I've been around since the very early 80s. I saw it all happen. Yes, the 80-90 docket was cool. More potential profitable stations. But full consolidation to the levels we have now is corporately driven and shames the public interest, in my opinion. That put too many stations in too few hands.
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Norsan Media Acquires Magic 106.3
- Thread starter lanceventa
- Start date
As I already said, what you want to know is whether the listener wants to hear that song today on your station.
I started doing radio research of listener perceptions over 50 years ago. I ran a research division that did several hundred AMTs a year, hundreds of thousands of completed callout interviews, and loads of Awareness-Trial-Usage tests to find new formats or modifications. We did not do "burn" questions. We got the feeling for each song in different and more actionable ways.
The research I managed and implemented resulted in the most listened to radio station in the Western Hemisphere for the half-decade I consulted it. That research seems to have worked.
I've been around since before the IC was invented, so I am not as surprised at changes as you appear to be.
No, it nearly destroyed radio.
Wrong. No increase in revenue, a huge increase in stations, a rapid decrease in local news, promotions, community involvement.
Yet we lived for over half a century before texting, Facebook and all the new devices with just one or maybe two newspapers in most US markets.
Yet look at radio in LA where there is one dreadful paper:
Audacy
IHeart
Entravision
Estrella,
Lotus
Meruelo
Multi-Cultural
Mt Wilson
KPoint Broadcasting
Salem
SBS
Televisa/Unvision
All these own multiple stations. Add in Crawford, Cumulus, LMN, P&Y, Taxi and even ABC/Disney and a half-dozen others and you have lots of diversity
Game Show or Magic Trick? (Epic Fail !!)
WSPA goes out with a whimper...Not a Bang 🧨Nothing Special, just cut to Spanish right in the middle of a song (Lifehouse's You & Me) was cut short & switched as quickly as possible (...Poof!)
Norsan started immediately with their Spanish Fanfare and Station ID...(Simulcast with WOLI-AM 910 and 105.7 W289BS)... ¡LA RAZA! 🎉🇲🇽🎊
Recorded Audio on Video as well...
WSPA goes out with a whimper...Not a Bang 🧨Nothing Special, just cut to Spanish right in the middle of a song (Lifehouse's You & Me) was cut short & switched as quickly as possible (...Poof!)
Norsan started immediately with their Spanish Fanfare and Station ID...(Simulcast with WOLI-AM 910 and 105.7 W289BS)... ¡LA RAZA! 🎉🇲🇽🎊
Recorded Audio on Video as well...
With your outstanding qualifications, I am shocked you choose not to acknowledge burn. Much of my experience is from working along side Roger Wimmer for the various music tests he did for our company. One oldies station, Entercom at the time, was very concerned about our burn score track by track and, as also happened to be the number 3 oldies station in America by share 25-54. and 35-64. Especially with older libraries, you MUST be concerned about burn. It's a real number that you can track test to test.
But that means nothing to this, the real issue is how less accommodating the audience is to spots at all. That's where burn is becoming a problem, even if you refuse to see it. There must be an adjustment when you have an audience who pays $5 more dollars a month to get Hulu without ads, is inundated with politically partisan theater at levels beyond anything prior, spam in every email message and radio stations who spend less time each hour playing music that they do talking. This is not the radio of years gone by, this is 2024 corporate radio. No wonder Spotify caught on.
As a researcher, how can you not acknowledge the need for radio to rethink it's formula?
The term is too broad to be actionable.
But not the only way to track what is best called "fatigue" rather than burn.
Radio is a one-to-many system, and sustained by advertising. Whether the system will last into the next decade is a good question, but given the CPP that advertisers will pay in the major markets, there is no other solution other than presenting the best curated playlist possible.
Look how Apple's audio service failed to create attractive curated playlists. There is a case study there about how they tried to obviate research and "paint a Picasso" instead of creating a mass appeal, mass researched curated playlist that combined research with the human programming skills of how to best combine the best songs into magnificent sets.
Fatigue is burn. Glad we got that settled.
"Fatigue" can be solved with lighter rotations, for example. It depends on the cause: overplay, never liked it a whole lot, my ex liked it so now I don't, etc., etc. Burn is permanent, various levels of fatigue are not. And it is often hard to find the cause of fatigue, so it comes back to "how much do you want to hear that song today".
Unless you do perceptual questions along with the score, "burn" is useless.
