Winter 2003 Ratings Period 3

The March survey had a surprise element in the way the listeners came and went to AM radio upon hearing the first news about the U.S. launching a liberation assault on the Iraqi government on March 19 San Diego time; due to the time difference, it was early March 20 Iraq time.

The listeners came to AM radio for the first few days to get continuous updates on the war, but once the rhythm of the war updates was established, with stations often repeating the same updates for hours, the listeners flocked back to music and Internet radio.

One odd quirk on March 19: DFSX had the most listeners during the period when the early evening rebroadcast of "I Still Get Demented" was airing between 5 and 8pm, possibly because half of Clear Channel's music stations switched to KOGO's news simulcast or whatever.

March had the debut of the new Mighty 1090, bringing back several old XTRA 690 sports talkers that were displaced when "Cheap" Channel folded XTRA 690 into its Los Angeles KXTA 1150 operation. The Broadcast Company of the Americas (BCA), a new broadcast parent company, acquired the rights of Mexican-owned legendary 50,000 watt XEPRS earlier this year. BCA will initially be operating the station under a Local Marketing Agreement (LMA).

The other format change that has gotten a lot of criticsm here and in the North County Times is KSPA's switching from classical to 70's hit music. KSPA broadcasts on AM 1450 in Escondido, and for Cox cable subscribers, it's in stereo on cable 107.1 FM. Funny enough, in spite of letters slamming the station's format switch, it was among the 20 most popular stations of the third period, going from nowhere to the ranking you'll be seeing in a minute.

Pre-season baseball on AM radio did fairly well, but once the games ended, the listeners switched back to other stations. As usual, the specialty Internet-only stations did well given the high amount of participants in the Evalutrons that get the Internet from DSL or broadband cable. Also given the high amount of participants in the North County area, stations such as AM 1450 and 92.1 did fairly well in the survey.

And as usual, stations run by Clear Channel are just not getting the ratings. Clear Channel just can't do radio right.

Some other developing trends: people want to relax from the stressful news about the war, so listeners have been tuning into tbe terrestrial broadcasters such as KYXY and KIFM in larger numbers and listening to the Internet less; the local broadcasters have been airing brief war updates during certain times.

Some popular stations such as KOZT dropped in rank due to the extreme difficulty being able to connect to its limited streaming audio bank. Many listeners switched to other stations.

The following stations are being rated for the first time in March 2003: