Another public radio station has announced it’s dropping classical music in favor of news — a common enough occurrence that maybe I should just write a boilerplate post about the phenomenon and change the links, cities and call letters where appropriate.
This time it’s WUFT in Gainesville, Fla., which makes the switch Aug. 3. Like WGCU in Fort Myers, Fla., which dumped classical last year, WUFT will move the music to a 24/7 stream available to listeners with digital radios.
In a press release, the dean who oversees the station explains the rationale behind the decision:
The Internet and digital communications revolution have significantly increased the need for dissemination of high quality news and public affairs programming. I made this programming decision after several months of research and data analysis and conversations with management in other public stations, our faculty, station personnel and other media professionals across the nation.
I’m not sure that the Internet has increased the need for high-quality news — some might argue exactly the opposite.
Like a lot of stations that have made this change in recent years, WUFT now sandwiches its classical music offerings between NPR’s newsmagazines Monday through Friday. It’s a difficult format for stations to succeed with, because they’re often catering to two separate audiences. A Gainesville Sun article indicates WUFT has faced such difficulties: “Wright [the previously quoted dean] said the station’s ratings drop as much as 70 percent at 9 a.m., when NPR’s ‘Morning Edition’ currently gives way to classical music.”
The Sun article also features a humdinger of a remark from Dean Wright about the digital-only classical channel that WUFT will launch:
The signal requires a special radio to receive it. Wright said the radios can be bought for as little as $75, so they should meet local demands for classical music.
“If they don’t want to spend 75 bucks, they must not want it that bad,” he said.
Just a bit callous there. WUFT’s classical listeners have never had to pay a dime for the service. If they’re donors, bravo, but that’s gravy. They just push a button and the music comes out. Now they’ll have to buy an expensive radio they’ve never wanted and possibly weren’t aware even existed, and figure out how to use it, and maybe not find one that fits on their nightstand or jives with their car stereo. It’s not just a minor inconvenience. It’s a disruption. And here the guy explaining the decision comes off as saying, well, pony up or get lost.
The University of Florida might benefit from a bit more tact, but the decision may be the right one. As I’ve discussed before, mixing news and music on one station is a tough sell, and the news often outperforms the music in audience and fundraising (both listener support and underwriting sales).
My co-blogger Mona Seghatoleslami at West Virginia Public Broadcasting took note of this on Twitter the other day and sparked a three-way discussion involving her, me and Adam Schweigert, online director at public WFIU/WTIU in Bloomington, Ind. For what’s its worth, I’ve created a pastiche of the conversation here, with some minor editing for readability. Please take a moment to add your views in the comments.
Mona: Florida pubcaster WUFT boots classical to HD2 (no mention whether they will web stream their secondary stream)
This sounds familar—ah, that was another Florida station ditching classical [WGCU]. Don’t like Dean Wright’s quote re: buying HD radios to hear classical “If they don’t want to spend 75 bucks, they must not want it that bad.”
Mike: Yeah, that quote struck me as arrogant and out of touch. It takes a lot to push people to replace radios. $75 for one station?
Adam: Not really “ditching” classical, that’s moving it where it belongs to focus on news, something “normal” people actually care about… and HD radio is a great place for classical, the people who want it have the money anyway, and should be willing to pay for it. Or maybe you missed the line about how their ratings drop off at 9am when they leave ME and switch to classical music…
Mike: The people who want classical might have money, but research shows they’re less likely to contribute in support of it.
Mona: Not everyone who likes or benefits from classical music is rich. Do people who want NPR news “have the money anyway” too? And who is rich enough to invest in technology that (as I think you’ve mentioned before) is probably not going to amount to much? And 9am has nothing to do with people arriving at work, being too busy no matter what is on the radio?
Mike: But listening to all-music stations generally rises during the work day. The dual format is usually an audience killer.
Adam: Well, you’re missing a couple of things: a) no one in that market was listening, as evidenced by the abysmal ratings b) news, i would argue, is a greater social good and far more important for a functioning democracy, music is entertainment. And as entertainment, it makes far more sense for it to be something people should pay for. The 9am effect happens at most stations, sure, but not 70% dropoff, that’s a clear sign that something is not right.