On on-line testing, I have implemented tests where if the score was below the mid-scale point a person was asked, "if you don't want to hear it now, did you ever enjoy it?" A "Yes" gets a list of reasons why it might not be liked any more. Think "Gagnam Style" as an example of "It was fun for a while but now I hate it".
You can measure with 1-5 or 1-3 scores fatigue, or burn. But it must be in the subject's language. "Burn" is proper when addressing fatigue with a research subject. They understand "how burned out is this song" better than "how fatigued does this song make you feel?"
We always ended with two or three perceptuals.
Burn numbers can go up and down on each song from test to test. No score is married to a song.
Magic Still on HD Radio? Online?
Would be interesting to see if any effort is made thru HD Radio of the "Magic" / AC Format or whatever remnants of it may be out there. They were saying it would continue online, so maybe WFBC HD-4 and WYRD HD-2 will also continue with the Format since technically they wouldn't carry Spanish from the now Norsan programmed station on their former dial location. Would love to check HD Radio ASAP though perhaps audio (if still available) or on second thought, sound quality might still be an issue, was unchecked and muffled over 1 year and even thru a station sale...
🤔😱😓📻
Also I wonder if the 95.1 and 101.5 translators went to Spanish, or if were they maintained by Audacy...
Would be interesting to see if any effort is made thru HD Radio of the "Magic" / AC Format or whatever remnants of it may be out there. They were saying it would continue online, so maybe WFBC HD-4 and WYRD HD-2 will also continue with the Format since technically they wouldn't carry Spanish from the now Norsan programmed station on their former dial location. Would love to check HD Radio ASAP though perhaps audio (if still available) or on second thought, sound quality might still be an issue, was unchecked and muffled over 1 year and even thru a station sale...
🤔😱😓📻
Also I wonder if the 95.1 and 101.5 translators went to Spanish, or if were they maintained by Audacy...
That is subjective. We return to the fact that the object of a test is to know what to play on your station now and until the next test is done. Most "average listeners" can't accurately give degrees of burn or fatigue or whatever,
We know what those terms mean. To the listener it is "I don't like it anymore" or "I am sick of it" or "I used to like it because my partner liked it but we broke up and it reminds me of her/him". Each variety of burn has a different solution.
Perceptuals done in a group environment of an old fashion music test (people in a big room) are very subject to conditional or situational bias. Perceptuals done online are great if you are sure the respondent is who they say they are; otherwise they need to be done one-on-one.
Fatigue with a song depends to a great extent on how often it has been played in the last few weeks or months, assuming you are testing heavy station music listeners. One of my networked formats tested 6 times a year, with the participants split each time in two different markets. We knew even the weather outside affected the average scores, so we established a specific break point for each individual session based on average and mean scores.
How many people control the streaming industry? What is the value of that industry?
It is totally unregulated. One person can start an unlimited number of stations.
The number of owners doesn't matter if they all want the same thing, which is a share of the same ad market.
We're now in a time when no one wants to buy. There's no motivation for a new owner to buy radio stations.
Look at what happened in Greenville. A chance for a new owner to buy into the market. It didn't happen.
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93.7 HD4 and 98.9 HD2 are running Spanish programming, the same as 106.3, however all (including 106.3) have RDS showing what's playing on Magic's webstream currently.
La Raza format sounds very sloppy and low bitrate, just like the old Activa 103.9 although they're different owners. Imaging has a strange echo that doesn't sound good. I wonder what the likelihood is that this was already in the works or being finalized when Audacy announced they were divesting 106.3? I can't say I've ever seen something happen so fast, at least not in this market.
Sounds like 106.3/93.7HD4/98.9HD2 are being fed by a Barix Box or comrex briclink over the internet and thats going directly to the transmitters, but its Magic's automation is still running and outputting as normal.
I'm pretty sure RDS data can be transmitted over the internet to a transmitter, but i dont know how its accomplished
Ah okay, makes sense. They’ve pulled the plug on the stream, so now nothing is showing in the “recently played” but the RDS/PAD is staying updated 🤪
Yup, sounds like RDS and Norsan are coming from two seperate sources, being fed in two different methods and both can operate at once.
Will they maintain the WSPA legacy call letters or change to something else?
It should be noted that originally WSPA radio and WSPA channel 7 TV were the same company, Spartan Broadcasting. Then they sold the radio stations, switched AM frequencies, and more recently moved from the strong 98.9 signal to the weaker 106.3. Today WSPA channel 7 is owned by Nexstar, and what was remaining of WSPA radio on 106.3 has now been sold by Audacy to Norsan/La Raza.