KROQ: More World Famous Than 91X?
Written Oct. 30, 2009 by Sean Ross in HD Radio + Internet Radio + Terrestrial Radio with 1 Comment
Good to see CBS continuing to roll out its local stations as HD multicasts in other markets, including bringing Alternative KROQ to San Diego and Hot AC KSCF (Sophie 103.7) to Los Angeles. It's a strategy that we've been endorsing for more than two years. Great local brands are better, even in other markets, than a hastily assembled local product or a white-label generic with local stagers.
That said . . .
Sophie, for those who will now be able to hear it, fills a need in a market that never got a direct replacement for KYSR (Star 98.7) when that station segued from Modern AC to Alternative. So does bringing WFAN New York to expatriate or wintering sports fans in Orlando, Tampa, and West Palm Beach.
KROQ, on the other hand, will be going against two local Alternative stations of relatively similar stripe. It will be interesting to see how that station's charisma stacks up against the also-world-famous XETRA-FM (91X) and KBZT on their own turf. And there are still CBS markets with no alternative station where KROQ would be welcome.
CBS, by the way, has done a great job of promoting its new Last FM Discover channel, which appears both on-line and on HD-2. To listen to any CBS station on-line (or view its Website) over the last few weeks has been to hear about Last FM Discover--another commendable alternative to the HD throwaways.
Reader Comments
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I will preface this by saying that I do like HD Radio, I have it in my car (Sophie on Amp-HD2 and Last.fm Discover are on my top bank of presets), and as a radio geek, I love being able to listen locally to out-of-market stations. I understand and sympathize with the fact that, across the board, budgets are nonexistent, and station employees are stretched incredibly thin and trying to accomplish way too much work than 1 person should handle on a daily basis.
That said, the big defense that radio mounted against satellite (and, to a tiny extent, Internet radio) was that it was live and local. Voicetracking and syndicated shows aside, I fail to see how piping in a station from hundreds of miles away -- or running a national-reaching network like Last.fm Discover or the offerings from Clear Channel's Format Lab like Pride Radio or eRockster or Hit Nation -- makes a station local. Just having the transmitter in a city doesn't make a station local, and not even having a jock can make a station local -- satellite channels have jocks too, and hearing someone on Last.fm mention the Hammerstein Ballroom doesn't do anything for someone who's not in New York.
Personally, I'm glad CBS is making an effort to put quality programming on its HD side-channels by giving its well-programmed FMs a way to spread their reach beyond their home markets, and I would love to see more of that since I like having HD options. But as someone who listened to radio screaming about satellite not being to supply the same kind of localism as AM and FM, this just sounds like an easy fix and a bit of hypocrisy.