Bye, bye CFRN. It was cool hearing you when you were on the airwaves.
I usually check out several radio forums online, some I check out daily, others once or twice a week. Through those forums I generally get a decent view of the state of the industry that I worked in for about 20 years.
The DX forums, which are getting fewer and fewer as the years go by, also provide some interesting information from time to time. On one of these DX forums, the HF Underground, I recently learned that four of the stations I've either tuned into, or listened to from time to time, are going off the air -- permanently. They comprise four of seven AM stations in Canada that are being taken off the air.
In fact, they already have been shut down. I found out after the fact.
One of the stations being shut down -- CFRN 1260, Edmonton, Alberta -- surprises me, as CFRN was a sports talker and Edmonton is a big sports town with a CFL football team and an NHL hockey team. CFRN, in fact, was the only sports radio station in Edmonton, a city with a million population metro area.
Stations like 'Funny 1060' CKMX brought some laughter to the airwaves, with a nonstop cycle of various comedy clips. Not any more.
The other stations -- Calgary's Funny 1060 CKMX, Vancouver's Funny 1040 CFTE, Vancouver's business radio CFTE 1410, and an AM station in Winnipeg plus two more AM stations in Ontario that I've never heard before -- all belong to a Canadian telecommunications company, Bell Media, that also owns CTV, a Canadian TV news network.
In all, Bell Media is laying off 1300 people, including newstaff on CTV, and other staff in corporate offices Canada-wide. In a country like the US, 1300 people being laid off is a big enough deal. But in a market like Canada it's even more of a big deal. Reaction seems to be ranging from shock to "what else did you expect?"
The four Western Canada stations -- CFRN, CKMX, CKST and CFTE -- were usually strong stations on the AM dial any particular evening. Sometimes I'd listen to a few comedy clips on CKMX, which used to have a country format, and then had an alt-rock format during the grunge boom. CKMX also had a Shortwave relay station that I used to hear in the early 2010's, competing with Radio Marti which broadcast on the same 6030 khz frequency.
CKMX's shortwave relay (call letters CFVP) also has, naturally, been shut down. The last time I heard it, it was still covered by Marti. I haven't heard CFVP clearly in over ten years -- that's how shitty the Solar Cycle has been. Now, of course, I won't hear it at all.
Right now, as I write this, it's night time, and I have my desk-side Sangean PR-D5 tuned to 1260. I am hearing Classic Hits KLYC, McMinnville, Oregon. I used to hear CFRN covering them with sports talk and ESPN at night. That's how great a signal CFRN had.
No more.
CFTE 1410 went through several formats in its 101 year existence. First on the air in 1922, in the 1970s it was a Top 40 station, that played Can-Con hits for Canadian rock fans south of the border. 101 years and you just pull the plug and lay off some people. That's radio.
RADIO IS SICK, AND EVERYTHING IS GOING ONLINE
It's the general state of radio these days. AM stations are on borrowed time. FM stations are not too far from borrowed time. Old time radio fans often say the migration of radio away from "live and local" presentation has killed radio, and they will say reduced listenership numbers are proof of that. Radio experts say the opposite -- that radio is doing the best job it can to stay vital in a world where everything is going online.
It's hard to determine the fact from fiction here. On one hand, it's fact that everything is going online, "radio" included. I have written previously on this blog about how the music industry's move to the online, streaming model is killing the music industry. The move to online-only, streaming delivery is like a massive steamroller, and not all of the results are good for the industries adopting that business model.
The same thing seems to be happening to other entertainment industries, which -- when they go all online -- they find themselves competing with not just with other competitors in their field, but they also find themselves competing with every other form of content, varying from social media to video games, to sites with numerous content channels, like OnlyFans.
Here is a recent article in Forbes, where it discusses job cuts in media platforms ranging from Warner Brothers' Discovery and Turner cable TV networks (100 laid off), the Los Angeles Times (74 staff laid off), and even Southern California Public Radio (21 layoffs from their 175 total positions). The new online, streaming media model is socking it to a lot of media.
One of the reasons for this shedding-of-workers phenomenon in the media is the decline in advertising revenue at most media platforms. Radio is a prime example. Radio in the US makes approximately one-third to one-half the revenue it made in 2005. It's because advertisers have a LOT more media to choose from than they did in 2005.
Advertisers can pick or choose from gazillions of web portals to use. It's not just radio, TV, Cable, and print media anymore. Advertisers have literally millions of websites to choose from to advertise on. And that massive number of sites drives down advertising revenues. The 'pie' is nearly infinite. The 'slices' are razor thin -- as are ad revenues per slice.
