Baltimore station seeks a leader

by

WBJC-FM, the all-classical public radio station in Baltimore, is looking for a new general manager. “[T]he General Man[a]ger is responsible for providing leadership, vision, planning and direction to Maryland’s oldest and largest public radio station, with approximately 200,000 listeners in the Baltimore-Washington metropolitan markets,” says the station’s website. WBJC is licensed to the Baltimore City Community College. We weren’t aware that the station’s previous g.m. had left, but we’ll see if we can find out where he’s gone, what he’s up to and if he’d like to chat it with us a … Continue Reading

WGCU: Another Classical Station Bites the Dust

by

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.

Continue Reading

Can classical stations take cues from Wordless Music?

by

Critics, bloggers and other media have lavished praise on Wordless Music, a concert series based primarily in New York that mines the considerable overlap among the realms of indie, experimental, classical and new music. This series popped up again in my radar because it staged its first concert in San Francisco last week. On the evening’s program was “Popcorn Superhet Receiver,” a work by Jonny Greenwood, lead guitarist for Radiohead. Also featured were pieces by Arvo Part and John Adams, among others.

These concerts, which began in New York last year, are not just attracting critical praise, but eager audiences as well. Many have sold out. Impresario Ronen Givony told Gramophone that often “more than 90 percent” of the audience shows up for the rock, but after the performances they pepper him with questions about the classical works, wanting to know and hear more. And many of these concertgoers are on the younger end of the spectrum.

Continue Reading

Actor and classical radio host dies at 90

by

Fred Crane, the last living male actor with a credit in the classic Gone with the Wind, died last week at the age of 90. Though his fame stemmed mainly from his appearance in the famous film, this obituary in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution notes that “his main career was hosting a classical music radio show in Los Angeles for 40 years.” He retired from radio more than two decades ago. The Wikipedia entry about Crane says the station was KFAC-AM/FM, which dumped the classical format in 1989.

Send this to a friend