Yet another classical music station has decided its classical niche audience is not valuable enough to keep: WGCU in Southwest Florida is dropping its classical format on September 8th to go after bigger audience with news and jazz. The station management will be up in arms at my statement. “We’re not dropping it,” they’ll say. “We’re moving it to our HD stream.” Really. How many of your listeners have HD radios or are likely to buy them to listen to a format you obviously don’t value enough to support with real resources? HD is going nowhere fast.
As I sit here listening to the Democratic National Convention, with all the talk of change and hope, I realize that one of the legacies of the big business era is the meshugaas it has made of classical radio.
We can’t blame the Republicans for the big money grab that was set off after the FCC deregulation in 1996. That was Bill Clinton’s era. Some classical stations sold out for a lot of money and then found that classical was unable to support the higher level of income they needed to pay down the debt.
Then public radio consultant David Giovannoni piled on with his research that convinced public stations to go after bigger audience, to drop niche formatting and mixed formats in favor of a single format model. Essentially his research showed that news/talk delivers the most audience.
WGCU’s decision is mostly in line with Giovannoni’s conclusions. It is currently a mixed format station and with the change will be mostly news/talk. The station plays four hours of classical music a day, and four hours in the evenings, plus a couple hours overnight, but they claim classical listeners pay for only 1/4 of the programming. Well, duh. They put no effort into it. It’s all canned programming, no local hosts.
The classical audience has always been small but exceedingly loyal, and there’s plenty of room in the stratosphere for at least one classical station per market.