My main argument is against dual format stations. I think dual format worked pretty well when broadcast was the sole means of distribution, but the internet changed that. It just isn’t possible to be everything for everyone anymore, better to be specialized.
Mike: Music is more than just entertainment! Should “a functioning democracy” be our sole concern?
Adam: re:music/entertainment, maybe, but also concerned about decline of newspapers, a void public radio needs to be stepping up to fill.
Mona: Do you have other articles/sources? I’d be interested if they tried anything else to build audience besides just switching formats. & the value of news vs music in life & society is way to big to even start here, so I’ll spare Twitter the rest of our discussion.
Adam: hrm. Like changing “what kind” of classical music they play? Doesn’t seem like it would be a big enough change to have much effect.
Mona: oh hell, I keep promising Randy I’m going to chill out & stop. But how about community outreach, partnerships, and marketing?
Adam: i think the audience for classical music on the radio is self-selecting, they find you, you don’t really need to find them. Online is obviously different, but for consumers of legacy media, i would be willing to bet that that is generally the case.
Mona: I disagree — and discussions on how people discover classical radio stations might make good Scanning the Dial post….
Adam: Hehe, ironically, if you did the research, it would turn out to be that they find stations by, well, Scanning the Dial 😛
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Maybe WUFT just wasn’t playing the right music, or wasn’t presenting it in a way that listeners responded to.
Note that I don’t speak for my station officially, but I’m music director at a dual format (NPR news and classical) station in rust belt Northeast Ohio.
It varies, depending on what’s happening in the news, but our daytime classical music (9am – 3pm) usually has *more* listeners in an average 15 minute period than the news and information shows.
Overall, since 1998, our daytime classical audience has been 78% larger than the average audience for Morning Edition, Fresh Air, All Things Considered, and Marketplace (6am – 9am and 3pm – 7pm).
Of course it helps that that’s peak radio usage time. People don’t switch off the radio when they get to work — quite the opposite. You just have to recognize that they *are* working, and program accordingly.
As for donations, remember that lots of things affect pledge timing. People call and pledge when it’s convenient for them, when the message gets through, and when the freebie grabs their interest, to name just a few. A person at work may not have time to pledge that very second. So the program that’s on when the calls (or web forms) come in doesn’t necessarily correlate with that program’s value to the caller.
That said, classical music can be a pretty decent pledge magnet at stations which choose and announce it with the listener in mind, and then pitch it well at pledge drive time.
Besides that “$75 HD radio” for (probably reduced signal coverage) home reception of classical music on HD2, for some there is likely much higher cost for listening in your car: When I bought a new Genesis sedan recently, the “Premium Package” came with satellite radio, but HD radio was another $2,000-$3,000 upgrade to the “Tech Package.”
Mike says “Now they’ll have to buy an expensive radio they’ve never wanted and possibly weren’t aware even existed”
HD Radio is NOT expensive unless you call $50 expensive. Further, if there is no adequate audience for a terrestrial station to carry classical, then it has every right and need to narrowcast. Listeners have no God-given right to receive, free, services they don’t pay for.
Jim
Thanks for the correction, Jim. Do you know which radios are selling for $50 these days? And what’s the minimum price for a car model?
And how much does it cost for labor for tearing out the perfectly-fine radio you bought in your new car, and installing one you had to purchase?
Mike, correct me if this is wrong — but from what I can tell, there seems to be significantly more enthusiasm for IBOC in public radio than in commercial radio — or among the general public, for that matter.
Pubradio folks seem intrigued by its multicasting capability, even though using that capability significantly degrades the sound quality, and some listeners seem to have trouble even finding the secondary and tertiary channels.
But the main IBOC problem is cost. Unless Ibiquity comes to their senses, it’s never going to be price-competitive, especially when you consider that the competition is so diverse (web streaming, smartphones, portable media players, and so on).
My understanding — again, someone please correct me if I err — is that Ibiquity charges receiver manufacturers $50 per set for licensing. Fifty bucks! That doesn’t leave much to spend on the hardware at anything under, say, $60 retail. The $50 deals (I’ve seen them too in the past) thus almost have to be loss leaders, no?
