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Sup peeps, I read this article on the MIAMI HERALD like 2 - 3 days ago.. and I thought I should make a thread about Party's success.. but would it last ?!?!
"Mike Disney is either a genius or a villain, depending on whom you talk to.
''It's unbelievable the way they changed the face of the scene in the last three months,'' Gordon Chin, dance music buyer for Uncle Sam's Music in South Beach, says of Disney's move to turn classical music radio station WTMI-FM (93.1) into dance music station WPYM-FM, Party 93. ``They are educating and making the South Florida dance community much more aware.''
Jack Firestone, a financial planner and a former manager of the Florida Philharmonic, disagrees.
''I'm furious,'' he says. ``It's corporate greed at its highest.''
Disney is not surprised at the passion on either side. As the man Cox Communications hired in January to turn Mendelssohn into Madonna, Disney knew he'd become a lightning rod for controversy. What he didn't anticipate was the new format succeeding so quickly.
February's ratings trend -- the second for WPYM's dance music format -- ranked the station as the third most-listened-to outlet in South Florida, behind urban music stations WEDR-FM (99.1) and WHQT-FM (105.1). And in its target demographic -- adults 18-34 -- Party's February numbers showed the station drawing more than 10 percent of all listeners in the market.
''We'd like to say we knew it was going to catch on this fast, but we really had no idea,'' Disney says. ``It's exciting and it's gratifying. The amazing thing is we're still in our rollout phase. It's only been three months.''
Still, program director Kid Curry of rhythmic music station WPOW-FM (96.5), Party's most obvious rival, remains unconvinced.
''There was a time that there wasn't a [dance] station and now there is,'' he says. ``There's going to be a bump. OK, congratulations. But where it goes after this, we'll have to wait and see.''
History favors Curry. The party music format has been tried in other cities, and while it drew fervent audiences in major markets such as Los Angeles, its popularity has generally failed to expand beyond a small band of loyal listeners.
But from K.C. and the Sunshine Band to Miami Sound Machine to the Winter Music Conference in Miami Beach, South Florida might have the nation's dance-friendliest audience.
''Where else but Miami Beach?'' says Jim Tremayne, editor of the New York-based dance-music magazine DJ Times. ``It's all about dance music there.''
And, Disney says, that makes all the difference in the world.
''This format is perfect for Miami. We see nothing but growth,'' he says.
Across the United States, music-industry ears are tuned to Party. The station's success could set a national trend, inspiring others to follow suit and giving dance music the larger audience observers have been saying it deserves for years.
''It would be huge,'' Tremayne says. ``At Winter Music Conference, I haven't seen so many people excited about a new development in dance music in a long time. A lot of people who have crossover-oriented projects are looking to South Florida for this station to succeed.''
Disney, 48, a bearish man with close-cropped hair, a trim beard and a penchant for business suits, doesn't seem to fit the stereotype one might associate with the young, hip dance crowd. But he has a South Florida pedigree, having once run local talk station WIOD-AM (610). In fact, he's spent most of his radio career managing talk stations -- he lured Neil Rogers to WIOD and most recently worked for FM talk station WCKG-FM in Chicago.
Disney, who also manages adult contemporary station WFLC-FM (97.3), says Cox's decision to flip WTMI from classical to dance music was supported by exhaustive research, then backed by the hiring of a staff with knowledge of the format.
''We saw a hole in the market,'' Disney says. Cox doesn't ``just go out and jam a format into a market that doesn't need it.''
Key among the hires was program director Phil Michaels Trueba, whom Disney is quick to credit for WPYM's early success. A Miami native, Trueba, 30, was most recently program director at Cox-owned rhythmic station WPYO-FM in Orlando.
Disney and Trueba have had to do more than simply switch programming since introducing WPYM -- they've had to reinvent the station.
When the publicly traded broadcasting company bought WTMI for $100 million nearly two years ago, it needed to justify the purchase to stockholders who saw an underperforming station that consistently ranked in the top seven in audience size but -- with 2000 revenue of $8.8 million -- ranked only 17th in the market in earnings. Near the top of that money list were pop and urban music stations such as WEDR, WHQT and WPOW, whose listeners fell well within the 18-49 age demographic favored by advisors. WTMI was drawing listeners as much as a generation older.
So when Cox flipped formats on Jan. 1, WTMI was drawing just a fraction of a percent of its new target audience; two months later, the station had 10.5 percent of listeners aged 18-34 -- a 2,000 percent increase.
''I daresay we didn't hold any listeners,'' Disney says.
That new audience came from virtually every music station on the FM dial, in English and Spanish. The February trends showed WPYM's growth caused WHYI-FM (100.7) to take a major hit, and WPOW and a number of Spanish-language pop stations lost ratings points as well.
Arbitron, the company that conducts the radio audience surveys, cautions that one-month trends can be unreliable, often varying widely from the quarterly ratings ''book'' stations used to set advertising rates. In addition, radio stations that switch formats generally experience an immediate ratings boost as listeners sample the new programming.
So whether WPYM can hold those listeners will indicate the format's true success.
One reason for the format's failure in other markets is the genre's penchant for producing ''one-hit wonders'' -- artists who turn out one popular song then are never heard from again. And without recognizable artists, audiences tend to gravitate back to the pop stations from which they came.
''I personally don't believe there's any way the dance format is going to sustain itself because there's no product feeding it,'' Curry says. ``There are no hits to sustain the listeners.''
Trueba has attempted to address that by concentrating on a skintight playlist that features fewer than two dozen songs in regular rotation -- a strategy that has proven successful at WPOW -- as well as remixes of songs by name acts such as Shakira, Mary J. Blige and Pink.
''I think we're a hit music station. A dance and music station,'' he says.
Meanwhile, classical music fans continued to mourn WTMI's passing.
''Look at the numbers in some of the other markets. It's not that people don't listen to classical music,'' says Firestone, who moved a computer into his living room so he can listen to classical stations from Seattle and elsewhere over the Internet. ``I've made my peace with this. [But] for me to have to be locked at home to listen to [classical music] is a tragedy. It's a travesty.''
Another classical fan who's had to alter his listening habits since January is Disney. He says he has made his peace with the changes.
''I happen to enjoy an awful lot of that music, and I listen to it in my personal collection,'' he says. ``But you look at classical music across the nation and it's a dying [radio] format. We can entertain many more people this way then we ever could have as a classical music station.''
What you guys thinK ?
All info Obtained from Miami herald . |
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