Does Radio Still Matter to 50-plus Listeners? (Apr 15, 2010)

Seriously. I keep coming across commentary articles linked from radiodailynews.com for at least once a week and has been going on for years and years, even a decade about talking how bad radio has become and how stale the playlists have evolved into.

Well, with playlists on radio stations reaching its nadir in its entire existance, and reports of Clear Channel and other radio owners having financial problems, doesn't it ever get the owners a clue that they just don't know how to program music that attracts the listeners?

Seriously. C'mon. Who are they trying to fool? Go back forty years to the 1970s, there were about two top 40 stations competeting with each other for the teenage and young adult audience (KCBQ and KGB-AM's Boss Radio), and that was enough. I consider KGB-FM (since 1972) and KPRI 106.5 to be more suitable for adults with their progressive rock and roll formats of that decade, but younger folks may enjoy those too though they're not directly aimed at them.

Nowadays, in San Diego, we have Z90, 91X, Channel 93.3, Star 94.1, FM 94/9, Q96, Rock 105.3, and Sophie 103.7 fighting each other for the much smaller teenage and young adult radio audience than there was 40 years ago.

Also 40 years ago, before talk radio took over the AM band, we had at least two dozen commercial English-language music stations for adults to tune in to. Many AM receivers could get a half dozen music stations from Los Angeles as well on the left-side of the AM band such as 570, 640, 690 (yes, Tijuana, but they billed themseves as a Los Angeles station), 710, etc. Many were what is now pop standards, middle of the road, or beautiful music formats. Some were country.

Nowadays, adults have just Magic 92.5, New Country 95.7, KYXY, KSON 97.3, KIFM, Jack, KGB-FM, KPRI 102.1, AM 1040, and Walrus 105.7. That's it. 10 stations compared to about I don't know about 24 back in the 70s? Talk, focus on the young, and Spanish-language have taken over the rest.

It's no wonder radio is f--ked up as it is today. There's not much for adults 25 and older to listen to anymore. Just a lot of focus on the young and the talkers. Where's the music for adults, radio music programmers? Why are there less than a dozen commercial English-language music stations for adults to enjoy?

Are they making new music for adults to listen to? Probably. Is radio playing them? Mostly no. That's the issue. Not all adults care for what radio offers for their age group, which is mostly old songs repeated over and over again. They want to hear the best of the new music.

KIFM, and KPRI play some of the better new non-country music that's out there for adults to enjoy. KSON and New Country are country music stations. That's the problem. There's not enough new music stations for adults to tune into nowadays.

And radio is having financial problems? Look at the crap for the new music for teens and young adults they're programming in the first place. It's no wonder that they're not going to attract the demographics with the money advertisers want to reach. Put on Lady GaGa or Glee and the adults will flee.

We have eight stations that are programmed mostly for those age groups fighting for a small piece of the pie, with many teens and young adults hooked into the digital age way of discovering new music through the Internet. That's a lot of competetion for one radio station to handle.

Adults for the most part don't have time to surf around the Internet to discover new music. That's where terrestrial radio should come in and play the best of the new songs aimed at the listeners 25 years of age and older. XM/Sirius Radio is the best way for adults to get new and older music for adults into their cars. The service is aimed for people with money to spend, though you'll find some music channels for the younger music fans on it too.

The oldies stations like Magic, Walrus, and Jack are okay for a while, but adults want to hear new music and more of it instead of less of it and just more oldies all the time.

Problem with AM is that nobody wants to hear music on AM anymore. That's why they're stuck with low-rated talk for most of the stations. KOGO, XX Sports, and KFMB-AM are the only ones that get significant numbers of listeners; the rest are stuggling and some are even loosing money.

The FM radio band is limited as there's room for some 25 full powered local stations at a time, with another 25 possible distant stations that can be received on alternate channels. The big problem with HD Radio is that it requires not 0.2 MHz of spectrum space, but actually 0.4 MHz, with 0.26 MHz for analog, and 0.14 MHz for digital, which is why you can't tune in the distant FM stations on adjacent channels anymore.

Say you have KSON 97.3 Mhz in HD, where the 97.3 is the center frequency of its broadcast footprint. It broadcasts exactly from 97.1 to 97.5 MHz. Two distant HD stations from the Los Angeles and Riverside areas are 97.1 and 97.5 MHz respectively, but normally, you can get its analog reception with their footprints from 97.0 to 97.2 and 97.4 to 97.6 MHz due to its long distance from their transmitters. If you were far enough from KSON-FM's transmitter, you could get KSON from 97.2 to 97.4 MHz. In Oceanside, you could get the three stations on 97.1, 97.3, and 97.5.

But here in San Diego, KSON-FM's digital transmitter is so strong that it blocks the reception of 97.1 from Los Angeles by interferring with the right half of its analog signal, rendering it unreceivable. Though 97.1's left-half from 97.0 to 97.1 could be received, when you tune in to 97.1 when you're too close to 97.3, you just get a loud digital white noise signal, with some of the analog debris of 97.1 in the background.

So another major problem with FM radio is that HD Radio is not designed for the FM band as it is. Radio stations are spaced too close. They should be spaced 0.4 MHz apart of each other instead of 0.2 MHz. HD Radio is a failure due to its low signal level to protect the distant stations from co-channel interference (KSON's 97.1-97.2 Mhz left HD digital signal vs. KAMP's 97.1-97.2 Mhz right analog signal).

Could HD radio be destroying commercial radio stations? Sounds like it is. People like me are turned off by radio's inability to tune in adjacent-channel stations from distant cities due to local HD radio stations' adjacent-channel interference.

A better solution is to dump HD radio on the AM and FM bands. They're destroying radio's fun of it all.

Also go back to the 7-7-7 ownership rule of years past. One TV/AM/FM station in a market maximum. No more than seven stations on any of the three bands to one company.

Forced bankruptcies could make that moot as there won't be any companies that can afford to run more than one of any station on any band.