No central Alabama radio station has garnered as much press lately as Citadel's adult alternative Live 100.5 has in the last several days. A rumored flip to talk radio has fans of the format up in arms, with over 13,000 fans on a "Save Live 100.5" Facebook page. This is quite the outpouring of support for a station whose primary signal barely reaches half the Birmingham metro area.
It's all going to be for naught.
For all the faces that have shown up on Facebook to support the station, those people simply did not materialize in the ratings. In the 12+ books (which are useless to advertisers but give us an idea of a station's popularity) WWMM placed 16th, behind three AM outlets. Smaller companies can eek out a living there at the bottom, but for a big company like Citadel they need a bigger return on the numbers.
Right now, numbers are everything to Citadel. They've filed for bankruptcy. Cutting costs to the bone is par for the course for these big media companies, but it's taken on a more serious note with Citadel. Staffing a station with seasoned jocks and a competent programmer who knows the genre costs money, money Citadel does not have. The cheaper alternative would be music playing off a computer, but music still costs royalty money, too. So the next cheapest option is to simply put on an existing format that the company is already paying for. With WERC's move to FM and WYDE already there, all of WAPI's competition has moved off AM, so it was a no-brainer to throw this talk on FM to put them on a more even footing.
Citadel, for what it's worth, is not who you want running your music format in Birmingham, anyway. They're the ones that ruined “The X”, the much-loved modern rocker, by first putting it on a big signal (and taking away one of Birmingham's heritage black stations) then killing off most of what made it special. They're making it work with Hot 107.7, but dying on the vine with Rock 99. Is it rock, or classic rock? Who knows. But I digress…
A lot of the comments on the Save 100.5 Facebook page have been along the lines of “I'm going back to my iPod.” Well, that's why this station is going away in the first place. The majority of people who might listen to this are generally technically savvy and already get most of their hipster music from iTunes. They're the people who abandoned radio during the great wave of consolidation in the early 90's, or never grew up with radio to begin with. To them, radio is passé and not worth the effort, especially with 15-minute long commercial blocks during drive time.
If WAPI is to compete today, it must be on FM. It should have been on FM years ago. It stinks when people passionate about radio and the music they love lose their jobs, but losing a gig is what radio broadcasting is all about. It's par for the course. With music radio's future so bleak, look for more and more talented and passionate people to be out on the streets.
Whether WAPI will see a ratings boost from moving to FM, though, remains to be seen. One last piece of the Live 100.5 problem is its coverage area. It has never covered the Birmingham area well, being something of a shoehorned-in rimshot from Tuscaloosa. Moving WAPI to this frequency won't overlap WAPI's coverage so much as supplement it in Tuscasloosa and points south.
The real loser in all this, in the long term, is AM radio. For some reason, people of a certain age forgot that there is an AM and an FM on their radio. The talkers that have done so well on AM are slowly losing listeners who don't even know those stations exist. Hence the accelerated move of talk to FM. It seems strange to a radio fan such as myself, but the ratings magically double, sometimes triple, when a talker moves to FM. AM will continue its slide into dollar-a-holler preaching, paid programming and decrepit, silent facilities too far gone to bring back to life. Whether the medium manages to survive on this and super-niche formats like regional Mexican and nostalgia remains to be seen.
Finally… We can only hope this will be the wakeup call to Crawford that their experiment with WYDE is not working. Is it a talk station? Is it a music station? Who knows. Is it a Cullman station, or a Huntsville station? Or Birmingham? Not sure. It doesn't cover any major market well enough to survive, but it's too big a facility to let go to pot in Cullman. It's future is in as much doubt as that of niche music on FM. ¿Que Buena? 101.1 anyone?
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