Niche formats seen as a way to revive AM.

Inside Radio March, 22, 2013 Top News Classical in Los Angeles, bluegrass in southeastern Virginia, and a free-form format in the Washington suburbs. These specialized niche formats are helping breathe new life into a beleaguered AM dial. Apart from the small number of big, lucrative spoken word brands found in most cities, operators say it will take more unique destination formats like these to keep the AM band alive. The latest hyper-niche AM started in an engineer’s basement. That’s where Hubbard Broadcasting-Washington’s Dave Kolesar rigged up an automated internet station to stream music from his oversized music collection. Hearing it, SVP/general manager Joel Oxley was impressed enough that in December 2011 he put it on the HD3 channel of news WTOP-FM (103.5). Spanning music from the ‘40s to today, “The Gamut” lived up to its name and generated more reaction than any of the cluster’s other HD side channels. That’s why the eclectic format with 10,000 songs in active rotation now also airs on 820 AM in Frederick, VA and on all of the cluster’s HD side channels. Few stations on any band segue from the Clancy Brothers to Wilson Pickett to Robert Palmer and that’s the point. “The Gamut is so unusual that it might be amenable for AM in the sense that people will seek it out,” Kolesar says. “Destination formats tend to be a good fit for disadvantaged signals.” At the opposite end of Virginia, New River Interactive Media’s WNRV, Narrows-Pearisburg (990) plays to the rich musical heritage of the Blue Ridge Mountains as the area’s only 24/7 Bluegrass station. Across the country in L.A., Mount Wilson FM Broadcasters’ “K-Mozart” KMZT (1260) is building a small but fiercely loyal following on AM serving a market largely forgotten by commercial FM operators: classical music. “People will tune to AM if they can get content they can’t get anywhere else,” president Saul Levine says. “They just want to hear the music we’re presenting.” With a growing majority of listeners tuning exclusively to FM, broadcasters are grappling with what to do with AM frequencies. As news and sports formats migrate to FM, AM operators are challenged to develop new destination formats that will fill specialized niches, from foreign language spoken word formats to music genres ignored by FM. “The AM band is not dying but there are AM stations that are dying,” CBS Radio SVP of programming Chris Oliviero says. “It’s not the band that’s killing them, it’s the product.” More experimentation is needed to create unique formats, broadcasters say, similar to how FM signals were handed over to renegade disc jockeys and programmers in the mid-to-late ‘60s, spawning underground radio that ultimately helped transform what was then an FM wasteland. “AM is still a good distribution model that’s in pretty much every car in America,” Oxley says. “But we’ve got to be bold and try some new ideas.” It will also take investment in equipment upgrades. “AM radio can be saved,” Levine says. “The primary problem is a lack of interest on the part of operators to secure independent programming and the lack of investment in improving facilities with state of the art equipment.” Both L.A.’s KMZT and Washington’s “The Gamut” WTOP-HD3 use AM as part of a cross-platform play. KMZT’s online stream promotes the AM station for easier in-car listening. The AM markets its higher fidelity availability online and on HD. Likewise, “The Gamut” encourages listeners to experience the station in better sound quality by buying a HD Radio.