Trackback: WETA & The Globe, and the O’s

When I first wrote about the George/Globe/’GMS-gone-down-the-pubradio-block events I mused that “DC Radio was about to get a lot more interesting.” True that…the latest Washington ratings (for Winter 2007) had a Spanish-language station (“El Zol,” formerly the legendary alternative pioneer WHFS) at the top of the heap; we’ve got the corporate “greenternaltive” of the Globe, a brand-new Gospel station (see below), and the invariably-amusing Mr. K on board to breathe life into the stuck-in-the-blocks Washington Post Radio, which is still mired at number 20 in the DC ratings derby, below a country music station 40 miles outta town. (Oh, and now that baseball season’s here, I was shocked to discover the mighty (clear channel) signal of WBAL 1090 in Baltimore, which brought me the vivid exploits of Earl Weaver, Brooks Robinson, and Andy “Eyebrows” Etchebarren in my formative years in New England, is no longer the Voice of the O’s! that distinction now belongs to an FM station at 105.7 in Charm City with the call letters – get this – WHFS.) Whoa. Missed that one – but plenty of O’s fans didn’t.

So, how’s it all working out?

A) In their infinite wisdom the Baltimore Base Ball Franchise, in their effort to win the hearts and minds (back) from the “tweener” fans in the Balti-Wash-imoreington metro area who have defected to the Nationals, have effectively disappeared from the radio. They claim to have a “16-station network,” but good luck finding them: if you type in “Orioles Radio Network” into your search engine all you get are the bios of its play-by-play announcers on the official O’s site. God forbid you’d actually want to LISTEN to a game. (Or perhaps now that we’re in the era of all radio and TV broadcasts of games available via subscription from the MLB.com supersite, the local broadcast information is either deemed to be superfluous – or being deliberately downplayed? Hmmm…)

B) WETA’s road has had a few bumps, most notably from former WGMS listeners with lots to say about the music selection, hosts, and the lack of any special programming, but nothing soothes like a major RATINGS bump: Public stations cannot report them officially, but according to the DCRTV blog from May 4:

WETA-FM (90.9) has seen a surge in its ratings since flipping from news and talk to classical music in January. The non-commercial outlet posted an overall (age 12+) 4.9 percent audience share during the winter period, way up from a 2.1 last fall. The station has seen higher ratings across the board, with almost a five-fold increase in middays and a doubling in afternoon drive. WETA attracts a 50/50 split among the genders, but now attracts more older listeners with classical music than it did with news and talk, with 66 percent age 55 or older. Before, about 50 percent were 55 or over.

WETA has abandoned the blogs and listener comments in favor of a “Classical Blog” of news and reviews, and added a few syndicated programs to its lineup: From the Top, distributed by my old place of business, and a year-round opera lineup, adding a combination of NPR’s World of Opera with a consortium of productions from WFMT in Chicago to its usual Saturday afternoon broadcasts of the Metropolitan Opera. DCRTV’s comment: “Bonneville look like utter fools for throwing away a very profitable station like WGMS”…..

C) The Globe also seems to be finding its feet, getting decent-enough ratings for its initial “book,” but still struggling to find its voice. In his blog the other day (“The Complete Radio Experience and a New Station in DC” – 4/22) the ever-astute and legendary programmer Lee Abrams (now at XM) noted the Globe has

“….the right idea, but they’re still saddled with radio baggage that weighs them down… The music is pretty cool. Covers a lot of genres but with the same psychographic type in mind. DJs are kinda ‘there’ and focus their raps on the music instead of trying to sell you on how cool they are… But the Globe just didn’t take it far enough… The music was too obvious which ultimately will lead to a disappointing experience. You just knew it was computer selected – it had that feel… I think it’s a case of slapping a format on instead of creating a mission plan. A trend in the past 20 years has been to launch a station with a condensed game plan. Music library, morning show, put up some billboards, and you’re done. The great stations were assembled with more of a complete plan – a mission”…..

“Mission,” eh? Interesting choice of words for a dyed-in-the-wool commercial programmer. PUBLIC radio programmers are spending a lot of time these days discussing the merits of “misson-based” programming, which is often as not has become a derogatory term.

Praise for George: Gone, or HiDing?

All right, this blog hasn’t been around all that long, but it’s already outlasted a radio format here in the RoeDeo listening area: George 104, which came – and went – in just over two months. (76 days, to be exact – from January 22 to April 7, 2007) George, (as noted earlier in this space) was the hastily-assembled pop/rock/dance oldies format that was thrown up after owner Bonneville engineered a novel play with public broadcaster WETA: Bonneville dumped DC classical icon WGMS, WETA switched (back) to all-classical, and for good measure picked up WGMS’s Program Director (Jim Allison), its extensive record library, and even its call letters – (now used by WETA’s repeater station in Hagerstown, MD). Of course, George was a pretty low-overhead operation, (“a CD player in the back room” according to some grumblings), and pledged to go ad-free for its first 104 days in a bid to build audience. It didn’t even get that far.

