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Full service radio stations

My reaction to this thread was similar to Goat Rodeo Cowboy: "I do not think that word means what you think it means." ;D

It sounds like you're looking for local sounding stations vs. what used to be described as a full-service format.

(Suddenly I feel a million years old...)

Full-service (as a format) USED to mean:

* Some music, often MOR but could be pop, country, etc through the hour. The number of records per hour varied depending on the number of elements and length of elements in each hour.

* News, both national and local, often at both the top and bottom of the hour. Breaking news events were often covered as well.

* Frequent weather updates, twice or more an hour.

* A sports update, perhaps a minute or two, most if not all hours of the day & night.

* Traffic updates, often every hour of the day in larger cities.

* Friendly banter (including Public Service announcements / community events) from a local (& used to be live) DJ. "Community Calender" was a regular part of most full-service stations.

The format as it used to be described could contain a lot more but wasn't all obituaries and lost dogs... although it COULD include those. It wasn't about inexperienced broadcasters, either... we had a 50,000 watt clearchannel AM where I live that was doing amazing full service up until about 10 years or so ago. The broadcasters there were legendary, and could have jocked circles around any of the FM liner jocks in town.

It sounds like what you were looking for were stations with unique local content... and that has a great appeal to me as well. Bright Star 100.1 in Bartlesville, OK is a fantastic little local operation that keeps it very hometown and is tremendous fun to listen to. I also might consider them full-service during the day as they do news, weather, sports, stocks, and on and on. However, it doesn't really sound like the full service powerhouses of yesteryear.

...OK, I'm going to take my walker and head down to the dining hall now... I hear we're having PUDDING tonight!!! ;D
 
In Chattanooga, TN this kind of station still exists. WDEF Sunny 92.3. And has Luther Massengale still serving Chattanooga and area very well. Full Service FM at it's very best.
 
NightAire said:
My reaction to this thread was similar to Goat Rodeo Cowboy: "I do not think that word means what you think it means." ;D

It sounds like you're looking for local sounding stations vs. what used to be described as a full-service format.

(Suddenly I feel a million years old...)

Full-service (as a format) USED to mean:

* Some music, often MOR but could be pop, country, etc through the hour. The number of records per hour varied depending on the number of elements and length of elements in each hour.

* News, both national and local, often at both the top and bottom of the hour. Breaking news events were often covered as well.

* Frequent weather updates, twice or more an hour.

* A sports update, perhaps a minute or two, most if not all hours of the day & night.

* Traffic updates, often every hour of the day in larger cities.

* Friendly banter (including Public Service announcements / community events) from a local (& used to be live) DJ. "Community Calender" was a regular part of most full-service stations.

The format as it used to be described could contain a lot more but wasn't all obituaries and lost dogs... although it COULD include those. It wasn't about inexperienced broadcasters, either... we had a 50,000 watt clearchannel AM where I live that was doing amazing full service up until about 10 years or so ago. The broadcasters there were legendary, and could have jocked circles around any of the FM liner jocks in town.
Click to expand...

That's it!

I wish we had one in my area.

We do have a couple of AM music stations in the central valley of CA, KYNO 1430 Fresno and KJUG 1270 Tulare. Up until about five or six years ago KJUG still had jocks and some of those full service elements but in a classic country music format. I'm too young to remember any real full-service stations around here but it seemed like all stations did some of this to a degree back in the mid to late 80's early 90's (early as I can remember). At least time, temp, traffic (DJ banters with traffic person) weather (more banter) sports at least two or three times a day (more banter on the larger stations) and the hits. I miss that.
 
WRNJ in Hackettstown, NJ is full service with Oldies/'80s music and local news/talk. They have tons of commercials for local businesses. Their main signal is on 1510 AM, plus translators on 92.7 and 104.7 FM.
 
Not only is Tan Talk brokered, they practically invented brokered radio. All hours of the day and night, most of their spot load appears to be asking people to call and buy their own radio program. If WTAN isn't brokered radio, brokered radio doesn't exist.
 
2 stations in my area which I would say do an excellent job of this:

WJPA, Washington, PA (pop. 14,000, 1450AM 1kW/95.3FM 2.1kW). Locally-produced news broadcast
top of the hour, morning drive thru evening drive. Mostly live DJ music programming. Lots of local
sports (high school, W&J College, minor league baseball).

WMBS, Uniontown, PA (pop. 11,000, 590 AM, 1kW) Locally produced newscast top of the hour most hours.
Locally hosted talk shows on local issues. Adult Standards with mostly live local DJ's. Community bulletin
board and obituary announcements. Local sports (high school, Pittsburgh pro teams, Univ. of Pittsburgh).
Locally hosted sports talk shows.
 
Sorry to say that WJPA does not stream its programming.

WMBS does, http://www.wmbs590.com/

I also submit these stations from the same region near Pittsburgh ...

WTYM 1380, Kittanning, http://www.wtymradio.com/ which has six days a week a local show from 10 a.m. to noon, followed by a half hour of news, swap-shop items and obituaries at noon. It also runs municipal meetings taped by its low-power TV sibling and some high school sports are recorded for broadcast.

