By Matthew French
Staff Writer

The landscape of radio is always shifting. One minute, a station that had been playing Bryan Adams is now playing Adam Ant.

Radio listeners today are much more savvy than their predecessors, and can choose from their broadcast radio, satellite radio services, Internet radio and their own recorded digital music. The competition for listeners, and advertisers as the lifeblood of the industry, has become much more fierce as the medium has gotten continually more crowded, especially in the past few years, says Lee Matthews, operations manager for Clear Channel in Charleston, operator of The Drive, which recently underwent a format change.

“The baby boomer generation is getting older, and their replacements are what are referred to as Generation X and Generation Y,” Matthews says. “They aren’t trusting of hype and know they can get their listening entertainment from a number of sources.”

Radio stations will often switch formats with little or no warning to its ­listeners. The change, according to radio executives, is made either because the station is losing its share of listeners, or a new group or music genre is on the rise and seen as a potentially untapped, or undertapped, money source.

“Radio is a tight-lipped industry,” explains Michael Baynard, general manager of Jabar Communications of North Charleston, which runs three stations in the Charleston area. “You will very rarely get any indication that a station is going to switch formats, for fear that someone else will beat you to the punch.”

In the past several months, a number of stations have abruptly changed formats as their parent companies switched strategies to try and capture more advertising dollars.

Finding a niche

One of the more drastic of the many changes came on Dec. 1. Hot 98.9, traditionally a hip-hop station, changed to a totally Spanish format, playing Latin-themed music as well as providing commentary, news and advertising in Spanish. Hot 98.9, run by Jabar Communications, is the only FM-band station in the region to broadcast exclusively in Spanish.

Baynard says the company was running a small Spanish-only AM station out of Summerville, which at 1,000 watts could barely reach downtown Charleston. But despite its limited range, the station had a large and fiercely loyal following.

“The station would host these entertainment festivals promoted by the station and, despite the limited reach, we would get 7,000 or 8,000 (people) showing up for these little festivals,” Baynard says. “It was clearly a force that wasn’t being addressed. We figured if we were getting those numbers to show up, there had to be an underserved population in excess of 40,000 to 50,000.”

Baynard says the move immediately began to pay dividends, as companies, most of which are Hispanic-owned, began calling him to buy advertising air time, rather than his sales force soliciting them. The station and its parent company are now involved in a campaign to educate non-Hispanic-owned companies about the buying power of the Hispanic population.

“The national census shows that the Hispanic population is growing by about 5 percent per year and will represent 10 percent of the gross national product by 2010,” he says. “This is a community that works hard and re-invests in its businesses to grow them.”

Given the rise in immigrant population from Central and South America, as well as Mexico and the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, Baynard says it was only a matter of time before a radio station flipped its format to accommodate them. Officially, the Hispanic population of the tri-county area more than doubled from roughly 12,000 to 25,000 from 1990 to 2000.

“Hispanics traditionally have a higher number of illegal (residents) living in this country, and they often aren’t likely to fill out any forms that are sent to them,” he says. “They don’t tend to answer surveys or questionnaires or anything that even remotely resembles a government form.”

And that plays right into Baynard’s hands, he says.

“I don’t see a Sinclair or Infinity Broadcasting or a Clear Channel in this Hispanic marketplace in Charleston until they get a report that says Arbitron sees a 10 percent Hispanic population in this area,” he says. “And that just isn’t likely to happen for a while, so we’ll already have brand recognition and customer loyalty when the big guys do come around.”

Arbitron Inc. is an international media and marketing research firm serving radio networks, cable companies and advertisers by providing them with marketshare information.

Tapping a niche market is nothing new to Jabar Communications. It also operates a gospel station that is in the top 10 listened-to stations in the region and the AM Hispanic station.

“We have found, over the years, that we get much more loyalty from ethnic radio listeners,” Baynard says. “My gospel listeners turn that station on, for lack of a better word, religiously, and it’s on all day long in stores and beauty salons and in homes. The same holds true for the Spanish station. Oftentimes, it’s the only thing they will listen to all day.”

‘Red’ vs. ‘Blue’ radio

On the other side of the radio dial, Charleston’s formerly conservative talk show station has taken a literal 180-degree turn, changing from the ber-conservative Rush Limbaugh to the ultraliberal Al Franken. The station, owned and run by Clear Channel, now caters to the left-leaning listeners in the Lowcountry.

“If you take an overall look at South Carolina, you’ll definitely see red,” says program director Richard Bachschmidt, referring to the colorful term used to describe Republican voters in the November election. “But if you break it down and zoom into our coverage area, you’ll see it’s not such a blanket issue. We are trying to determine how to best impact our listeners with both ratings and revenue.”

Clear Channel is playing it safe, however. While its AM station hosts talk radio for the blue listeners, area reds can still get their fix of conservative talk on the FM dial, through Clear Channel’s WSC-FM on 94.3.

Given the vehemence with which people defend their political and ideological beliefs, Bachschmidt admits there is always some concern that content on a politically driven talk radio show could scare off potential advertisers.

“That’s always the case with political talk radio,” he says “But advertisers realize that in this business you can’t generally afford to be all in or all out. Clear Channel Charleston is among the first to put a station on the air to satisfy the desires of a growing audience for progressive radio.”

Less radical, but change is change

While not as radical a change as switching from hip-hop to Latin, or conservative to liberal talk radio, other stations in the Charleston area have undergone similar format changes in recent months, further diversifying the area’s radio landscape.

Early last year, LM Communications, which owns and runs FM stations 98X and 105.5 The Bridge, underwent a format change. 98X went from being classic rock to “active” rock and The Bridge went from playing “rhythmic oldies” to a more classic rock style.

Charlie Cohn, vice president and general manager of LM Communications, says the company made the move to establish itself as a rock company, saying no other radio company in the region had focused exclusively on that genre.

Another more recent shift in the Charleston radio scene came Christmas day when 100.7 FM, formerly known as Alice, changed to become The Drive. What had been a “Top 40” station began to focus more on music of the 1970s through the early ’90s.

“With so many other options available for personal entertainment, music, news, we felt we had to re-attract people to basic radio,” says Clear Channel’s Matthews. “Alice was all about light rock, where The Drive is targeting the 35-plus-year-old, mostly male, who was in college at the time this music was playing.”

Matthew French is a staff writer for the Business Journal. E-mail him at mfrench@crbj.com.

SUBSCRIBE | REPRINTS | CONTACT US

Phone: 843-849-3100    Fax: 843-849-3122