Radio Disney, a pop music radio network that was aimed towards young people and children, recently announced that it will end all of its broadcasting at the end of this year. The Radio Disney network, which started out on a large network of AM radio stations across the US -- and stayed on the AM band for almost 20 years -- will be completely eliminated. Being online-only for about four years, their stream will be dumped. People will be fired.
Radio Disney will be no more. Mickey Mouse is kissing radio goodbye.
The news, of course -- pandemic or no pandemic -- came as a shock to many, if not most of us who enjoy radio and otherwise follow the industry.
After all, Disney is a well heeled, gigantic entertainment company. And it openly embraced, and touted online streaming as the future of radio. That was just over four and a half years ago, when the last of its over-the-air radio stations was sold. One would think that if anyone can make streaming radio work, it would be one of the largest entertainment corporations in the world.
ALL DIGITAL DIDN'T APPARENTLY DELIVER
But some of us got the feeling Disney was having second thoughts about broadcasting in general when they got rid of their AM stations in the latter part of the last decade.
In 2014, Disney announced they would be selling all their Radio Disney radio stations, and effectively taking Radio Disney off the air, except for some FM HD2 channels in various metros across the US, where the network would remain. For all intents and purposes, Radio Disney would be an all-digital operation -- concentrating on their streaming website, with the HD2's providing token support to over the air radio broadcasting.
But, obviously, the new improved model didn't last.
It's an interesting example of a broadcast operation supposedly embracing the online future, only to find that the online 'future' does not deliver on its promises.
To explain the irony of this news, a bit of background about Radio Disney is necessary.
RE-DISCOVERING MY RADIOS, AND DISCOVERING RADIO DISNEY
To start out with -- the subject of Radio Disney is a complex one when MW / AM fans talk about it. Some guys say the station was pointless -- they'll say the music was for kids, it was stupid, a waste of airwaves, etc.
Others, like myself, found it fun to listen to at times, if only because they played pop music over the MW band. The first time I got into listening to Radio Disney was in the Fall and early Winter of 2011, when I got back into the radio hobby after a long pause (maybe 10 years).
I had pulled a lot of radios out of the closet -- older transistor radios, several boomboxes, and even a CB radio I hadn't used since 1990 -- including some radios which I'd forgotten I had. I then cleaned them all up, including my Yaesu FRG-7, which is an excellent MW receiver. I put out a 150 ft. low wire, out in the yard, stringing it over a hedge, and through this antenna, the FRG-7 was a MW DXing monster. Yes, even through a low wire.
It was one night, probably in September or October 2011, I fired up my FRG-7. With a good set of headphones plugged into the headphone jack on the front of the radio, I tuned across the MW band. I was taking notes, of course, because I was re-discovering forgotten territory. In my years of not DXing the MW band, the band sounded different. The band itself hadn't changed much, but the stations had.
Anyway, this one particular night in 2011 I just tuned in to 1580 khz, which by now I knew was the territory of a talk station in Oregon, KGAL. Suddenly I heard the pop music coming into my FRG-7's headphones like a distant wave.
To my surprise, instead of hearing the usual conservative talk that KGAL played, there was this upbeat 'thump, thump, thump!' of dance pop, and the cheery vocals of pop singer Carly Rae Jepsen. Looking up my DX records, there was a station in Phoenix, Arizona which I'd heard on that channel in the past, if only rarely -- in the 80's it was called KNIX, and it was a country station. A quick peek at the internet showed me that the station had now changed their call letters to KMIK -- for Mickey Mouse.
Soon enough, I heard the cheery, female voice of the DJ in my headphones: I had just tuned into Radio Disney.
Being up here in Rain-land and hearing a station from warm and dry weather Phoenix, Arizona was cool enough. But what made it cooler was this distant station from the land of non-stop sunshine played pop music.
I kept listening to KMIK after that, which, because of its 50 KW signal, often boomed up here from the Valley of the Sun. I also discovered several other Radio Disney stations at night, including the one in Portland on 1640, which often came in strong during the daytime as well.
RE-DISCOVERING GOOD POP -- INCLUDING DISNEY'S OWN POP MUSIC
And to my surprise, most of the pop music I heard on Radio Disney was very, very good -- much of it electronic dance music, by artists as diverse as Taio Cruz ("Dynamite"), Owl City ("Good Time"), Selena Gomez ("A Year Without Rain"), 3OH!3 ("Follow Me Down"), Cobra Starship ("You Make Me Feel"), Pitbull ("Back In Time"), Calvin Harris ("Feel So Close"), Rihanna ("Love in a Hopeless Place") and numerous others, including a bunch of Disney artists whose songs were also surprisingly quite good (Shane Harper's "Dancin' In The Rain" being one of them; "Guardian Angel" by a couple Disney singing stars, Tyler James Williams and Coco Jones being another).
Here is the video for "Guardian Angel", which got heavy airplay on Radio Disney in 2012. I was impressed with the song, and its performance. To my knowledge, this song didn't get much airplay on regular CHR / Pop Hit radio.
Up until 2011 and 2012 I had never enjoyed pop music, actually, especially after the mid 1980's, when I lost interest in it completely. Now it seemed a lot of the pop music was really creative and worth hearing.
All that aside, I managed to log most, if not all, the Radio Disney stations in the Western US, and I'd listen to the local Disney outlet (KKDZ 1250, now South Asian programming) from time to time as well.
Fast forward two years. As most radio aficionados know, the AM band is slowly dying. It's hurting because radio revenues industry wide (both AM and FM) have been dropping since 2005. The core audience for the AM band is older GenXers and Boomers, people over age 45-50. It's difficult for many AM stations to find good advertisers.