Right now, a bit over $60 seems to be about the bottom price for a tabletop IBOC set at Amazon, though you might want to consider adding another $25 or so for an outdoor antenna. (Another issue we won’t go into right now.) Car adapters that couple into your existing radio are indeed available in the $50-85 range, though I don’t know how they sound. No idea what factory-installed digital radios cost.
I keep thinking that we’ve been down this road before. Your public radio station isn’t on the FM band because FM sounds better, but because when the NCE band was allocated, FM was the low rent district. Hardly anyone was listening — yet.
What made FM take off — thereby putting FM in every car and house, and giving pubsters an audience — was the emergence of a format which rang true for a large minority of radio listeners, but which couldn’t be found on AM. No, not public radio, and not classical music. It was album rock.
What format today is going to put IBOC in nearly every radio sold, as FM was by the 1980s?
If some new “killer format” emerges, and if Ibiquity cuts their receiver license fee by, say, 90% — then we’ll have something. The sidebands could really improve public radio audience service in the future.
But that’s not going to happen next week, and probably not next year. Right now, you simply can’t move an underperforming format to IBOC and expect it to magically clean Best Buy’s shelves of digital radios.
As for the audience hit at 9am — that’s because they’re changing from news to programming with a different appeal and power.
But news-talk isn’t a magic bullet. You still have to find a show that can maintain audience service. And if you’re programming music locally, you actually have more control over power and appeal than you do with a network talk show.
Now, in regions where there’s more than one FM public radio station, I agree that it makes sense, from a listener’s perspective, for one station to program news/talk and another to play music.
But IBOC isn’t yet the equivalent of another FM station. It may never be, though we can hope.
I know nothing of the internal situation at WUFT, but I’d think that with a little effort they could nurse the patient (midday music) back to health. Instead they’ve apparently decided to starve him on the sidebands. Seems to me it’d be more humane to just shoot him and be done with it, but what do I know?
For the internet listener this is a significant loss although not as big as the WMCE flip in January. The sound quality of WUFT was among the best with a data rate of 320kbit/sec in Windows Media format. They do not appear to stream HD 2. Like WMCE they programmed rare syndicated concert programming including CD Syndication programming. The monthly programming guide was very well done in a PDF format. It was very easy to find out what pieces were going to be played on the syndicated concert programs. They often ran these programs a few weeks late allowing one to hear an interesting concert again. Most stations that run classical on HD 2 just run the Beethoven Satellite Network. I wonder if WUFT will continue the syndicated concert programming on HD 2. WRTI is the only HD 2 station I know of that runs syndicated programming although the HD 2 grid is inaccurate. The WRTI HD 2 grid is not updated when they change the orchestra that is being programmed. For those of us that seek syndicated concert programming on the internet in high quality sound another loss was the decision by WUOT to drop from 7 to 3 syndicated programs replacing them with Classical 24. WUOT may have the best sounding internet feed for classical music because the stations engineer really cares about the quality of the feed. WUOT also did an excellent job providing detailed programming information of the syndicated broadcasts.
Perhaps the worse thing thing that happened this month with respect to live music programming was the cancelation of Showcase on WHYY. This started out providing the Philadelphia Orchestra although they lost funding long ago for that. They continued Showcase by recording other local orchestras and Curtis student recitals. The Curtis recitals had previously been presented by WFLN so they must have been on the air for decades.
The best HD Radio tuner also happens to be the best analog tuner commercially available and perhaps the best performing analog tuner ever produced. It is the Sony XDR-F1HD. It uses advanced digital signal processing technology to do this. The price is about $100. For a deep technical analysis go to http://ham-radio.com/k6sti/xdr-f1hd.htm. The chief engineer of Saga Communications in Keene, N.H has a detailed use report at http://www.rwonline.com/article/71710.
You are still limited by the antenna. I cannot get HD radio to stay locked on WWFM, which is 10 miles away from me, with an indoor dipole. Things are much better with an outdoor antenna. The other well regarded, but more expensive, Sangean HDT-1X does no better on HD indoors.
