From: utzoo!decvax!yale-com!brunix!gh Newsgroups: net.music Title: Re: Rock Radio Article-I.D.: brunix.1205 Posted: Tue Jan 11 12:00:15 1983 Received: Wed Jan 12 08:10:07 1983 References: alice.1388 alice!sjb misses the point. The majority of the radio audience may be kids who want heavy metal or whatever, but they only form the majority because that's what's on the radio. What we should be talking about is the majority of POTENTIAL radio listeners, the people who would like to listen to the radio if only they could reliably find something on it they liked. The problem is that too many radio stations reason as follows: The potential audience out there is fragmented -- we can never appeal to a majority. Therefore, we should try to appeal to the fragment with the largest appeal to advertisers, viz. teenage rock. The result is that you get a lot of radio stations competing for their share of one fragment, while other fragments get completely ignored. In practice, some stations will realize they can do better by looking to medium-sized fragments where there is less competition, but this only happens to a limited extent. The fact is that, contrary to what alice!sjb says, outside the major metropolitan areas, there AREN'T plenty of classical music stations, and one has at est a single college station or non-profit public station, often of less-than-stellar quality, that time-multiplexes classical, jazz, bluegrass, "non-commercial" rock and talk programs. Jazz, in particular, for some reason is frequently considered to be of interest only to the midnight-to-5am listener. Example: In the Providence area we have: FM: 4 rock/HM stations, 1 muzak, 2 MOR (Manilow, Streisand, Diamond), 2 time-multiplexed college stations (one of them pretty bad). AM: 2 C&W, 1 40s-50s music (broadcasts daytime only), 2 pop/oldies/talk, misc religious and foreign language, 1 all-news. We are fortunate that in some parts of the city one can get an all-classical station and an excellent time-multiplexed public radio station from Boston (50 miles away), but reception is bad: usually mono only, and sometimes unlistenable, especially the all-classical station.