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| Seals and Crofts, Baha’i believers |
RADIO
BAHA’I WANTS TO MAKE YOUR DAY
Before
today the only thing we new about the Baha’I faith was that 1970’s folk
crooners Seal & Crofts were members. Who can forget their ode to summer:
Summer breeze, makes me
feel fine,
blowing through the
jasmine in my mind
We
like the thought of blowing jasmine in our minds, so we dug deeper and found what
is the nation’s only all Baha’I radio station: WLGI FM – Radio Baha'I.
WLGI is located in the Florence, SC Nielsen Audio
market. Radio Baha'I [link] brings its listeners the full Baha'i experience
including Baha'i meditation, Baha'i music, Baha'i news and even Baha'I
shopping.
Baha'i
is known as a peaceful religion.
Wikipedia describes it as a Persian religious that teaches the essential
worth of all religions, and the unity and equality of all people. The faith was
established by Bahá'u'lláh in 1863. Baha'i initially grew in Iran and parts of the Middle East,
where it has faced ongoing persecution since its inception.
Since
we had the jasmine flowing, we decided to listen to Radio Baha'I. What we heard was pleasant but slightly alien. The
music is a mix of smooth jazz, folk and sing-a-long songs probably used in Baha'I
meditation. In an hour of listening we
did not hear a single song we recognized or an artist we had heard of. We didn’t hear a single son by Seals and
Crofts.
The
announcer was obviously voice-tracked and we heard a brief module explain that Baha'I
meditation makes your brain “sharper.”
We
checked the ratings for WGLI and learned that in Fall 2018 the station had an
estimated 1,800 weekly listeners. Radio
Baha'I makes good on its promise of love, peace and unity but it seems not
many people care.
KUMT-FM IS ALL MORMON, ALL THE TIME
We
have written about KUMT, a/k/a BYU Radio, so consider this to
be an update.
BYU Radio is a
one-of-a-kind radio station for several reasons.
Perhaps the most interesting
reason is that it is the only noncommercial or commercial station in the nation
where it doesn’t matter if people are actually listening.
In
2018 when the station debuted, KUMT’s creator Michael Dunn, Managing Director of BYU
Broadcasting unit told Variety:
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| Michael Dunn |
“One of the few
pressures we don’t have is monetization pressure. Our clarion call is to do
better work.”
It
is important to understand that BYU Radio
is not a local Salt Lake City station.
It is a simulcast of BYU’s public service programming on SiriusXM
Channel 143. T
he schedule consists of pre-taped talk shows that are rolled over
three or four times per day.
Dunn’s
theory of “only doing better work” and not worrying about reaching a critical mass of listeners may be put to a test soon.
KUMT’s ratings trend line is on the left.
KUMT
debuted last September with what looked like a flurry of listeners. Since then, the station has lost audience
every month.
Why
is this happening?
Because people aren’t tuning in for the Mormon talk shows,
they are tuning in for BYU Cougar sports. KUMT is the exclusive radio voice for
play-by-play of BYU football, a religion that is even bigger than the LDS
church in Utah.
We
are willing to bet that KUMT’s listeners now are tuning in for BYU Men’s and
Women’s Basketball games, not the "up with Mormon" programs.
PODTRAC CHANGES ITS
RANKING CHARTS TO PLEASE iHEARTRADIO
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| Podtrac's replacement iHeart chart |
Last
week on Tuesday (2/26) we reported [link] that Podtrac Analytics, the wannabe Standard of Podcast Listening,
abruptly announced that one of its key metrics, global downloads, was no longer
going to be available.
Podtrac
did not give a reason for the change but industry insiders speculated that
Podtrac’s download analytics might not be in compliance with the Internet
Advertising Bureau’s (IAB) impending 2.0 methodology standards.
Such a red flag
could hurt the perceived veracity of Podtrac’s charts.
The
folks at iHeartRadio had a cow and told Podtrac that they were not going
continue subscribing to Podtrac’s research.
Then
on Monday (3/4), Podtrac ate a big piece of humble pie. Without explanation,
Podtrac reissued the January publisher rankings (above right) including global downloads,
just as iHeart wanted.
Guess
what, the new chart says iHeart is number one in global downloads, beating NPR.
Putting aside the fact that there are many, many reasons why Nielson ratings can be misleading, if not just flat-out inaccurate...
ReplyDeleteBoth WLGI and KUMT are expressly targeting niche audiences. One can debate about the lack of utility in using a BROADcast medium for a NARROW audience, but the point is that they are specifically trying to super-serve a specific audience. In such cases, ratings are a very poor gauge of success. The better gauge is gross revenue, and the best gauge is net revenue. Obviously such information is a lot harder to come by, but with non-profits you can sometimes tease info out of an IRS990 form (albeit often 12 to 24 months removed in time), and with CPB-funded stations you can find a lot through their annual reports to CPB.
I often think of the station I work for, "The Public's Radio" (aka WNPN/Rhode Island Public Radio, Inc) whose ratings were terrible for many years because our signals were not full-market-covering (Nielsen's methodology doesn't work very well in that situation) yet our Non-Federal Financial Support (NFFS; essentially fundraising & underwiting revenue) was always pretty strong. If you just looked at our ratings, you'd think we were a total failure. But if you look at the revenue, we're doing reasonably well.