So wha’happen? Turns out George isn’t completely gone – it’s now available as an HD – only channel, (103.5 – 2), next door to Bonneville’s perennial ratings champ WTOP with perhaps with lamest web site in the business. George was cleared out to make way for Praise 104.1– a new gospel format from Radio One, who are now “renting” the frequency from Bonneville. Believe it or not, it’s the first Gospel FM station in the DC area, which must be some kind of first. So perhaps that will bring a little stability to a frequency that has gone through FOUR format changes and call letters in a year’s time. Ahhh, radio…a nice stable industry.

The Empire Strikes Back

The latest positioning tag line from The Globe (the new “Green” radio format in DC I wrote about a while back) is a little closer to the mark: “Corporately Owned, Listener Monkeyed-Around With.” Bad grammar aside, I’d argue that at least half that statement is factual – and it’s the corporate owners who have been doing the messing around recently – with three big news items in the last three days that suggest that the Old Order is not going to gently into the good night.

First was, the $12.5 million – in the words of FCC Commish Ken Adelstein “The largest collective fine in the history of American Broadcasting” that the Globe’s “good guy” owners CBS Radio (along with their friends Entercom, Clear Channel and Citadel Broadcasting) ponied up to the FCC to make the payola charges go away. Not that they actually admitted to it or anything. Sample grab from the Washington Post story:

Andy Levin, Clear Channel’s executive vice president, said in a statement that his company has “devoted tremendous resources” to preventing payola at its stations. “While no violations were found,” he said, “we are pleased to announce that Clear Channel has agreed to settle this longstanding payola investigation with the FCC. We believe it is time to close the door on this ongoing inquiry and move forward.”

The other three companies declined comment or did not respond to requests for interviews.

Aside from paying the fines to the FCC, the four companies have agreed to give about 4,000 hours of air time to small record companies and local artists. “This is a new opportunity for fresher, newer artists to be heard on the radio,” Adelstein said.

Right. Clear Channel pays $3.5 million to the Feds because they are doing their part to ease the budget deficit. And just where do you suppose those 4,000 hours of air time are going to fall? Sometime between midnight and six, do you suppose?

So, taking Mr. Levin’s advice, let’s “move forward:” Second was the Copyright Royalty Board ruling on Internet radio, which is similarly mind-boggling. Today’s Wall Street Journal has the most comprehensive story in the mainstream press about what this obscure Congressionally-charted agency has wrought: nothing less than a protectionist nod to those “good guys” in the above paragraph. You can read the entire report here. And it whacks public radio’s Internet music activities as well, which previously had been negotiated under a separate deal. Great. Take one of the few areas of growth and innovation in the broadcasting biz and make sure you suffocate ’em. THAT’ll show ’em! THAT’ll keep people tuned to my Clear Channel station! You need to be a subscriber to read beyond the opening grafs; here are a couple of key lines from the rest (hey, I bought my copy in the newsstand!)

…The board’s new rates appear to be those sought by the largest industry group, the Recording Industry Association of America. But the Internet radio broadcasters say the rates hit one of the few bright spots in the moribund music busienss and thus end up shooting the labels in the foot.

The new schedule highlights an inequality that has rankled many online entrepreneurs for years. Regular radio stations don’t pay any royalities to song performers for their over-the-airwaves broadcasts, although they do pay royalities to composers and songwriters. “It’s flat out unfair,” says Jonathan Potter, executive director of the Washington-based Digital Media Association.

How unfair? Under the old system, most Internet broadcasters could be a percentage of revenue – about 12% – to a copyright collection agency called SoundExchange. But no more. In it place: a new system where each station pays .0762 per listener, per song (retroactive to 2006) – a rate that will double in the next three years. Kurt Hanson’s Radio and Internet Newsletter has become sort of the “Central Command” for the Internet broadcasters up in arms about the ruling – and he says the new royalty schedule will mean his payments for his Accuradio service will balloon from $50,000 per year to about $600,000. Check out Bill Goldsmith’s blog at Radio Paradise for a reasoned, if impassioned view of what this means for the immediate future of his excellent service. Sample Grab:

The performance royalty rates released by the Copyright Board on March 1, 2007 are not just extreme, not just burdensome. They are a death sentence for all US-based independent webcasters like Radio Paradise, SOMA-FM, Digitally Imported, and many others…

Let’s reassess that reasoning in the light of 21st-century reality. Is there, in truth, a fundamental difference in the experience of an online listener to Radio Paradise and someone who was listening to identical programming on an FM station? Every one of our listeners – indeed, anyone who has ever clicked on a webcast as background music while working – knows the answer to that question. No! There is no difference whatsoever. Radio is radio, whether it comes in digital or analog form.

