Ratings Roundup: November

[CAwasinNJ]

KSL still number 1 though they fell almost 2 share points from October.

The B has been steadily eroding over the last 6 months. I wonder whether that will be allowed to continue under the new management at Cumulus.

On the other hand The End is doing worse now and I think they really need to get that taken care of first. The only full market FM's that are performing worse than KENZ are non-comms. I wonder if anyone has considered resurrecting the Country Legends format that got dropped when 107.5 was sold to Educational Media Foundation. Maybe they could simulcast the talk format from KKAT/860. 860's ratings are almost nonexistent and there's some good stuff on there. I don't think anyone knows about it.

[radioman101]

This completely goes along with my post about changes coming to Cumulus. There are two obvious adjustments that need to happen.

I like the idea of simulcasting 860 on 101.9. A) It would return the KKAT call letters to the frequency and B) as you pointed out, there is some pretty decent content there. They need to do something, because that re-birth of the End certainly has just been a big failure.

As for the B - who knows. Would Cumulus blow up to stations at the same time?

[CAwasinNJ]

I think we need to be realistic here about callsigns. Outside of a few radio geeks nobody cares whether 101.9 becomes some flavor of KKAT. In fact I think it would be a big mistake to use those calls on anything other than a country station outside of the legal ID at the top of the hour. Those calls are too closely identified with country and would confuse the listeners. That you don't want. 860 is KKAT simply to warehouse the calls until they're needed elsewhere.

Trying to launch 2 new stations at the same time seems risky to me. You need a lot of ad dollars to push the word out and splitting that between 2 stations runs the risk of neither getting what they need to succeed. That being said, it's definitely been done. The simultaneous launch of My 99.5 and 105.7 The River (version 1) in 2004 leaps to mind. I also wonder what kind of promotions budget Cumulus has having swallowed one of the biggest radio companies in the country.