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of classical music
From Bach to rock: Fewer stations airing longhair
By Michael Markowitz
On New Year's Day at noon, Miami classical music radio station WTMI-FM played "The Star Spangled Banner," as it had every day since Sept. 11.
Then, after a brief pause, a promotional spot trumpeted "a new dimension in radio" and the station abruptly switched formats to techno-dance.
The last complete classical piece played on the station was Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.
Fittingly perhaps, the first song after the changeover was "Shut the F--- Up and Dance" by a group called Adrenaline.
Decades ago, it was common for several stations in major cities to play classical music. But in recent years, more and more stations have been going the way of WTMI, ditching Debussy for dance pop or replacing Rachmaninov with rock in a bid for better ratings and more marketable demographics.
Just last year, Chicago's WNIB-FM dropped classical music and reinvented itself as a rock station. Prior to that, classical music lovers mourned the loss of the only commercial classical stations in Detroit and Philadelphia.
In New York the demise of WNCN-FM several years ago still rankles its loyal former listeners.
Today there are just 34 commercial radio stations playing classical music in the U.S., a drop of more than 29 percent from a decade ago, when there were 48, itself a tiny number compared to the total number of stations.
And although public radio stepped in to fill the gap in some markets, it too has been shifting away from the classics and toward news and talk. Experts say the trend shows no sign of reversing.
"It's been heading in this direction for years," says Martin Goldsmith, the former host of "Performance Today" on National Public Radio who now directs classical programming at Washington-based XM Satellite Radio.
"Classical music on commercial radio is the victim of consolidation among broadcasters and a drive for bigger profits."
It's not that classical broadcasting is a money-loser. Small, family-owned outlets have earned respectable returns for years.
But since deregulation in 1996 large companies have been buying up these stations, often paying high prices that require them in turn to ratchet up revenues to make the deals work. That invariably means going after a bigger--and younger-- audience than classical delivers.
Bonneville International Corp. of Salt Lake City paid $165 million for WNIB's spot on the Chicago dial. Atlanta's Cox Enterprises spent $100 million on WTMI 18 months before it changed formats.
As a classical station, WTMI's ratings were consistently in the top seven in the Miami market, but it reportedly took in only $8.8 million in ad revenue in 2000. At that rate, it would have taken Cox a dozen years to recoup its investment.
By the end of March, three months after its rebirth as WPYM "Party 93," the Miami station ranked ninth in its debut appearance in the quarterly Arbitron ratings report, but it had vastly increased its listenership in the 18-to-34-year-old demographic coveted by advertisers.
Commercial stations are not the only ones turning away from classical music. Nationwide, large National Public Radio stations have been embracing news and talk, believing that the audiences for such programs are more likely than music listeners to donate money and attract corporate underwriters.
In March, New York's public FM station, WNYC, dealt a major blow to fans of free over-the-air music when it converted its entire daytime schedule to news and talk, eliminating five hours of daily classical programming.
WNYC now broadcasts music only in the evening and overnight, although one of its new afternoon talk programs focuses on arts and culture. (The move made permanent an emergency change that took place on Sept. 11, when the station's transmitter atop the World Trade Center was destroyed and the FM station began carrying the same news and public affairs programming as WNYC-AM).
New York still has a commercial classical station, The New York Times-owned WQXR-FM, but the WNYC switch sparked a torrent of complaints. A petition, describing the 77-year-old station as "an invaluable and irreplaceable cultural service for New Yorkers," was signed by dozens of musical and literary luminaries, including André Previn, Yo-Yo Ma, Itzhak Perlman, Pete Hamill, Nora Ephron and Edward Albee.
Like its commercial counterparts, WNYC justified the change as a response to listener preferences, noting that two-thirds of its FM programming used to be classical music but it drew only a quarter of the station's audience.
So far, from the standpoint of numbers, WNYC appears to have been justified. A spokeswoman for WNYC says the daytime FM audience for the new format is up 38 percent compared to last spring when the station was still broadcasting music.
June 21, 2002 © 2002 Media Life
-Michael Markowitz is a New Jersey writer.
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