This isn’t saying that music that is woman friendly doesn’t work, but if you format a radio station making everything on the web site in pink and talking about breast cancer and why we hate men, men won’t listen. “No girls in the treehouse” doesn’t work in reverse. Men don’t want to invade the female turf and talk about their feelings.
The reason for bringing this up is that the former “Jill FM” (consisting of 3 rimshot class A (small) FM stations around Los Angeles) have been sold for about $8 million after the format flopped.
The buyer? EMF – Educational Media Foundation – the folks behind Air1 and K-Love contemporary Christian music. While the rest of radio is going hat in hand to global banks begging for loans, EMF keeps buying up failed radio stations at a constant pace with lots of cash in hand.
Other than maybe the FM Repeater license thing, few people in radio probably even have heard of EMF. EMF doesn’t rely on Arbitron and ratings so they aren’t seen as competition – they prosper on people sending them money.
If you check the Facebook like! counts,
K-Love has over a million fans
http://streamingradioguide.com/facebook-counts.php?format=18
Air1 is Christian rock targeted at young people and has a bit over 200,000
Compare that to KIIS-FM in LA and Z100 in New York who are playing hit music using the social media game all out and have a little over 200,000
Glenn Beck has a bit over 2 million.
The men who run Clear Channel and Cumulus are not capable of understanding the above. Selling colon cleansers, babe of the day pictures, promoting drug use – they “get” – being responsible moral decent citizens, not so much. That’s where the women are, at least the ones raising the next generation.
I know lots of women and very few are into AM talk radio, most of them prefer NPR, dance music or TV. Woman hosted radio audiences have had not much of a following either since most listeners are male and high pitch voices make them reach for the dial.
So which came first – women not listening to AM talk or AM talk not doing things to attract women? Was Don Regan right when he said that most women just aren’t interested in talking about throw weights for ballistic missiles?
http://www.apnewsarchive.com/1986/Regan-Interrogated-on-Definition-of-Throw-Weight-/id-227df4436a04cdbe76c14297504b611c
Most men aren’t interested in talking about throw weights for ballistic missiles either, so makes me wonder about Don Regan’s thinking.
Hannity has a lot of women callers on his show. Even Rush has a good representative number of women calling in. I think it is based on the fact that women callers seem to make good sense.