WABC/New York embraces local content and older listeners … and succeeds
InsideMusicMedia.Com’s Jerry Del Colliano posted a column on March 31 that — like many of his columns — could have been written by me. Great minds think alike, you know. Entitled The AM Station That Defies Failure, it tells the story of WABC/New York and the success it has had since being bought by a local owner from Cumulus.
WABC is much like numerous AM stations across the country. Powerhouse top-40 format leaders in the 1960s and ‘70s, they lost their way when large corporate owners couldn’t figure out what to do with them. They dropped music, sometimes found temporary success with political talk, and then floundered once programmers focussed more on their FMs.
Weird how a neglected station would lose listeners.
Anyway, for all intents and purposes, WABC was a failure in 2019 when Cumulus Media, owner of KABC (790 AM) here in Los Angeles, sold the station to a 74-year-old New York businessman named John Catsimatidis — a guy with no radio experience other than being a radio fan.
Catsimatidis then did what some think is impossible: brought a dead radio station back to life. How? He made it local. He served his local audience. He wasn’t afraid to embrace older listeners, and he started super-serving those willing to tune in.
And tune in they did. The station has been above a 3.0 share for at least the last six months, and has had a 3.9 share the last two months. It is the top-rated AM station in New York. Under previous ownership, it had fallen to the mid to upper 1s. Could other stations learn from the recent success?
Yes … more than that: the entire industry could learn from its success. The formula is so simple, it’s almost as if stations of the past could help with the lesson. In fact, that’s pretty much all Catsimatidis did … look at what made previous stations “tick,” and applied it to his new toy.
WABC found an audience that was being underserved, then designed a format that would appeal to that audience, in this case an eclectic mix of talk, news, and music. Yes, music … on AM. Weird.
Cousin Brucie, a legendary WABC disc jockey, plays oldies on weekends. The station runs its old iconic jingles. News coverage focusses on the local area. The talk hosts are mostly local, including former mayor Rudy Giuliani, former Rush Limbaugh producer Bo Snerdley, and a founding member of the Guardian Angels, Curtis Sliwa.
Catsimatidis even has his own show, hosted by himself and local broadcaster Rita Cosby.
While it is impressive that Catsimatidis took a failing station and made it successful, he is not alone. I’ve written about the success of stations such as WION/Ionia, Michigan and WRDN/Durand, Wisconsin. What all three and others like them have in common is local owners who care enough to program to their local audience and not rely on cheap syndicated programming.
This approach benefits not only the stations and listeners, but local businesses that can advertise to reach an audience otherwise hard to find. That Catsimatidis does it in New York City, arguably one of the toughest markets in the United States, makes it even more impressive …. and in my opinion, frankly, embarrassing to owners like Audacy that has gone so far as to just shut down some of its AM stations.
This lesson isn’t just for AM, though. FM stations definitely can use more local content , and in the cases in which the local audience is super-served, the results are impressive. Local content is the one thing that Spotify, Apple Music, or any other streaming service simply can’t match.
Fight for the Dashboard
On the heal of the news that engineers at Ford are as lazy or incompetent as those at BMW, Mazda, Polestar, Rivian, Tesla, Volkswagen and Volvo due to the decision to remove AM radio from their future automobile offerings — because unlike every other company they are unable to deal with interference — comes news that GM has decided to drop Apple CarPlay and Android Auto support from future EVs.
While I hate that AM is being dropped, and I believe it to be a bad decision, at least you can — usually, at least — use apps to replace the tuner and in some ways have better reception and better sound.
But dropping CarPlay? That’s a non-starter for me. My family, starting with my grandfather, my father and now me, has owned GM almost exclusively since 1926. If CarPlay is not offered, I will not buy one.
I want the choice to use the mapping software I want to use. I want the ability to use the apps I want to use, for example StreamsHiFi Audio and MyTuner Radio for online radio streams. I can connect my phone to any of my current car stereos and have all of my apps and preferences ready to go; without CarPlay I’d have to set all my preferences individually in every car.
And I certainly don’t want my life controlled by Google, which GM plans to use as the basis for its dashboard infotainment system. I am not a Google fan by any means, and I certainly don’t want their intrusive anti-privacy ad-based system in my car.
In my opinion, GM is making a tremendously bad decision in dropping CarPlay and Android Auto. In doing so, though, you can now understand what is in store for the future … the ability to charge for being part of and using the dash. It is anti-competitive and anti-consumer.
I hope that the move is met with consumer resistance similar to my own – as I said, I will never buy a car without CarPlay ability. Even if I have to keep my current truck forever.
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