the most) that makes the listener want to tune into the same station everyday to hear the best of the new music that an educated music director (unlike those who work at Clear Channel) carefully selects and chooses the new songs wisely while mixing the best of the classics from decades past without overrepeating the same songs into the mix.

If a bigger bottom line is what a radio station desires, they're not going to get it by programming cookie cutter formats for the highly paid educated listener the advertisers are trying to reach. The educated listeners are turning to CDs bought with their own disposable income while radio is nowadays catering to those under the $50,000 a year income group by playing a narrow selection of songs and genres that are so poorly put together that the average listener doesn't know any better about better radio stations that they could be listening to on the Internet that are designed to not just entertain but to expand their musical knowledge to the availability of the new music that is out there for them to add to their CD collections.

Oldies-only stations will always underperform no matter what you program on the station or how many nationwide contests you promote on the station. It's why oldies stations such as KGB-FM, KOOL 95.7, Magic 92.5, B 94.9, and Planet 103.7 will never get ratings into the fives and up while radio stations that select the genres to play (R&B, Adult Rock, Country, Jazz, Easy Pop) and mix in the compatable new and classic songs are most likely to get big ratings. You listen to stations that play 2-3 decades and new music such as KOZT Ft. Bragg (adult rock, my favorite) or KIOZ San Diego (hard rock) and you can see how well the ratings for those stations are since they're playing songs that both the parents and their kids can enjoy together, while stations such as 91X and Channel 933 appeal only to 12-17 males and females respectively.

You listen to Dr. Demento you downloaded from the Internet or from several USENET newsgroups and you get a wide variety of genres adults can enjoy. Demento plays songs from today, and up to 100 years ago, a wide variety of genres, avoids boring music such as 99 percent of those heard on the Clear Channel stations, and always announces what songs were played on the air. Many other radio programmers and jocks should follow this example of what audience you want to reach (In Dr. Demento's case, funny or entertaining music), such as jazz or country or adult rock or easy pop or whatever, buy several hundred albums of the genres you are studying to use in the format (use Billboard's books to help, not only as an advisory), listen to the examples of the songs to get a feel of what they sound like, make notes of what songs you liked and hated, program the songs you like on the station, include both the new and the old songs, present the new format to the public, market it smartly and to the point in 1/2-a-second on a billboard, invite listener comments, and post your playlists on the website. This may take months to do, but when you are programming a music station, you are required to be into the music you are programming or you should do something else like be a chef at McDonald's serving cookie-cutter corporate shit to the masses.

So, with that understanding, here's how the ratings came out for period 2.

KOGO bounces back a bit and remains in first place due largely to a cookie-cutter non-thinking conservative Roger Hedgecock who is simply abusing the radio waves to promote his idea of society without cultural diversity through rose-colored glasses. Next up is KYXY, a radio station that has been deemed unsuitable for listening to for most thinking people and may cause irreversible brain damage and the listeners will end up like Farrah or Britney. In third place is the cookie cutter unhip pop Channel 933, a station that doesn't bother to play the new music that sounds good while settling for predictable crap such as pop grunge, soft R&B, and uncool hip hop, as opposed to the pop music that should be played such as euro pop, electronic dance, and cool alternative rock. Tied for third is also another brain-damaging station KIFM (soft adult pop), and I refuse to call it smooth jazz because it plays too many other genres for it to qualify for the name. Rounding out the top five is another station living in the past, Z-90, who excluded dance and euro in favor of a bland flavor of hip hop and R&B whose songs all taste like used paint.

Other highlights include the tired Star 100.7 sliding to 11th, Magic slipping to 12th with its oldies only angle of R&B, My Mix 94.1 (or whatever) jumping 50 percent to 13th place in one period, B 94.9 slipping out of the top 15 with its worn out period piece of alternative and pop tunes of the 80's, Sets 102.1 going nowhere but down, Premium 92.1 gaining another notch, XLTN 104.5 failing, MORE-FM gaining, and KFSD and XJAZ scraping the bottom with their useless classical formats, which they both changed to something more meaningful like pop standards.

And Radio Dismal...nothing! KSDO-AM 1240 should have dumped this turkey for nostalgia or go classic country, Scandanavian rock, ancient Iron Curtain era hits, anything but canned kids radio!