Most people in the Radio Biz have never heard of K-Love or Air1, or if they do – they hold it in high contempt for their aggressive acquisition of FM Licenses.
K-Love is a Contemporary Christian music service distributed by satellite to a network of stations owned by the Educational Media Foundation (EMF). EMF also has the sister Air1 network that plays “Christian Rock” targeted at young people.
The non-profit EMF is extremely profitable. They appear to have close to an infinite supply of money to acquire radio stations.
K-Love and Air1 (together) have over 1 million fans on Facebook, far outpacing any other over the air radio stations. (Glenn Beck’s own web site has over 2 million)
A long time ago, I wrote a blurb about how pointless the music is on K-Love. It’s all mostly narcissistic – about how good I feel because Jesus loves me, etc… and how it has nothing to do with the man who lived 2000 years ago and what he taught. You could take most of the songs and replace Jesus with Allah or Buddha and the songs would still make sense. But people like it, so who am I to judge?
Just another indication that Bob Pittman knows what he is doing.