The Infinite Dial

Perhaps the most exciting thing about Country radio in the early '90s was that the debut of a successful new hipper-sounding Country station didn't necessarily take a lot of shares from the successful incumbent. The new station won by taking a few people from the incumbent and turning other new listeners on to Country music, often former Top 40 listeners. At the same time, the second Top 40 station in the market would often go away and the remaining Top 40 would get a negligible bump, at best -- a sign of just how bad things were in Top 40 at the time.

A few years later, Top 40 rebounded and by the late '90s/early '00s, there was a building boom. But a second Top 40 rarely grew the audience by 3-4 shares in the way a second Country had. The new, younger leaning, more rhythmic Clear Channel Top 40s of that era usually cut the incumbent neatly in half, leaving them to tough it out with a 3.5 share or, just as often, get out. The new KAMP (Amp 97.1) Los Angeles is the first sign-on in recent memory that might have conceivably added a few shares to the Top 40 pool.

For a while, it looked like new Hip-Hop/R&B stations were creating new listening. Often, a new Hip-Hop outlet would raid the other Top 40 and leave the Urban relatively untouched. But in recent years, Hip-Hop stations have often shown the effects of fragmentation, even before PPM. Now we've seen Clear Channel's KATZ (the Beat) St. Louis decide that half the Hip-Hop franchise is no longer worth arguing over.

So turn your attention now to Boston, where CBS' new All-Sports station WBZ-FM (the Sports Hub) went 0.6 - 2.5 - 3.6 in the October PPM. Entercom's WEEI, meanwhile, is up 4.5 - 5.2 - 5.3 in that same time. Yes, it was Boston in October. Yes, there was a round of Red Sox playoff games involved. Yes, WEEI might have had an even bigger October without competition. And WBZ-FM began life with Patriots broadcasts. But if any of that growth sustains through the fall, that's a big deal.

And if you're wondering where those shares came from: neither of the Rock stations that might have expected a bump from the departure of the former WBCN have seen one . . . yet. If that sustains through the fall, there are definite shades of Top 40 in 1993 and the only good news is that Top 40 did not fall off the face of the Earth as many then predicted. If both Rock and Sports radio were to go up at some point, we would have a format that not only creates new listening for itself but brings people back to the radio, but for now, creating a few extra shares of listening for one's own format is formidable.