Disney didn't have this problem. They used the radio stations to keep kids interested in their music stars, and for a while, the strategy worked. When Disney got into radio in 1996 they bought AM's in every major metro. It was a cheap way to get your in-house pop music played on the air. And a lot of kids apparently tuned in to hear their favorite Disney stars' songs play 24/7 on these stations.
Even in 2014, when Disney decided to pull the plug on their AM stations, almost a fifth of their audience was still listening to the AM stations (18%, according to their own data).
NO ADVERTISING REVENUE NECESSARY
The stations, and Disney, also didn't need to depend on advertising. Not only was Disney a multinational, corporate powerhouse with bottomless pockets, the Radio Disney stations WERE the advertising -- advertising for their brand, for their music machine that turned young TV and Disney movie stars into pop singers, and the network of Disney stations provided instant airplay, and free promotion for their singers.
Unlike most other music production and recording companies, which had to jostle for airplay on commercial radio, Disney already owned stations in every major metro in the US. And Disney stars got their airplay, lots of promotion, and it obviously drove sales of those artists' music. No payola needed!
And the quality of the programming, as I said previously, was excellent. Even the Disney actors' pop hits were good. There was one track I recall that was sung by a young Disney star -- I had to look up her name, it was Coco Jones -- but her voice was as powerful, as gritty and soulful as Amy Winehouse or any other, well-known, bluesy pop diva.
When I finally found out who the singer was, it turned out that when she made that record, she wasn't even out of her teens.
The Disney machine definitely knew how to make quality music for quality airplay. Which stands to reason -- they had the recording facilities (including a high tech studio in Orlando, where the nu-metal band Skrape recorded their first album), and they had the personnel, the writers and musicians, to put it all together.
DIGITAL, HD, and Rose Tinted Glasses
So, what happened? According to Disney, by the end of 2014, it was time for a change. After all, streaming was the 'future'. They could afford to ditch the fifth of their listeners who listened via the AM radio, believing that they would easily pull them over to the internet stream.
To fill the over-the-air void, they contracted with a large, US radio company to have Radio Disney broadcast on FM HD2s in most major metros.
But there was a problem, Houston. :-)
A big problem, it apparently turned out.
Apparently not enough kids and pre-teens and 'tween's were using their phones to listen to Radio Disney's stream. As for the switch from AM radio to FM-HD2's, HD radios were still hard to find, especially for kids. After I finally got my HD radio, Radio Disney only remained on a local HD2 for a couple months, before Disney yanked it off the air.
One radio industry expert on a forum online thinks that Disney believed their own faulty data. They thought, like many, that no one was listening to the AM stations. They may have misinterpreted the streaming data as well. Perhaps not as many listeners were streaming as they thought. Maybe more of the kids and 'tweens' were listening to the AM stations than they originally thought. When the stations went dark, and switched to conservative talk, Asian, Punjabi, Spanish, religion, money talk, or sports, the kids apparently just gave up on Disney-broadcast music altogether.
After all, every city in the US already has a slick CHR, commercial pop station. Many have two or three of them.
Either way, I have to admit I lament the loss of Radio Disney, even though they don't lament giving up on all broadcasting whatsoever. They certainly didn't lament losing those few AM listeners who were out of their demographic, and there were probably more than a few of them. Some of them might have been parents, or grandparents, of the kids who were the primary target audience.
I still have about an hour of recordings of the Radio Disney station in Portland, 1640 KDZR, when it was blasting Disney's flavor of pop up and down the I-5 corridor every night. The recordings were made in October 2015, a few months before the last five Disney AM stations went off the air. When I heard the tracks after downloading them off my Grundig G2 radio, the recordings were a nice glimpse of pop music as it was that year. It brought back a lot of memories of the mid-part of the 2010's.
KDZR in Portland were one of the last five Radio Disney holdouts, if only because they were one of the last stations to sell. Salem radio bought KDZR for about $250K in 2016, and before the end of that year, Disney left the AM band for good.
Now KDZR are "The Patriot", a conservative talk station. I sometimes tune past it, and maybe hang out on that channel for a minute or two, but it's definitely not the same.
RIP, Disney. You almost had a 25 year run -- 20 of those years being on the AM broadcast band. You don't miss radio, but part of it misses you.
I'll end this article on Radio Disney on an upbeat note -- a video of one of their better pop songs. Earlier in this article I mentioned Shane Harper, one of the Disney singing stars who had a 'hit' that got a lot of airplay on Radio Disney in 2012. The song was a catchy, infections and upbeat, and well put-together tune called "Dancin' In The Rain". Like the other track I mentioned -- "Guardian Angel", I don't think this song got regular Hit Radio airplay, but in my opinion, it should have. It was a good track.:
MICKEY MOUSE FINALLY LEAVES MY WINDOW :-)
Almost fitting -- just before starting on this blog article -- I took down the last of my electric Jack O' Lanterns, which I left up a couple months late this year -- well, because. The outdoor ones went into the closet first, and the last one was my Mickey Mouse electric pumpkin, which I bought in October 2016.
Mickey Mouse says goodbye to radio, 2016 -- Mickey Mouse says goodbye to Halloween, December 2020.
Christmas lights still have to go up on my Hawthorn tree. That will happen later tonight.
Right now it's around 45F / 8C outside. The terminal rain stopped for a while, but it's supposed to come back soon. Now it's time to put up a few Christmas lights for a holiday I'm not really celebrating in less than five days. :-)
Until later, my friends,
Peace.
C.C. 12-19-2020, & 12-23-2020
Addendum: April 5th, 2022: I added the video of the song "Guardian Angel" by Tyler James Williams and Coco Jones, two of Disney's own stable of pop singers. I also added the video link to 'Dancin' In The Rain' by Shane Harper, another Disney pop singer. At the time I wrote this blog article in 2020, I didn't know how to add videos to an article, and these songs I think were worth including.
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