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.