May 2016 was a
pretty good month for Triple A stations in Nielsen Audio PPM markets compared
to May 2015. Of the seventeen stations
we track, nine were up in one-year weekly cumulative listener trends. Eight
were down from a year ago.
Obviously the
biggest gainer was 89.3 The Current
powered by their historic coverage of Prince’s death and fan reaction. We told this story on June 10th [link].
There were other
Triple A stations that gained a sizeable number of estimated listeners
including one you might now be familiar with: WSGE in Charlotte. Scroll down to learn more about WSGE.
The stations that
gained the most weekly listeners were:
KCMP +33%
WSGE +21%
KUTX +17%
WXPN +15%
The stations with
the biggest declines in weekly listeners were WSME, a college rock station in
Milwaukee, KVOQ in Denver and WERS and WUMB in Boston.
Here are the
results for all of the Triple A PPM market stations:
MEET WSGE - A STATION ON THE
WAY UP
WSGE-FM [link] has
a lot in common with its licensee Gaston College. Based in the Charlotte exurb of Dallas, North
Carolina, both are new kids on the block. But they have accomplished a lot in
few years.
Gaston College
began as community college with two buildings in 1964. WSGE began in 1980 as a
teaching lab. In 1997, Gaston wisely separated the operation of the station
from the academic sector and made it a for-real radio station. In 2002 Gaston
upgraded the signal to compete in the Charlotte metro.
 |
| Cathis Hall |
In 2006 WSGE had
its biggest upgrade: Gaston hired Cathis Hall to manage and program WSGE. Hall
is a well-known jazz diva who loves all kinds of music. She focused the format and brought a real
sense of purpose to WSGE. No other
station in Charlotte was specializing in Triple A, blues, rockabilly and alt-country.
 |
| Tim Greene |
Hall turned up
WSGE’s volume to 11 a couple of years ago when she hired morning personality
Tim Greene. Greene is a proven pro who honed his chops at 100.3 The Beat and Stevie Wonder’s KJLH in Los Angeles. Read more
about Greene on WSGE’s Facebook page [link].
One of the things
that amaze me the most about WSGE is that it is mainly staffed by volunteers.
In many cases that is a recipe for programming chaos and dis-harmony. Hall has
turned volunteers into team players the are making WSGE shine.
Here is WSGE's program schedule:
What gives with WERS and WUMB? They seem perpetually subject to wild swings in the ratings...
ReplyDeleteOne can, and probably should, "point the finger" at WUMB's well-documented signal issues; the move of WUMB to that taller tower in Milton has made a world of difference for in-car listening...but it doesn't change the fact that they're trying to cobble together a bunch of inferior signals to cover the whole Greater Boston region - and that strategy is dubious at best. (I'm not sure they have any alternative, but they're always going to be hobbled by that.)
And you could do the same with WERS's problems committing to a mission; are they a professional, financially self-sufficient Triple A station? Or are they a student educational training ground?
But neither of those really explain why the numbers wildly gyrate from one book to the next.