You can't stop people choosing to use their phone to get every form of news and entertainment. It's just so convenient to use the phone to watch, view, or listen to stuff. No one under age 40 uses a radio anymore, and what used to be a 'TV' is now a large internet video monitor. Cable TV, which ruled from the 1970's to the start of this decade, is losing viewers. Cable channels like MTV -- which made hits, and made artists into big stars -- are fading. Other 'legacy' media like Magazines and Newspapers are in their dying throes. For those of us who grew up with these media, and even worked in them, it's a sad state of affairs.
And the changes in media that the greater population chooses -- like the move from broadcast and print media to the all-online model -- only becomes accelerated when the economy is marginal. The first instinct for the media moguls is to shut down marginally profitable operations and lay off people. It happened to me. It happened to literally thousands of other workers in radio since 2005. It happened in the newspaper and news industries, which went from 350K journalists nationwide in the late 1980s to merely 46K journalists (or less) in America today.
And, of course, in the case of these seven Canadian AM radio stations, people got laid off. As someone who was laid off from the radio industry in 2006-2007, I can relate. You almost never get a job again in the industry. Because the industry is not growing. Even growing industries, like the software industry, are laying off people.
Radio, in contrast to stable industries like software, is a dying industry. Those who have jobs in radio now have their days numbered. AI is already being used on the airwaves. It's being used as a test bed on a shift or two on one or two stations, but once the bugs get worked out, you can guarantee that it will be bye bye DJ. Think about it. In the second month of 2020 the largest radio company in the US got rid of 10% of its employees, including airstaff that had great ratings. Does an industry which is more than willing to slough off workers like that, because of a downturn in revenues, sound like one that won't ditch real people for AI voices?
I say this because radio is not, in general, going to make more money in the future. Even the non-commercial stations will not make more money. Because their contributors are generally Gen X or older. The younger demos aren't paying for the non-comm radio operations to the same extent. All radio stations have their days numbered. It may take 15-20 years for what happened to CKMX, CFRN, CFTE, CKST, and the station in Winnipeg and two AM stations in Ontario, to happen to them.
But it's coming. You can blame 'corporate greed' if you want. You can blame the lack of "live and local" if you want. You can blame the fact that FM sounds cookie cutter and boring (which it often does), and blame the fact that stations that aren't boring in their music choices don't get ratings. You can blame the fact that some radio companies flip formats on a station more than Mickey D's flips burgers. You can blame the fact that nearly all music on FM is researched to death, guaranteeing that every song you've heard is one you've heard a gazillion times before, driving you to YouTube with the rest of the radio refugees if you want to hear a little variety.
But really, you can't blame anybody. It's the state of audio entertainment -- and all entertainment -- in the 2020s. Everyone, and everything, is going online. They aren't switching on their radios, because they probably don't have one.
Anyway, so long CFRN. So long, Funny 1060. So long, Funny 1040, and so long 1410 CFTE, which once was a popular rock station north of the border. You all had a good run. I think Funny 1060 was over a hundred years old. 101 years old, in fact. So was CFTE 1410. Both stations were put on the air in 1922.
101 years on the air, and some suit in an office in Eastern Canada pulls the plug on it like it's yesterday's trash. That's radio.
Yep, that's radio -- my industry of choice for just shy of two decades. When I was a little kid, I wanted to be a DJ. My mom and dad rigged up a fake radio DJ studio for me, with a real, working, red on-the-air light and a fake microphone. It was in a space under the stairwell which also had my toybox. The radio 'desk' was big cardboard box. I'd pretend I was playing records, switch on the big red light, and chatter away. That's how bad I wanted to be a radio guy.
Years later, I was a radio guy. I wasn't a known name, but I was on the radio just the same. I was a DJ for maybe two and a half months, a news announcer for three years, and then worked in another side of the radio business for 16 more years.
And you know? When I was a little kid, dreaming of being on the radio, I never figured I'd be writing about it being a dying industry. That's how much things change.
And with that, I'm going to try to finish my latest fiction novelette, and I'll be listening to KLYC 1260 playing oldies for a while. They just played Baker Street. Now they're playing Transfusion by Nervous Norvus. I might as well enjoy it while it lasts, right?
C.C. June 20th, 2023.
ADDENDUM, June 21st.
I made a correction (7 AM stations were shut down, not just 6) and added a link to a Forbes magazine online article about layoffs in the media, along with a paragraph about it.
ADDENDUM, June 27th.
I corrected the spelling of our nation's #2 city from "Lost Angeles" (in the paragraph about the LA Times losing some staff) to "Los Angeles". It was an honest typo. Sort of funny, but not really. I like Los Angeles.
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