Butler County Network, http://www.insidebutlercounty.com/ including WISR 680, WBUT 1050, WLER 97.7 in Butler, PA.

Beaver County Network, http://www.wbvp-wmba.com/ including WBVP 1230 in Beaver Falls and WMBA 1460 in Ambridge, PA.
 
Wish I did. It really is a pretty good local station. The only time WJPA streams, to the best of my knowledge, is when MSA Sports Network picks up its sports coverage and streams that alongside sports from more than two dozen radio stations.
 
As it happens, yes. WJPA for me at home is a fringe station but it covers much of the area around where I work.

And I fully agree with you on both counts about stations that don't stream.
 
I wish more great stations streamed as well. I think it deals more with cost than anything else. Not only do you pay per listener for bandwidth but you pay Sound Exchange, ASCAP, BMI and SESAC and have certain reporting requirements. For many stations, they have not been able to monetize the added benefits wiith their clients. Even more important, if a client can only spend $200 a month, you are going to only get $200 whether you stream or not. So, the chance at increasing revenue from your existing list is rather unlikely. From a business perspective, the idea of streaming is something you'd want to do if you can cover the expense and hassle with additional revenue.
 
It is definitely a cost issue. Sound Exchange has a byzantine variety of ways they charge stations. If you ever want to go cross-eyed, just visit their web site and see for yourself. If you are a small Internet only broadcaster, there are some options through third parties that will pay your music licensing fees for you. They aren't all that expensive. Unfortunately they can't help commercial over-the-air broadcasters.

If you are a non-commercial or LPFM station Sound Exchange has some reasonable plans available as well. If you are an over the air commercial broadcaster, you might be able to squeak by for a while as a "Small Internet Radio Broadcaster." Unfortunately there is a very low listener cap on that classification. Once you graduate to being a large broadcaster, hold on to your hat. There is a minimum fee (which you will use up right away) of $500. You must then file monthly "Statement of Account" forms that report what songs you played, who the artist was, and how many people listened to each one. Those of you who love paperwork, will enjoy that monthly exercise. For your effort you will pay $0.0023 per song per listener. That doesn't sound like much, but if 100 people heard the song you will owe $0.23. Still not much, but assume you play 14 songs per hour, that is $3.22 per hour or $77.28 per day for those 100 listeners. That's $28207.20 per year. Add to that ASCAP. BMI and SESAC fees as well as your actual cost of bandwidth and hosting, and it begins to really add up. And that is only for 100 listeners. Can you make money out of 100 listeners?

Most likely, the bulk of your Internet listeners will be from areas outside of your over-the-air coverage area. They contribute nothing to your ability to sell commercials to local sponsors. The deck is stacked against you. That's why many small stations, including mine, have made the difficult decision to pass on streaming. Kind of sad, really...
 
May well be where I am going as well, at least during the music periods, or about half the time, You are dead on about the location of the web listeners having no value to a local advertiser.
 
A lot of smaller stations that run local talk or sports programs will stream that part of their broadcast day and shut it down during music programming. Some even offer these programs as a podcast. As long as there is no music or you use buy-out production music, you don't need Sound Exchange's blessing to do that.

We've had well over 200 listeners on line for local high school football. The good news is these listeners are people who have ties with the community. It's likely they don't live here anymore, but they may visit from time to time. They might even patronize some of our sponsors when they do. It is also quite possible that they have ties with one of the team members who does live here. In this case, streaming makes sense, if for nothing else than a "halo effect." It helps your station to be perceived as a team player and an asset to your community. That's not a bad thing...
 
A few years ago a National Guard unit from a town in the Ozarks was sent to Iraq. For the time the unit was overseas, the local station streamed so that the military people could keep up with things back home. You can imagine what kind of good-will that built up with the home town people who thought they had the best radio station in the whole world.

I suspect there are a number of folks on that tour of duty that will be life-long supporters of that radio station. I haven't talked to the station owner. I suspect the costs, including the music royalties may have cost him more that any immediate bump in advertising during that year. I aslo suspect that his business for the next 15 or 20 years will be a bit more secure, more robust than if he had just sat there, "grinding records" as we used to say back in the pre-CD and pre-Automation days.
 
Goat Rodeo Cowboy said:
A few years ago a National Guard unit from a town in the Ozarks was sent to Iraq. For the time the unit was overseas, the local station streamed so that the military people could keep up with things back home. You can imagine what kind of good-will that built up with the home town people who thought they had the best radio station in the whole world.
Click to expand...
That's certainly true. When we streamed, we had quite a few listeners in the Mid-East. I feel sure that they were GI's who just wanted to keep a connection to home. I'm sorry we can't do that any more.
 
I know of a few, all in southeast Alaska.

KTKN/930 (Ketchikan)
KIFW/1230 (Sitka)
KINY/800 (Juneau)

Does FM public radio that's more than, frankly, classical/jazz music and NPR programming, count? If so:

-KCAW/104.7 (Sitka)
-KFSK/100.9 (Petersburg)
 
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