What’s happening with Classical Public Radio Network?

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.

CPRN never achieved the carriage of competitor Classical 24, which has been available for much longer and now airs on 229 stations. Another service, WFMT Radio Network’s Beethoven Satellite Network, is also available—WFMT declined to disclose carriage.

But Brenda Barnes, president at KUSC and a board member of CPRN, told me that neither carriage nor financial concerns prompted the shutdown. Colorado Public Radio and KUSC never expected to make money from CPRN and have been using it for their own music programming, she says. Instead, the founders now want to devote more attention to the possibility of developing online services.

“We decided that we wanted to be able to start really thinking about the Internet, and it was going to be awfully hard to do that while running a broadcast network and keeping our local stations going,” Barnes says. CPRN is working with the consulting firm McKinsey and Co. and several public radio stations to shape the focus of its research into use of classical music online. It expects to start the research within a few months, Barnes says.

Barnes did acknowledge that classical music’s slipping foothold on public radio informed the decision. She cited a recent study by NPR that found news programming bypassing classical in total hours on public radio for the first time. “That particular trend doesn’t look like it’s going to change anytime soon,” she says. “The growth opportunities for classical broadcasts just aren’t there.”

CPRN arrived on the scene in the late ‘90s, after Classical 24 and BSN, and some observers in public radio questioned whether public radio really needed a third full-time classical service. They also asked whether the Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s decision to fund CPRN with an $850,000 grant was the best use of funds.

A perceived glut of classical programming was one factor that inspired the creation of Music and Media, a coalition of classical producers that convened in 2006. Although some changes stemmed from those talks, such as NPR’s decision to transfer several shows to American Public Media, “the basic problem remains,” says consultant Ben Roe, formerly NPR’s director of music initiatives.  “I see the CPRN announcement as the logical outcome of those same market realities at play,” he wrote me in an e-mail.

“What’s too bad about this is that we still don’t have a single great national service devoted to classical music—with resources and reach to create the same kind of footprint and impact that NPR has established in the news and information front,” Ben continued. “The problem is even worse with jazz. And given the changes in the media world, it may be too late for public radio ever to do it now.”