John B. Wells made his debut over the weekend replacement for Ian Punnett on the Sunday morning edition of Coast to Coast Radio. He (or his producer) made a serious blunder that shows he doesn’t understand overnight radio.
So who is listening to AM radio in the middle of the night? Before going into that, it should be noted “It doesn’t really matter”. Arbitron doesn’t calculate ratings from midnight to 6 AM and they don’t figure into the overall ratings. Radio stations with 24 hr licenses aren’t even required to be on the air (a station can legally be off the air from 10PM until 6 AM if they wanted to). You could have 50% share in a major market and still have only a few hundred people listening.
People listening to radio at 2 AM are generally one of two groups of people – people wanting to go to sleep and people trying to stay awake.
Coast to Coast is the former – a quiet show with a lot of talking about things that are of no significance. The audience is made up of people who don’t have jobs – retired people, people with sleeping disorders or other physical problems, people with psychiatctric disorders, and people living in a house by themselves – none of which are of interest to most advertisers. The voice on the radio comforts them that they are not alone. Phil Hendrie’s show also fits in this category.
The Midnight Radio Network is the opposite type of show – it is targeted at truck drivers and other people driving across Kansas in the middle of the night – who need stimulation to keep them from drowsing off. The discussions are active topics about real things – not UFO stories, crop circles, secret global conspiracies.
With the exit of Redeye Radio’s host Doug McIntyre back to local radio, live overnight talk radio has 3 basic choices – Coast to Coast, Redeye Radio (with the Trucking guys hosting) and Phil Hendrie – and to a lesser audience John & Jeff and America Tonight with Kate Delaney.
The “Blunder” Mr Wells made was he doesn’t understand that he is doing a show whose purpose it is to put people to sleep – not one that people want to focus their minds to listen to – he came out of a break playing heavy metal music – not just a 10 second clip, but pretty much the entire “Song”. I didn’t hang around to hear what he had to say. That’s not what overnight radio is.
On a related note, I think Coast to Coast generally is cruising for trouble, but maybe there is some arrangement that I don’t know about, not being in the “radio biz”. In general, News/Talk stations pay only a small fee to ASCAP and BMI (and Soundexchange for streaming) because they are not music stations. They instead have what is called an “Incidental music” license – which covers the station in the gray aera for brief periods of music – generally 30 seconds or less and coincidental to the content of the show.
http://soundexchange.digitalservices.npr.org/faqs/#news_talk
A news/Talk radio station without a full music license carrying a syndicated show that plays an entire song is likely to eventually get a phone call from ASCAP. In one case I remember, a radio station had no ASCAP license at all, and got nailed because Dave Ramsey had played a song covered by ASCAP. The station lost in court, and the payment they owed ASCAP for the statutory violation of the copyright put the station into bankruptcy.
I was listening to Coast to Coast in the past couple of weeks when Wells was hosting. A caller point blank said (paraphrasing) “I love your voice and topics, but please don’t play blaring music in the middle of the night, it wakes me up!” Wells replied that was his exact aim — to wake up the listeners (whom he did not want sleeping). Clearly you have discerned how clueless Wells is about his audience. I think Wells has a great voice for late night radio but he is definitely starting on the wrong foot and will likely lose a great deal of audience if he keeps blasting the heavy metal at 3 am.
I have been working an odd shift job for the past year, therefore I now listen to ‘wee hours’ radio on a daily basis. I occasionally tune in to Coast to Coast, but usually I tune in the BBC on my local NPR outlets — the drone of voices on the Beeb is the perfect cure for insomnia. As a plus, I am sometimes awakened in the middle of the night by a braking news story. (I first heard of the Japanese tsunami last March on the late night BBC).
(footnote: my work schedule is also the reason I rarely test anymore — most of my radio listening is now over the air, not on my PC)
I’m one of those trying to get to sleep, listening to the 2am radio shows.
I used to listen to the Red Eye, and enjoyed the music and McIntyre;s talk.
Maybe it’s too soon, they’re still trying to figure out what to do. But i can’t listen long to the 2 schlubs blabbering to each other on Red Eye now.
You’re correct that they’re gonna wander a bit. Eric and Gary have done their show for 18 years (more or less) pitching to a very niche audience. Usually they mostly only talked about politics when it was something that directly affected truckers, like deregulation, fuel taxes, etc… but probably the last 5 years they spend more and more time talking about politics. It’s definitely not a “put you to sleep show”…. the air horns blasting in the commercials probably are a bit rude 🙂
I don’t know why this deal happened. Dial Global was syndicating the Midnight Radio show – I suspect Dial Global didn’t want to renew their contract, and Cumulus made them an offer. There is some ugly history that I only slightly remember with WLW in Cincinnati… they have a non-syndicated show with “Trucking” in the name (America’s Truckin’ network), and someone was related to someone and the issue of the word “Trucking” being in the name “Midnight Trucking” became a lawsuit, I think. They still sometimes use Trucking in the name of their show, sometimes not.
Doing a “midnight trucking” show has some pretty significant geographic boundaries, and satellite radio is probably cutting into their audience big time. To have truckers listening to you means that the station can’t be fading out every 20 miles (won’t work on FM)…. and there are parts of the country where middle of the night trucking is not a big deal. It’s mainly a midwest US show, and maybe Eastern Seaboard.
Maybe their trucking audience is the ones stopped @ the truck stop overnight.
And those people trying to sleep, and listening to them streaming
Anyway, I think the new Red Eye is a downgrade from the original show.
The truckers in the truckstops are busy taking a shower, hooking up with prostitutes and stocking up on NoDoze and eating in the Professional Drivers section of the restaurant.
Much of the truck driving is done overnight, especially if the truck is going to or through large cities – that way they avoid the traffic jams of the commuters during the day. It’s a whole thing that most people who live and work only during the day never realize exists.
A fair amount of my youth was spent riding Greyhound buses in the middle of the night – my father enjoyed the the idea of sleeping on the bus overnight as a way to avoid the cost of the family staying in a hotel.
As a teenager (I think it was my 16th birthday), I received a ticket that allowed me to ride (by myself) from North Carolina to anywhere in the country. I went to San Francisco, mostly to ride the streetcars. Along the way, I had the opportunity to spend the night in a flophouse in Denver near the Bus Station. I think everyone should do that at least once in their life.
These days, 16 years aren’t perceived as being capable of tying their own shoes, and I’m sure my parents would be arrested today for child abuse for letting me do that. There were no cell phones or internet cafes, of course, I had only the cash on my person and calling home on the phone meant depositing coins in a pay phone or calling home collect.
Along the way, I also visited Las Vegas, where I had fun playing the pinball machines and watching compulsive gambling in action.