You have a great idea for a radio series. You have the skill to create some shows, and the musicians have signed off on the rights to put the music on the air. But you don’t know how to get stations interested in your shows. Well, one of the strengths of the classical radio world is the network of people who know the biz and are always keeping an ear open for great programming. Enter Kathy Gronau and her organization, Creative Public Radio.
Public radio
Florida station moves classical to HD
We’ve been ruminating and prognosticating lately about the Future of Classical Radio, but it’s equally important to follow present-day developments in good old terrestrial radio — for many still the primary source for classical.
So I took notice when not one but two public radio stations announced in the past few weeks that they’re moving away from the dual news/classical format and giving more daytime hours to news and talk. They join several other stations that have made similar changes since we launched this blog in March. As I’ve written before, 200-plus public stations in the U.S. air both news and classical. But the format is saddled with some inherent drawbacks, the main one being that few listeners enjoy both kinds of programming.
One of the stations to dump the dual format is going whole-hog — not just taking classical out of middays, but taking it off its primary signal entirely.
WCPE – An Amazing Business Model
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.
Horner: Midday research as “a house of cards on a foundation of quicksand”
To wrap up my series of posts about the midday classical music research undertaken by the Public Radio Program Directors Association, I conducted a Q&A by e-mail with Wes Horner. Horner has a long track record in arts and documentary programming for public radio. He started in the business as a producer at Boston’s WGBH, then went on to serve as executive producer of NPR’s Performance Today. He also worked in the same role for Smithsonian Productions, helped develop From the Top and is now involved with Five Farms, a series of radio documentaries about farming families in the U.S.
Horner wrote a commentary for Current newspaper last year in which he questioned the findings and implications of the Midday Classical Music Testing Project. I asked him to explain his views and to lay out the priorities classical public radio should be pursuing. Here’s our interview.
Scanning the Dial: What do you see as the shortcomings of the PRPD Midday Classical Music Testing Project?
Horner: Two issues:
(1) The conceit that you can make meaningful decisions about programming pre-recorded music on CD based on testing artificially excised samples, tested in an artificial environment, I believe is building a house of cards on a foundation of quicksand. Music is more complex than the study recognizes, as is real-life listening. The data aren’t very useful.
(2) Tinkering with the process of making the “right” selection of CD tracks in the hopes that we can energize music on radio is a deflection from where our energy and resources ought to be focused. Namely, how can public radio create music programming that shares the values of our successful news programs? We need to come to grips with the dissonance we’ve created between our music programming and our news/talk programming. And we ought to ask ourselves what the landscape would look like in music on public radio nationally if we invested money, developed production infrastructures, and cultivated talent on both sides of the microphone on a scale similar to that of news. Imagine — please — that the community of music makers and music lovers considered public radio their meeting place of engagement, as do newsmakers and news consumers.