What’s happening with Classical Public Radio Network?

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As I mentioned a few weeks ago, Classical Public Radio Network will go off the air June 30, narrowing the range of choices for public radio stations looking to fill airtime with an around-the-clock, plug-and-play stream of music.

CPRN is one of several 24/7 feeds of classical music available to public stations via satellite, many of which use it or its competitors to fill overnight hours or otherwise keep costs low at times when using live hosts would be pricy or inconvenient. About 60 stations carry CPRN, which also airs on six HD Radio multicast channels. The service launched nationally in 2003, a partnership between Colorado Public Radio in Denver and KUSC in Los Angeles.

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Roundup: Classical radio online, WQXR and more

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Authormike72x72_3The Albany Times-Union ran a feature the other day on a local classical music buff who has refined a system for tracking performances by orchestras around the world:

 

To keep track of his daily listening options, Olsen has compiled a weekly grid showing when concerts by major orchestras can be heard, and on which stations. The full schedule allows him to keep up on the weekly performances of acclaimed orchestras in Pittsburgh, Chicago, Milwaukee and Vienna, among others.

The fruit of Karl Olsen’s hobby sounds like a one-man PublicRadioFan.com. Now he just needs to get it online so the rest of us can enjoy. ClassicalMusicFan.com?

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National vs. Local; Live vs. Canned Music

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Authormarty72x72_2You’re a program director for a classical music station. You have a tight budget, an on-air staff ranging from just ok to excellent, an incredibly supportive local audience, and a lot of local ensembles that need promotion. What do you put on the air?

Can your listeners tell the difference between national vs. local, live vs canned music? Is there any reason to play whole shows of live performances?

A program director at a major station recently told me the concert hall experience doesn’t work on the radio; people don’t sit quietly and listen like that. They’re driving, working, or exercising while they listen. So he won’t air any national concert programs. Yet that same station plays all sorts of local concerts, some good, some mediocre. The rest of the time the station plays canned music.

Two program directors were talking about Performance Today at a national conference, and one said, “I’d never play it. There’s too much talk. The other said, “I’d never allow that on my air.” Another program director recently told me, “we don’t air any produced product.” I talked to a major market station this week that doesn’t allow outside material, because they believe in local, local, local.

Then there are stations that air just about everything national but have no local production. Or how about stations that believe only local announcers should be heard on-air?

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The dual format: neither fish nor fowl

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In my last post about broad trends in classical radio, I started to examine the odd beast known in public radio as the “dual format.” A dual-format station airs both news and classical music on weekdays, with NPR’s morning and afternoon newsmagazines, Morning Edition and All Things Considered, sandwiching a midday block of music.

Many stations in public radio adhere to this format — a little more than half of the 450 stations airing classical are dual-format. Most of them serve small- and medium-sized markets where the smaller number of public-radio listeners makes being “all things to all people” more feasible. But a considerable number of dual-format stations have been cutting back on classical in recent years or dumping it entirely, in part due to the thorny problems posed by airing two different kinds of programming. Research shows that most listeners who enjoy classical avoid news programming and vice versa, which forces a dual-format station to try to serve two different audiences. What’s more, stations have found greater success raising money around news programming than around classical.

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