Marty Ronish

Marty Ronish is an independent producer of classical music radio programs. She currently produces the Chicago Symphony Orchestra broadcasts that air 52 weeks a year on more than 400 stations and online at www.cso.org. She also produces a radio series called "America's Music Festivals," which presents live music from some of the country's most dynamic festivals. She is a former Fulbright scholar and co-author of a catalogue of Handel's autograph manuscripts.

Martin Perlich, KCSN, Ben Rosen on the Met, and Sean MacLean

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Some notes about happenings in the classical radio world on a midsummer Friday. Dailynews.com reports than longtime radio personality Martin Perlich resigned on Tuesday from his job as Program Director at KCSN in Northridge, CA. Perlich is very well respected for his award-winning interviews with musicians. He’s retiring at age 70 with his legendary energy unabated. His retirement leaves a big hole in the radio landscape and raises even more questions about the fate of KCSN, where there have been rumblings of changes, but no hard news yet. To quote the article … Continue Reading

WCPE – An Amazing Business Model

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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.

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The Radio Performance Tax — Just Say No

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Authormarty72x72_2 Who makes money off of classical music radio, or any music radio, for that matter? Is it the artists? The stations? The record companies?

If classical music radio were profitable, there would be a lot more stations doing it. That’s why it makes no sense at all for the Recording Industry of America (RIAA) to try to levy a Radio Performance Tax on stations. For the past 50 years or more, record companies have been sending free recordings to stations and begging for airplay. The money the companies made off all that free airplay was pure profit.

After making money off the stations for all those years, now the record companies have become ingrates and want to charge the stations. They are saying that the radio stations are getting their products for free and making money off them, and they ought to pay for the privilege. Virtually all of the record companies still standing are overseas, so any tax money earned would immediately leave the country.

It won’t succeed — this time. Congress isn’t going to allow it. As of last week, a majority in the House and about 13 senators have opposed the effort. You can read about it here. Here’s the other side of the argument in Wired.

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Mozart as Wallpaper

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I know today’s title may be “fightin’ words,” but I have a musical reason for begging program directors not to play so much Mozart. And Haydn. And Rosetti, Krommer, J.C. Bach, Hummel, and Stamitz, as well. The melodies are square, the harmonies are safe and predictable, the form is formulaic (pun intended). And frankly, many recordings of this repertoire are just plain boring. Mozart and Haydn did it better than anyone else, but they are being played to death on classical stations. We use their music as filler, because it comes in … Continue Reading

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