949thegame.com

Recently 'parked' .....of course, could mean nothing

Being as Dan Sileo just left mornings at the Mighty 1090 and said that he left for a "great opportunity", "more money" and that "I'm not leaving San Diego...stay tuned" -

it appears that Entercom will be entering the already crowded (3 station) San Diego sports radio field by setting up a station built around the Padres baseball broadcasts it will be running through (at least) the 2021 season.

It then remains to be seen if the "FM 94/9" alternative rock format would replace Energy 97.3,
sending it to the Entercom format dumpster where it would join other former CBS Radio CHRs that have recently met their demise in New York and Dallas.

There also happens to be a 973thegame.com domain parked as well, which also indicates that Entercom plans to blow up Energy to bring an FM sports station to San Diego.

I'm quite surprised that Entercom would be doing such a move now. They could've already made the move to Sports following the closing of CBS Radio merger when KSON moved to 103.7 instead of moving Energy to 97.3.

San Diego only has one major league team, so its doubtful the market can support another all-sports station. And Padres games have already been on FM 94/9 for nearly a year, so if 94/9 was going to all-sports you'd think it would have switched already -- especially when you consider the ratings have remained terrible.

Signal Geek said:

San Diego only has one major league team, so its doubtful the market can support another all-sports station. And Padres games have already been on FM 94/9 for nearly a year, so if 94/9 was going to all-sports you'd think it would have switched already -- especially when you consider the ratings have remained terrible.

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The only difference is that both of the existing sports stations are on the AM band, and Entercom doesn’t own any AM stations in San Diego. I still think it’s more likely that Entercom will eventually flip Energy 97.3 to sports, given that Entercom has been flipping a lot of the underperforming CHR stations they acquired from the CBS Radio merger.

The bad news is when KSON exchanged frequencies with Energy, it resulted in a huge ratings loss for both stations. That's typical of such frequency shifts. Who know how long it will take for both stations to recover. So Entercom would be wise to wait for at least one station to recover before blowing up another.

I doubt we can say Country radio fans in San Diego gave up on Country simply due to a frequency swap. Many Country stations suffer during the Christmas music season. It's the format hurt the most by those double digit Christmas stations. My guess is KSON will be back to somewhat normal in the January ratings.

Why didn't Entercom just switch either 94.9 or 97.3 to Sports as soon as it took over the CBS-owned stations? Well, it takes a while to build a Sports station. You just can't play 10,000 songs in a row with no DJs as you would with a music format flip. But you would think the company has figured out which frequency to use. Does Entercom want to keep one of San Diego's two so-so performing Alternative stations? Or keep the #3 Top 40 station. I would say ax Energy.

Sports stations really do outperform their ratings. Notice the modest numbers stations like WPEN Philadelphia, KRLD-FM Dallas, WZGC Atlanta, WJFK Washington and KMVP-FM Phoenix post. These are labor-intensive stations that only rely on network programming overnight and weekends. But I doubt any of them are in trouble. The audience is male and youthful, a hard to reach crowd. You can run more spots per hour than music formats. So even if a new San Diego FM Sports station does moderately well, it should be successful.

Gregg. said:

I doubt we can say Country radio fans in San Diego gave up on Country simply due to a frequency swap.

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You're right. But the country fans are only a portion of the station's listenership. The country fans will seek out what they want. There is another group of people who just listen to whatever's there. Those folks may not have paid attention to all the promos, and just thought their station went away, so let's find something else. You never know.

Chris Patyk has just been named the new PD at FM 94/9 http://ramp247.com/programming/patyk-now-pd-of-kbztsan-diego/

Thus, it would seem that the alternative format will continue in some way, shape or form, TBD whether on 94.9 or 97.3.

The only reason to mention 97.3 is that one would think that the sports format would wind up on the stronger signal (94.9).
But, we'll see soon enough...

miketheradioguy said:

There also happens to be a 973thegame.com domain parked as well, which also indicates that Entercom plans to blow up Energy to bring an FM sports station to San Diego.

I'm quite surprised that Entercom would be doing such a move now. They could've already made the move to Sports following the closing of CBS Radio merger when KSON moved to 103.7 instead of moving Energy to 97.3.

Click to expand...

There are multiple domains parked for 94/9 & 97.3 with sports branding, but they're not owned by Entercom.

Domain Name: 973THEGAME.COM
Domain ID: 2208907439_DOMAIN_COM-VRSN
Registrar WHOIS Server: whois.easydns.com
Registrar URL: http://www.easydns.com
Updated Date: 2018-01-04T19:58:38Z
Creation Date: 2018-01-04T19:58:38Z
Registrar Registration Expiration Date: 2019-01-04T19:58:38Z
Registrar: easyDNS Technologies, Inc.
Registrar IANA ID: 469
Domain Status: clientTransferProhibited https://icann.org/epp#clientTransferProhibited
Domain Status: clientUpdateProhibited https://icann.org/epp#clientUpdateProhibited
Registry Registrant ID:
Registrant Name: Joe Lindsay
Registrant Organization: Local Media San Diego
Registrant Street: 6160 Cornerstone Court East