i have a question about the radio stations in our market that have no advertiseing, i do not mean the public stations that use fund raising drives to pay their bills, i mean the " commercial" stations albeit the ones with no advertising to pay the bills. i understand they usually are on some kind of computer feed, and thy have no on air personalities to pay, and usually their playlists are rather limited and come from the 60’s 0r 70’s. what i don’t comprehend is how they pay for the other stuff, like license,power, office, technical staff, song rites,(though,maybe their playlist is in the public domain.)
Who or what entity is funding them?
I don’t see how his kind of operation could last very long financially. The only two (short-term) possibilities I can think of are: 1) the station is undergoing a format change, so it is “stunting”, in order to both drive away the old listeners who won’t like the new format, and get people wondering what the new format will be, or 2) a station in the process of being sold or in extreme financial distress, so they are buying time by running the least expensive programming possible. In this category past I’ve heard a station that ran nothing but midi files running off a computer, and another that did nothing but relay the local NOAA weather forecasts. But in both cases the stations eventually resumed a regular format with advertising.
If you tell us which market and what their call sign or frequency is, you’ll greatly improve the odds that some of us correctly figure out what you’re talking about.
I can answer this question with some authority, because I once worked at a business in Berkeley that was designed to monitor radio advertisements in the San Francisco Bay Area. My job was to record all the advertisements that were on radio stations during a three-hour period (two stations at a time) using a console designed by the company’s owner. Then I had to review each ad and had to make a log, identifying who the sponsors were. For example, I had to determine if the sponsor of the ad was a local car dealership, or the amalgam of all the car dealerships of that particular maker in the area, or the maker itself. (And listening to the same ads over and over again is truly crazy-making.)
Among the various radio stations I had to monitor, there was the Bay Area “all news” station, as well was the classical music station. After a while, I was curious as to why the classical music station had such a minimal amount of ads, compared to the news station.
So I asked the owner of the company about this, and he said it was very simple, for two basic reasons. News radio is the most expensive to produce, so they have to have a lot of ads. I calculated that nearly a third of their airtime was advertising. Classical music, on the other hand, is cheap–you can broadcast it with minimal DJ input and the royalties are relatively cheap.
But the real reason, he told me, why some radio stations persist with so little advertising is that the owner is simply holding onto the broadcasting license, so that they can sell it in the future at a profit. The license itself is an investment, just like the license that a liquor store has. That’s why radio stations often change their format in seemingly bizarre ways.
They did that at a local station when they were in the process of being sold. Their “classical with commercials” format just couldn’t get the ads to pay the bills, so they ran without ads until they sold it to the local public broadcasting station (which already had a classical station). The public broadcasting then turned it into a very good indie rock station – without commercials (it’s on the web at http://www.exit977.org/).
As to how they are paying for it, IME, few stations are one-offs. They are usually part of a larger organization, the revenues of the company’s other stations probably pay whatever expenses there are.
The Bay Area classical station, KDFC, is one of the few in the country that is a for-profit, commercial station. It is owned by Entercom Communications Corp.
Happy Camper, are you referring to KMCQ 104.5? Although it stopped broadcasting over the winter it’s now back on the air. This article says that while the reason the stations’ broadcasting commercial free are not clear, many think it’s just to fill time until a big pockets company buys them out.
yes, installLSC, that is the particular station that was the reason i asked the question, althogh i have other sations in other markets across the U.S. that were doing the same thing at one point or another.
Thank You to the members who replied, and shed some light.