I was surfing the net the other day and saw a press release from WCPE in Wake Forest, NC about their new affiliation with KXMS in Joplin, MO. Jeff Skibbe, the Joplin station’s General Manager is always intensely interested in classical radio’s place on the internet, so my ears perked up. I picked up the old fashioned telephone and called Curtis Brothers, WCPE’s outreach manager.
We’re providing programming free to small stations that can’t afford their own. We pay a lot of attention to the human aspect; we’re always 24-hour live-hosted. For radio stations we provide tones for local i.d.s; a lot of stations use us overnight.
Free to any station that wants it? Wait a minute. How is that possible? The recent demise of CPRN’s voice-tracked satellite service which we reported on March 21st makes this seem impossible from a business standpoint. CPRN was charging stations for their service, as are the two other programming services, Beethoven Satellite Network from WFMT in Chicago, and Classical 24 from American Public Media in St. Paul, MN. How does WCPE do it for free?
Because they really want to. Curtis Brothers says they are managed extremely efficiently.
We’re 100% listener-supported. We do our own fundraisers twice a year. Volunteers answer the phones and send out mailings. We use volunteer hosts for 25% of our airtime. Stations get the local Wake Forest concert announcements and underwriting because it’s just straight streaming, but it’s only a couple of minutes per hour.
Seems like a small price to pay. WCPE has about 150,000 listeners in Raleigh-Durham, plus 11 translators and 14 radio station affiliates. You can pick up their signal on many cable TV stations, and if you have your own dish you can pick it up at home from the AMC-1 satellite.
They get some income from online listeners and from radio listeners in their outlying markets. They also use direct mail. Brothers says they spend 11 to 13 cents to raise each dollar, for a total annual budget of around $2.12 million.
Remember those “demods” that every station had before the advent of Content Depot? They were transponders that picked up satellite signals and allowed you to broadcast content from an outside source. Well, here’s a really good use for your old demod!
Besides offering its programming free to other stations, WCPE makes its stream available online in five different formats. Management provides professional coaching for the station’s volunteer and paid announcers. The announcers air many, many artist interviews and the station makes the interviews available online in a separate archive.
We’re real! Not stuffy. We’re real people who love the music, and are doing it as volunteers because we love it. You can always get an answer to your question. We have a website full of information and music trivia. It’s one of the most amazing business models I’ve ever seen.
Curtis Brothers is supposed to say positive things because he’s the outreach manager, but I’m amazed at this model, too. If all this is for real, WCPE wins the prize. Thanks, you guys!
p.s. Happy Bastille Day.
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Kudos to WCPE for their continued excellence in doing what they do and how they do it. No federal money, no interference, music for anyone and any station.
I was a member of WCPE, along with KUSC and WCNY, during my refugee status from WNYC after 9/11 when WNYC went to daytime talk.
I delighted in their live on-air hosts and the fact that I could actually pick up the telephone and call and speak to someone right away, sort of like WPRB, Princeton, NJ.
I am so pleased to see this write-up about their services. I wish them nothing but the best of good fortune for the future.