When There's No Smooth Jazz
Written Apr. 24, 2008 by Sean Ross in Content + Terrestrial Radio with 3 Comments
An interesting tidbit from yesterday's release of Arbitron March PPM data for Philadelphia and Houston that has, as best I can tell, gone uncommented on elsewhere:
Halfway through March, Smooth Jazz KHJZ Houston became Top 40 KKHH. That station, which was already declining in previous months, went 2.6 - 1.9 6-plus. Urban AC KMJQ (Majic 102) was off 6.9 - 6.7 but maintained its market lead. AC KODA (Sunny 99.1), which had been tapering off since the Christmas music ended, was up 4.5 - 5.9. The traditional jazz station, noncommercial KTSU, went down as well 0.6 - 0.5 although few partisans of either station would see the other as in any way connected.
Another full month might better tell the story, of course, but for now it's intriguing that the demise of Smooth Jazz seemingly does everything to help the Mainstream AC and nothing for the Urban AC -- this even though one of the existential issues for Smooth Jazz had become its musical proximity to Urban AC.
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no surprise there. half or more of the "smooth jazz" playlists were made up of mainstream-to-soft AC material, with little or no urban AC influence. some of the "smooth jazz" core music would occasionally leak over the border into urban AC, but most urban AC's tried to stay away from the music to avoid confusion (though some would air on specialty shows). and "smooth jazz" stations didn't want to be thought of as part of the urban radio structure thinking it would be bad for biz, nor did they want their image to be one of "beautiful/ez for yuppies". thus the addition of phil collins, etc to the playlists. then "smooth jazz" over did it. so when the station would disappear, most of the audience would shift to the market's m-s/soft AC station.
Well, that's Houston. But I think an analysis of the results in a market like New York might be more telling (despite the fact that PPM is not "official" here, yet).
The ethnic component of the market goes without saying, but I know for a fact that Smooth Jazz, when it aired here on CD 101.9 (it recently flipped to Rock), garnered a very "Urban" audience, here.
Anecdotal evidence (mine) showed that just about every Black cab driver in the City that I ever encountered had either it, or all-news WINS (?) on (believe me, if you're working a 23 1/2 hour shift, you're not going to be jammin' to Hot 97! :-)
Seriously Sean, I'd love to see the PPM stats of 101.9's flip to Rock vs. Smooth Jazz, here in New York.
In Houston you will now find KODA running specialty jazz programming on Saturday night and Sunday mornings since the demise of KHJZ. This is something KODA did previously before KHJZ came on the air back in 2002 or 2003. KODA had some good high shares with their specialty jazz programming.