Just to underscore Goldsmith’s point, there are 50 million listeners in the US to online radio services (WSJ figures); 14 million to satellite radio. And is this happening because the publishing industry is broke? That brings us to news item number three: ASCAP Reports Record Revenue, Royalties in 2006. Yes, that’s right – record revenues. Highlights:
Overall revenue: $785 million – up 5 percent
Overall royalty payments: $680 milllion – up 5.3 percent
Payments by radio: $22 million – up 11 percent

And the kicker, courtesy of Digital Music News:

Meanwhile, ASCAP also gained $13.8 million from internet-based and wireless licensing agreements, a gain of 70 percent. The group is planning aggressive moves ahead, including a recent push to extract performance royalties from paid downloads. Predictably, that has drawn the ire of online music providers, represented by trade body DiMA.

Remember, that 70 per cent gain from internet and wireless providers came before the new Copyright rates were announced. Clearly the old system wasn’t working, eh?

Last word (for today at least) that wraps all three of these subjects together goes to Jerry Del Colliano’s Inside Music Media:

Hypocrisy #5 :

If everyone was so concerned with fresh music, new artists and the health of indie labels, they’d be fighting the new Internet royalty rates that threaten to impede the growth of Internet radio by charging small operators more money than they can afford to play the music.

Who is kidding whom? 8,400 half-hours when no listeners are listening to terrestrial radio or building Internet radio as the lifeline for music diversity.

Does anyone question the pervasiveness of the Internet?

Is it that hard to believe the Internet will be on everyone’s mobile devices once WiFi becomes universal?

If you’re with me so far, can you see the hypocrisy of letting four serial offenders of music diversity off the hook for chump change and a kiss on the backside while the big crybabies in the music industry try to get blood out of the one stone that will outlive them — Internet radio.

The Globe, By George!

Cruising around the DC radio dial after a few days away to discover another shakeup on the radio dial…WARW, the longtime “classic rock” station has become The Globe, a station blending “world class rock” with an environmental message. The format flip happened on Friday (2/2) at noon, same day, of course, as the U.N. Report on Climate Change was released. Since then, the station has played a slightly tweaked version (read: more stuff from the 90’s) of its classic-rock format, and ditched the deejays in favor of left-leaning eco-and-call-to-action messages (soundbites of Al Gore, bromides to save energy, and even an anti-focus group rant!). The deeejays are supposed to be back within a few days, as well as presumably a better-developed website – right now, all you get on their site is the option to listen to their stream, IM or E-mail “the studio,” and a read of The Globe’s 12-Point Mission Statement [Number 10: “WE WON’T INSULT YOUR INTELLIGENCE – The Globe will have commercials (got bills of our own to pay) but we will try to keep them to a minimum and present them in a way that respects our listeners and our advertisers.”]. There’s even talk that the station will bring back the call letters WHFS, recalling the glory years of the once-legendary “alternative” station in the DC – Baltimore area. (Corporate parent CBS radio still owns those call letters.)

The RoeDeo Reaction? Fascinating, but preposterous. Very nice of them to tell us that flourescents save 70% more energy that incandescents, that we all can make a difference, and that they are now “partially operating on alternative fuels.” (Where? Are they lighting candles in the control room?). And the playlist is at least veering more towards the sound of excellent non-commercial stations like WXPN in Philly or WTMD in Towson (Baltimore), MD. But this is a station, as noted above, that’s owned by CBS. It’s all thoroughly unconvincing, and to my mind, creepily artificial. Maybe it’ll be better once the live air staffers return, and the sound becomes less canned and calculated. We’ll see.

The DC market has suddenly gotten a whole lot more interesting for us radio junkies, however…I’ve mentioned Dave Hughes’ DCRTV blog (stands for DC Radio and Television) before, and if you like this sort of stuff it makes for pretty entertaining reading. Sample:

OK, maybe The Globe is not real “adult alternative” like what’s heard in other markets and on some non-comm stations. Maybe it’s a bit “harder” and a bit more “commercial.” And, OK, yeah, maybe the “green” sloganeering will grow tiring. Still, it’s a great mix of powerful music that can (and should) only get better. CBS and Michael Hughes have planted the seed for a powerful force in Washington area radio. It’s energizing and thought provoking. Not moldy oldie and turgid, like some some area rockers have become.

Meanwhile, Washington Post columnist Marc Fisher had a lengthy take-out in the Sunday Arts section on George 104, the new oldies-plus format adopted by the formerly-classical WGMS:

George is a 44-year-old white guy who lives in the suburbs and likes Foreigner, Journey, Billy Idol, and David Bowie. When George was in high school, he loathed disco and the soft soul sounds of the ’70s”…..

Fisher’s blog on washingtonpost.com also has more background on the the Globe, including some more reactions about eco-awareness become a trend in the radio biz, including this observation from my friend Steve Yasko at WTMD:

“Public radio is the authentic green radio network and not the corporate hacks at CBS.”

As I said, radio in DC has suddenly gotten a whole lot more interesting….