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| The Kansas City Symphony Orchestra |
Classical
music fans in Kansas City are celebrating KCUR’s purchase of a powerful FM
signal that will become a full-time music station.
The move will allow NPR
News/Talk KCUR to drop its remaining hours of Classical music.
The
new Classical station, expected to sign on in spring 2020, will be at 91.9 FM.
KCUR is paying William Jewel College $2 million for the frequency, pending FCC
approval. The station’s current call letters are KWJC. Local news reports say
that KWJC has been off the air for several months.
Kansas
City has been without a full-time Classical music station for almost 20 years.
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| Coverage area for new Classical station |
KCUR’s
purchase was a bargain considering the potential coverage for 91.9 FM.
The
signal is licensed for 7,000-watts at a height of over 600-feet.
This means it will cover a lot of flat land (and people)
in Missouri and Kansas.
Moving
forward, 91.9 FM will offer severe competition for dual-format KANU.
That station now offers
part-time Classical music along with NPR’s major news magazines.
KANU is licensed to
Lawrence, Kansas and is in the Topeka radio market. According Nielsen, KANU had
a 1.0 AQH share and 40,800 estimated weekly listeners in the July Kansas City Nielsen PPM ratings. KANU also had a 4.6 AQH
share in Topeka in the spring 2019 ratings.
A
comment on Tony’s Kansas City, a
local blog about the arts [link], a reader offered this foreboding warning to KANU:
“Great! I have been
listening to [KANU], 91.5 FM, which has good music but: too frequent news
updates; some static due to a weak signal; and the music stops at 3 pm and only
plays on week days. The Kansas City public radio station had a great
opportunity to fill the void when KXTR changed formats, but chose to continue
its yak yak yak over Bach Bach Bach.”
FAMILIAR FACES TOP SPRING
2019 CLASSICAL STATION RATINGS
Spark News has been tracking
stations in markets where Nielsen uses Diary methodology for almost five years.
Because of recent changes caused by Nielsen’s move to Continuous Diary Measurement
(CDM), it has left us with less information to report and what we do get is less reliable.
Since
Nielsen launched CDM, it appears that fewer noncommercial stations are
now subscribing to the ratings. Also, Nielsen has not been releasing “cume” numbers that show
estimated weekly listeners.
Spark News and two other radio trade publications are
talking with Nielsen about access to weekly cume numbers.
Nielsen
is now distributing monthly CDM reports for 44 Diary markets. These monthly
stats are partially based on “reheated” data. For instance, for the July report
for New Orleans is based mainly on data from May and June with some new information
from July.
Nielsen
has made this change because of pressure from advertising companies who felt
Nielsen’s quarterly “books” were getting “stale.”
As
we said in an editorial on August 2nd [link], CDM brings no new
advantages to noncommercial stations. Nielsen is not increasing the sample size
in Diary markets. Many observers, including us, believe Nielsen is devaluing
its product and hurting its credibility.
We
will continue to publish Nielsen Diary and PPM data because it is the
"common currency" of our industry. However, we urge Nielsen to take
steps to make their ratings more useful and believable.
Well the numbers in the diaries are total fiction anyways, might as well get that fiction more often, right? Right??? :-P
ReplyDelete(and don't get me started on PPM!)
What KANU (Kansas Public Radio: KPR) could do once KCUR signs on its Classical music station is to drop the Classical music blocks and replace those with more Jazz blocks in the daytime and early evening while keeping NPR's drivetime flagship shows (Morning Edition and All Things Considered). No different that what Seattle's KNKX has been doing for years and very successful at doing so.
ReplyDeleteCurrently KPR plays Jazz in the late evening and overnight hours.