Commentary: Serve a Niche Not Being Served (June 18, 2004)

With all the soft music glut on local radio, and you can find it all over the dial, except for hard rocker Rock 105.3, there is a sizable audience locally for music that is upbeat and fast, but without all the soft fluff that you hear all the time on My and Star, and sometimes 91X and 94.9 (Big Sonic Chill my ear! Give me some late-night underground punk instead!). While radio claims that they are serving their market well, there are sizable niches of listeners that would be far better served than to serve a certain niche on a permanent downswing, especially the declining number of 35-54 listeners who mostly listen to talk radio, subscribe to satellite radio, and/or are rich enough to have a 100-CD changer in their Ford Explorer. Only a few formats, such as smooth jazz KIFM, and soft rock KYXY, are serving their older audiences well with a 12+ rating big enough to justify bragging rights to the listeners and advertisers. KOGO and KFMB do well as talk stations.

The three sports-talk stations combined get around a ranking that would equal 15th place, which leads me to wonder if there is a market for three 24-hour sports radio stations. My better way would be to serve up some non-sports talk shows not carried in San Diego such as Michael Reagan (which ran for four days in the vacationing Roger Hedgecock's time slot on KOGO), Tom Leykis, and what have you. Instead of all sports talk, if that's not getting the ratings, then why can't 690, 800, or 1090 program in some non-sports talkers that could do better than what the ratings they're getting with their incumbents. Sports radio gets great ratings...as long as a game is on. When there's no game on, and all the talk about the recent game is over, put on something else.

The frequency of 99.3 in Tijuana since it went into an English-language format five years ago has been a sleeping giant waiting for a genre to put it into the top ten with both the Mexican and American listeners alike. Hot Country didn't work, neither did Bob. Why? American country music on a Mexican stick just doesn't serve the Mexican audience, which is a third of all radio listeners in the county. KOOL Oldies is foundering on 99.3 since Clear Channel moved the country music format over to 95.7. Guess what happened to the country music format on 95.7 run by Clear Channel since? It took down KSON's country format, also thanks to Tony and Kris moving there. Meanwhile, 99.3 is doing diddly-squat in the ratings, and Oldies 540 AM is doing okay, taking away some of their listeners.

My advice for Clear Channel: serve the displaced electronica dance fans MOORON-FM doens't care about and make 99.3 a dance station. For one thing, with broadband in San Diego beating dial-up 55 to 45 percent, more people are listening to dance music stations on the Internet. Why shouldn't the Clear Channel San Diego World Domination Headquarters care about getting those dance listeners to listen to one of their stations?

Meanwhile, the popularity of alternative radio stations continues to rise to serve niches not being served locally. Don't wait to get them back until it's too late.