{"id":4079,"date":"2012-01-09T09:40:59","date_gmt":"2012-01-09T14:40:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/streamingradioguide.com\/startingover\/?p=4079"},"modified":"2012-01-09T09:40:59","modified_gmt":"2012-01-09T14:40:59","slug":"who-listens-to-radio-at-2-a-m","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/streamingradioguide.com\/startingover\/?p=4079","title":{"rendered":"Who listens to radio at 2 A.M.?"},"content":{"rendered":"

John B. Wells<\/strong> made his debut over the weekend replacement for Ian Punnett on the Sunday morning edition of Coast to Coast<\/strong> Radio.\u00a0\u00a0 He (or his producer) made a serious blunder that shows he doesn’t understand overnight radio.<\/p>\n

So who is listening to AM radio in the middle of the night?<\/strong>\u00a0\u00a0 Before going into that, it should be noted “It doesn’t really matter”.\u00a0\u00a0 Arbitron doesn’t calculate ratings from midnight to 6 AM and they don’t figure into the overall ratings.\u00a0\u00a0 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).\u00a0\u00a0 You could have 50% share in a major market and still have only a few hundred people listening.<\/p>\n

People listening to radio at 2 AM are generally one of two groups of people – people wanting to go to sleep<\/span> and people trying to stay awake<\/span>.<\/p>\n

Coast to Coast is the former – a quiet show with a lot of talking about things that are of no significance. \u00a0\u00a0 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.\u00a0\u00a0 The voice on the radio comforts them that they are not alone.\u00a0\u00a0 Phil Hendrie’s show also fits in this category.<\/p>\n

The Midnight Radio Network<\/strong> 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.\u00a0\u00a0 The discussions are active topics about real things – not<\/span><\/strong> UFO stories, crop circles, secret global conspiracies.<\/p>\n

With the exit of Redeye Radio’s host Doug McIntyre<\/strong> 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<\/strong> – and to a lesser audience John & Jeff<\/strong> and America Tonight with Kate Delaney<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

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<\/strong> – not just a 10 second clip, but pretty much the entire “Song”.\u00a0\u00a0 I didn’t hang around to hear what he had to say.\u00a0\u00a0 That’s not what overnight radio is.<\/p>\n

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”.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 In general, News\/Talk stations pay only a small fee to ASCAP<\/strong> and BMI (and Soundexchange for streaming) because they are not music stations.\u00a0 They instead have what is called an “Incidental music<\/strong>” 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.<\/p>\n

http:\/\/soundexchange.digitalservices.npr.org\/faqs\/#news_talk<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0\u00a0 The station lost in court, and the payment they owed ASCAP for the statutory violation of the copyright put the station into bankruptcy.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

John B. Wells made his debut over the weekend replacement for Ian Punnett on the Sunday morning edition of Coast to Coast Radio.\u00a0\u00a0 He (or his producer) made a serious blunder that shows he doesn’t understand overnight radio. So who … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,98],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4079","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-radio-biz","category-talk-radio"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/streamingradioguide.com\/startingover\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4079","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/streamingradioguide.com\/startingover\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/streamingradioguide.com\/startingover\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/streamingradioguide.com\/startingover\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/streamingradioguide.com\/startingover\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4079"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/streamingradioguide.com\/startingover\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4079\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4080,"href":"https:\/\/streamingradioguide.com\/startingover\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4079\/revisions\/4080"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/streamingradioguide.com\/startingover\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4079"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/streamingradioguide.com\/startingover\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4079"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/streamingradioguide.com\/startingover\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4079"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}