The problem is that the level of the HD signal is too low. Pushing it up results in degradation of the analog signal of the station and first adjacent stations, These issues are discussed in detail in the NPR Labs technical reports found at http://www.nprlabs.org/publications. The Sony XDR-F1HD will bring in WRTI analog in OK sound on an indoor dipole and I am outside its coverage area.
Needless to say HD table top radios perform worse than these component tuners designed for excellent stereo systems. I expect most HD 2 listening indoors, well INSIDE the limits of the stations analog signal coverage area, happens on the internet feed. Table wireless internet radios start at around $120. Of course you need a wireless internet transmitter in the house connected to DSL or a cable modem for these to work.
While these wireless internet radios work well for most stations I always advise using a computer when listening to classical stations. It is much easier to navigate to the best sounding stations that stay connected for a long time and you get the program guide on screen.
Jim — I appreciate you weighing in on this. Cost of the HD Radio aside, the larger question, is there an adequate audience for a terrestrial station to carry classical? I say yes. So, what’s the problem? I suspect it’s us and not them (listeners).
David
I think David makes a good point (or poses a good question).
For stations to carry classical music (or news and talk or bluegrass or polka, for that matter) the real question is whether or not there is enough local support to make that format a feasible option.
I think the key to long-term viability for terrestrial broadcast stations will be to become hyper-responsive to their local audience and program accordingly.
If the audience wants music, you give them music. If they want news, you give them news. But in any case, you give them something unique to that geographical area and not just a bunch of syndicated programs.
As far as online streaming/HD Radio sidestreams, however (which, at this point, I think a lot of people would agree are DOA thanks to the restrictive licensing costs from IBOC and the power throttling of HD signals by the FCC), a lot of the listenership to HD2 and HD3 channels is really online listening (for stations that make that service available), and I think a lot of stations (the smart ones, at least) are quietly making that assumption and using HD2 and HD3 for niche services to try to lock down a particular narrow format online (We’re your source for polkas, for example).
That makes a lot of sense in my opinion, and unless classical broadcasters specifically are not just spinning CDs, they might as well be taking Classical 24, because the internet will soon be putting them out of business anyway, when WGBH, WNYC, KUSC and maybe a few others “win” at classical music online.
Terrestrial broadcasters need to acknowledge what makes broadcast unique (ie. – it’s tied to a particular geographic location) and online broadcasters need to acknowledge what makes online streaming unique (available anywhere in the world, the long-tail rules, etc.).
Basically, if you want to broadcast classical music, get local, pay attention to your audience, give them what they want, and then you stand a chance of surviving. Otherwise, local news and talk are probably going to look like a better option for many.
Well said, Adam — I’m pretty much in total agreement, and I think the same thinking is reflected in a lot of the future-oriented posts I’ve written for this blog.
Given what you say, I think public radio news stations might face an even tougher climb than classical, in a way — because local news is expensive to produce, and many news stations are still largely airing syndicated programming.
But even national news still gives stations the opportunity, at least for now, of owning the franchise on a stream of programming that for the most part is not available in quite the same form online. Meanwhile, 24-hour classical music stations are plentiful online (both online-only and streams of other classical FM stations from around the world).
I agree that mixing news and and music is a tough sell. I once listened to KUHF, my local station, but the classical music programming is uninspired and they have too much NPR, IMHO. The last thing I need to hear during a stressful commute is an in depth analysis on all the world’s problems. So on my commutes I listen to AM sports radio! Otherwise, my loyalty and dollars go to WFMT Chicago, a basically ‘private’ classical station I listen to on the internet. There is no political content of any stripe, and the programming and sound are unique. If I could figure it out technically, I would have WFMT always piped into my car.
Brian — what about WFMT’s sound and programming do you find unique? I’m curious to see which online classical stations emerge as the most popular as more people listen to music online. There must be some ratings out there somewhere to track down.
As I’ve said before — it’s thought that before long you WILL be able to listen to WFMT in your car thanks to WiMax — that’s really going to shake things up.
Mike–What about WFMT’s sound is unique? How about the fact that they don’t repeat their call-letters eye-bleedingly incessantly at every break. They credit their audience with enough smarts to know what station they are tuned to. (And it’s not like they are oblivious to Arbitron in that matter, either.)