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 in dailynews.com:
Robert Bucker, dean of the Mike Curb College of Arts, Media and Communications, said the KCSN audience is so small, the station no longer qualifies for Corporation for Public Broadcasting funding.
He also said few dollars have been raised from listeners during recent pledge drives.
That brings up the larger issue of whether classical music listeners are willing to support the format they supposedly want. I remember pledge drives on a dual format station where we hardly bothered pitching during the classical music shows, because the return was so paltry. Then there are stations that have incredibly active listeners who donate enough to run a really good station, like the other Los Angeles station, KUSC.
Anybody have any insight on this?
On another subject, if you haven’t read Ben Rosen’s great post about the Metropolitan Opera’s recent initiatives, I think it’s a must-read. You’ll find it here. If you’re involved in classical radio, you know how hard it is to come up with fresh ideas that really work, so maybe this will stimulate your thinking.
And because you don’t want to be sitting inside reading blogs when you could be out enjoying a summer weekend, I’ll keep this brief. I leave you with a chuckle. I was listening to KING-FM yesterday afternoon, when Sean MacLean was on. He is one of Seattle’s main attractions. You visit Mount Rainier and Pike Place Market, you eat salmon, and you listen to Sean MacLean (you can hear him online, too). He played a recording of Sarasate’s Zigeunerweisen, came on after it and said “Whoo!” and immediately launched another piece. Shortest back announce ever!
Way to go, Sean. I laughed and laughed.
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Great story about Sean. I remember I once came out of a piece of lounge-y, off-kilter Indonesian music I was playing on the public radio station I used to work at in North Carolina — I just laughed. But I did go on to say more.
Funny you’d bring up the issue of listener support for classical stations. I was thinking about it recently after reading this in a commentary in Current about listener support: “Classical and jazz stations have fewer givers relative to listening compared to other station types.” Why is this? I wonder whether it’s partly because there are other ways to hear music, whereas you can only hear NPR news on the radio (or, granted, online or in podcasts). So perhaps news listeners value the service more and will show it with their money?