Bill Lynch of the West Virginia Gazette reports that WVPR is planning to replace half of its opera time with news/talk when the Met Opera finishes next week. The change, apparently, is not about dropping classical music per se, but about opera in particular.
James Muhammad, director of Radio Services at West Virginia Public Broadcasting, said it’s been a long time coming, but change was almost inevitable.
“Looking at the audience over the past 10 years, I’ve noticed a 48 percent decline in the cume and a 57 percent decline in the average quarter hour audience,” he said…
Muhammad said that while other public radio stations around the country are abandoning classical music in favor of more news and talk programming, he believes WVPR needed to hold onto classical music for now. In other states and other radio markets, radio listeners have greater access to classical music. In West Virginia they don’t.
However, with the opera, Muhammad said he couldn’t justify continuing to broadcast a full year of opera programming –at least, not with the same schedule.
Muhammad said WVPR would add the Houston Grand Opera from the American Opera Series, beginning in October. The show would be broadcast Tuesday evenings.
One thing you can say about public radio listeners is that they feel ownership of their own personal public station. The typical call goes like this: “I’m a donor to your station and I’m not going to give anymore until you …” Fill in the blank.
At NPR we used to say that if the complaints were even on both sides of a programming issue, that we had it about right.
… Since [Muhannad] arrived at WVPR in 2001, the station has trimmed back its classical music content — primarily, the classical music content from the network, and replaced it with programming he said had a broader audience appeal.
He eliminated classical music from Sunday nights and Sunday mornings.
“One of our best performing programs is ‘Wait, Wait … Don’t Tell Me,'” he said. “I added it on Sunday mornings where we’d had classical music. I received more negative feedback than I received in my entire career.”
Muhammad said critics were relentless. He got calls almost daily and after a year, even though the audience numbers were solid, he decided to cut the program.
He got even more complaints.
“I cross-referenced them with the complaints I got for adding it,” he said. “I was getting complaints from some of the same people.”
I guess like Mitt Romney they’re of two opinions.
Running a dual format station is hard. The music listeners want more music and the talk listeners want more talk, and never the twain shall meet. That’s why the larger markets have dropped their dual format and moved to single format. Anybody have a solution that will make all the listeners happy?
Jim Lange is the classical music programmer at WVPR, and he certainly knows what he’s doing in the biz. We wish WVPR luck.
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Like always thanks for the information I otherwise may never have read. I hate opera music and wish it was not on Classical stations. I also do not like most singing and do not like violin concerto’s or violin sonata’s or solo violins on classical stations. Those are what kept me from listening to Classical music most of my life. But I listen to classical all the time now that I am in my 40’s. I like almost all other Classical music. I love the harp, piano, trumpet and all brass instruments, flute, clarinet, tubu, guitar, harpsichord and orchestras.
I also agree that I do not like when stations split news and classical music. I would rather get XM radio than be able to only listen part-time to Classical if I were in the car. What got me listening to Classical music was the new 24 hour classical stations on HD 2 and HD 3 channels where I live and travel.
Before I started listening to classical music a few years ago I listened to a lot of news on NPR stations and turned it off when classical came on. But now I do the opposite and listen to classical but turn the news off. I recently got am email from WUIS 91.9 Springfield, IL my local station saying to support their station if I wanted more news programming. I was very tempted to write back and say I did not want any news programming. That turns me off. I am sick of all the political and financial news dominating now.