Per Nielsen (granted, this is for TV, but radio can't be that much different), SF/Oakland/San Jose has about 180,000 African-American households, rank #22. Phoenix has about 106,000 households, rank #43. Not all of them are in the areas east of Downtown, South Phoenix, and Ahwatukee (especially east of 40th St.), either. They're spread out all over the Valley, which would likely require a South Mountain stick to reach everybody who might be interested. Not happening with such a small potential audience.
IIRC, the last stations to program to African-Americans were KUKQ 1060 and Buckeye's 106.9 (I forgot the call letters) in the early/mid 1990s.
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct...ck_Ranks.pdf&usg=AOvVaw07LPNWqtlwiHlaHlRagifK (PDF)
In the early 90's, I ran KISP/KYOT/KISO 1230 using the ABC "Touch" format. We pulled a 0.8 at best.
The Urban AC format was chosen to sell in combo with its original sister, KMXX (Mix 101.5). We classified it with Arbitron as Adult Contemporary and used it to drive down the cost per point on combo buys.
After the station was sold and KMXX became KZON, Sundance left it alone because it was profitable. That's because it cost them almost nothing to run. The KYOT calls were parked there before they bought KOY in anticipation of using them later. We kept it branded Kiss and only used the calls at the top of hour during that time.
Once Sundance ended up spun to Chancellor it became country to be used as a flanker to KNIX.
KMJK came on after Sundance owned 1230. They tried to get ABC to take the network affiliation away from us so we played hardball to keep it, but they did end up picking up the Joyner show which we had passed on. After 1230 went country, KMJK aired The Touch and Joyner until they went under. There were many stories of vendors and employees not getting paid at KMJK. 106.9 was never going to be a player with that signal. At the end they had a good translator in the market, but they never had a lot of business on the air.
I should point out that Art Mobley, the former owner of KMJK, is part of a new group that has a CP for a class C3 station in Wickenburg, so if they can get that on the air, expect something similar to Majic to come back.
Here's my take on the format: if you do a traditional urban or urban AC station in Phoenix, you're going to have a hard time making it if you're on your own. We kept the expenses down to almost nothing at Kiss 1230 because the only personnel that came out of the budget were me and one to two salespeople. I don't know about the sales folks, but I made less than 30k. The rest of the support staff (production, engineering, traffic, sales support) and the cost of the studio real estate all came out of running the other stations. So when you ran a profit/loss statement on 1230, you came out with an insane profit margin and we could pay our operating expenses with about a week's worth of operation because most of our operating expenses were being charged to other lines on the balance sheet... If you're running a standalone rimshot out of Wickenburg, all you've got to work with is the direct business you can get on the street - and unlike 1994, you're up against the two Sierra H stations and Riviera all chasing the same business but they have economies of scale that you don't have. I give them credit for persistence, but even with the rules on the main studio being relaxed they've got a tough road ahead.
Kiss 1230 was a reliable 0.8 - 1.0 share in the early 90s, but that was in the diary. The reality was that we usually got a couple of diaries that fell in the zip code where the state capitol is (which is one of the few neighborhoods where that signal does okay at night) and they wrote down that they listened to us all day every day. PPM is a different beast, and you're not going to get a 1 share off of two diaries with incredible time spent listening. I don't have firsthand knowledge of how KUKQ's diaries looked back in the day, but I suspect they were also heavy in TSL. (Like 1230, 1060's signal is strongest in historically black neighborhoods in Phoenix, so the night signal didn't hurt them either.) PPM is all about cume. You don't have enough of a black population to eat off of cume doing Urban AC in Phoenix.
Why can't you just import KTWV or KBLX and win? Because this isn't LA or San Francisco. I would point out too that KYOT-FM tried the rhythmic AC format when it segued from Smooth Jazz to "Eva 95.5" but they've done a lot better both in ratings and billing as The Mountain. And keep in mind that today's radio is all about cluster strategy. You're combining multiple stations together to reach men (Hubbard) or women (iHeart, Entercom) as part of a package. Or why Radio One blew up its Gospel station in Houston even though it got the highest ratings the signal had ever achieved (because it was pulling audience away from its top brand and was hurting its billing). Radio is a numbers game.
If you're going to change a format on an existing signal, you have to be willing to lose money for at least a year and bet that what you're going to make later offsets that. Eva was expendable for iHeart because it wasn't doing great; they flipped the format in about 48 hours from the time Bonneville blew up The Peak and it paid off. Had Eva been making more money they might not have done that. Even when we knew that Rhythm & Rock was a dud at KYOT-FM and we were losing our shirt we couldn't turn the car around that fast.
If you're going to sign on a new signal without others to sell in combo with? Good luck. The other stations will eat your lunch with a combo buy that beats your reach.
