Stations Going Dark? (Feb 9, 2008)

Victoria Advocate reports that Vicky Coffman, the manager of Third Coast Radio, which owned and operated Texas Radio 98.7, the Texas Mix, has shut down the station permanently on Monday for lack of advertising dollars.

Could more stations follow suit? With so much competetion eating away for a share of radio listening, it's only a matter of time before the owners of the ill-performing stations take the ultimate move and shut down the opreations to cut their losses.

The biggest problem is radio itself not being able to modernize the way they do business and select programming. So much more variety that radio has never ever touched is available on the Internet, while all radio can do is to program cookie-cutter formats with limited repetetive playlists nobody could stand for long periods of time.

And when it comes to trying something new, what do they come up with? A format that has new stuff alright, but it's not what people want to hear. A good example is "Sophie" on 103.7. Still languishing in low ratings after six months, you'd think that the CBS suits would realize that this format is a dog and ain't going to work. Put on something people want to hear, or sell the station to a broadcaster that has an idea what to do with a city grade signal.

A radio station can make as many cuts as it wants in personnell, but when all those cuts don't translate into making a profit, the station may just have to go poof. It's off the air.

The matter is: being relevant to today's tastes. If you can't be relevant (are you reading this KGB programmer?), then you just won't survive. If you don't put on what people what to hear year in and year out, you're not going to make it in the ratings, simple as that.

Putting on the same formats that don't generate listeners just isn't going to work. Putting on the same predictable mixes of formats won't work in this day and age where ipods rule. Ignoring what the public wants will result in the station being ignored.

Radio is killing itself with playlists being programmed from 3,000 miles away, voice-tracked deejays, small playlists, lack of variety, lack of diversity, firing of people that mattered in our lives (read that, Clear Channel?), not trying anything new on the HD2 channels, long sets to commercials, the list goes on and on. Listeners are fed-up when they don't hear what they want, and they leave, vowing never to return.

With most of the stations below the 2.0 mark in San Diego (and that's just the English-language stations), we would think that the programmers of several of them would think about reformatting into something people want to hear like Oldies Gold, comedy talk, MOR rock, modern dance, even rap-free urban. Instead, we get boring music mixes on Star, Sophie, Channel, Z, Blazin, Magic, and others who are just clueless on what people desire to hear in the formats. Clear Channel, Finest City, CBS, or some shabby outfit behind Blazin are getting it right. Their ratings will continue to shrink as more people get Slacker, cell phones capable of listening to music from Pandora, iPods, and other things that broadcast music radio isn't programming.

In the year 2008, about a decade after Jacor and Clear Channel went on their buying sprees, building up their radio station counts until they merged into a big fat company in 2000, firing well qualified engineers, newspeople, deejays, music directors, programmers, and general managers in order to downsize and cut back on expenses, and turing the stations into puppets of the suits in remote areas of the country, the listeners, who got mad as hell and wouldn't take it anymore, have taken conrol of their lives and are turning radio off in droves.

As diversity in music playlists shrunk to all time lows, music fans were discovering music on the Internet and taking them with them everywhere. Radio hasn't figured out why fewer people are listening to their remote-programmed pop music stations. Radio continues to fire professionals and hire people who could work minumum wage doing deejay work. The music playlists on the radio are ignored more and more than it ever was. Many people that the radio is targeting have never heard most of the "popular" Billboard songs that radio broke out since they're discovering better music on the Internet. This leaves radio with only the elderly people who can only afford a radio and nothing else for music. When those people die, radio could just die off as well. Radio isn't attracting the younger folks anymore because they're programming down at them with stupid pop music formats. Men are listening to music on satellite in their car. Thanks to Clear Channel scaring off Howard Stern, there's virtually nothing on morning radio to listen to. Women enjoy music on their cellphones and ipods. Kids listen to whatever their parents are listening to.

What is radio left with? Again. The elders, 50 and older. Is radio programming to them? No. Advertisers don't like the elders, radio says. Well, think again, because the way things are going, radio is going to vanish like the dinosaurs as the threat of the convergence between portable Internet connections in your moving car and streaming music puts Internet radio on the same level as terrestrial broadcasting and satellite radio. With millions of channels on the Internet, and more younger people embracing the technology, it's a matter of time before radio as we know it will outlive its usefulness, or what's left of it, and simply fade into the static.