Randy's FM news station has about this many listeners.

However, the surprising news is that Randy appears to be actually acknowledging that maybe there are some kinks in the execution of the station’s programming, if not the concept. The idea for WWWN is target women listeners with news more suited to that demographic than the typical news talker.

Chicago media reporter Robert Feder has a source who was in on a staff meeting held Wednesday at the station, and according to the source Randy acknowledged that, “[t]here was a feeling that we’d gone too far in focusing on women.” Feder adds that perhaps part of the problem is due to “the assumption of what women wanted to hear on an FM news station, as conceived by Merlin Media’s chief operating officer, Walter Sabo.”

Having listened to the station myself, I agree with Feder. The station’s news sounds watered down and the overall sound is unpolished. I’m not sure that’s what anyone wants, whatever the demographic.

I–along with many other online radio fans–was surprised to learn this morning that online indie rock station WOXY abruptly shut down its live stream this morning. The only explanation was a short blurb on their website blaming “current economic realities and the lack of ongoing funding” for the closure. The situation was all the more surprising given the station’s intensive participation in SXSW just last week.

WOXY website's farewell message

Pop Candy received some information directly from WOXY music director Matt Shiv who said the staff knew there were financial troubles, but maintained operations last week at SXSW because “a deal was ‘in motion’ to continue funding.” The staff only received notice of the closure from owner Future Sounds on Monday and were given no opportunity to say goodbye to listeners.

WOXY has certainly had a bumpy ride going from being a commercial FM station in Oxford, OH, going online-only in 2004, being bought by lala.com in 2006, and then being being sold to Future Sounds and moving operations to Austin last year. As I wrote last month, WOXY was one of my favorite commercial broadcast stations and I continued to be an online listener.

Unfortunately the closure of WOXY only reminds me that online streaming radio is not necessarily an inexpensive enterprise. By comparison traditional broadcast has higher fixed costs. A station must have a real brick-and-mortar studio and a transmitter with tower, and must maintain these technical operations in accordance with federal laws and regulations. Without even accounting for staffing, and depending on location, these base costs easily start at the low six figures annually.

Streaming stations don’t require much in the way of a physical studio–though certainly some of the best ones, like WOXY, have them. They also don’t require transmitters and the power to run them, nor compliance with FCC rules. But while free of these liabilities, streaming stations do have other significant costs to bare.

First, streaming music stations must pay royalties for the right to play music online, which scale up in cost as listenership increases. Second, and most significantly, streaming stations have to buy bandwidth to deliver their streams. And here’s where popularity can become a double-edged sword. Unlike broadcast, each additional listener requires additional bandwidth, which in turn costs more money. If your listenership grows, so does your bandwidth bill.

On the one hand streaming online has been such a boon for small niche stations because it can be relatively inexpensive to reach a small number of simultaneous listeners. For instance, the streaming radio host Live365 charges $112 a month for a plan that accommodates up to 25 simultaneous listeners using a stereo 128 kbps stream (not including any royalty charges). While 25 listeners doesn’t sound like a lot, remember that listeners tune in and out of online radio, and so a station with only that many listeners at any given time may still have an entire listenership of hundreds or thousands.

But when you scale up to broadcast-level audiences the costs also scale up. Back in WOXY’s old home broadcast market of Cincinnati even the lowest rated stations have an average simultaneous audience of about 7000 people. Using Live365′s published rates as a guide, it would cost $26,000 a month to reach this many simultaneous internet listeners. Now, I’m certain that a station with that many listeners can negotiate a better deal, but even extrapolating from a smaller, lower-cost company’s published rates would set the cost at $13,300. That’s a big difference from $26k, however it demonstrates that reaching the same number of listeners online as a small, low-rated broadcast station in large radio market will run at least $10,000 a month.

At that point a streaming station looks like less of a bargain, even if it is less expensive and complex than operating a broadcast station. But then my argument isn’t that a streaming station is more expensive or more of a hassle than a broadcast station. Rather, I’m pointing out that operating a live streaming music station can still be expensive, with costs getting higher as listenership goes up. One advantage of a broadcast station is that additional listeners don’t cost a thing — the costs of running the station are much more fixed as long as the price of rent, power and such remain relatively constant. Reaching 70,000 listeners costs the same as 7,000, provided that many people live in your listening area. Obviously, in broadcast it’s not economically advantageous to have 25 simultaneous listeners like it is online.

I honestly do not know what WOXY’s revenue model was. I know the station ran ads on its website but I don’t recall hearing ads on its live stream. I think the station had show sponsorships that sounded more like underwriting on public radio. WOXY was also being broadcast on the HD2 channel of Cincinnati public station WXVU, which would have prohibited regular ads being run. (As a side note, one has to guess that the HD channel is now silent, too.)

Given that the station had a studio and staff of six, in addition to bandwidth costs, my conservative guess is that WOXY operations ran at least $300,000 annually, and likely closer to $500,000. That’s a fraction of a top station in a major market, but it’s still not chicken feed, either.

WOXY was often mentioned in the same breath as other indie rock online stations like Seattle’s KEXP, Jersey City’s WFMU or Minneapolis’ The Current. But the difference is that that those other stations are also non-commerical broadcast stations that rely on a listener-supported revenue model to fund operations. So, I will be surprised if we see the resurrection of WOXY, at least in a form that sounds anything like it was. The brand may rise again, but it’s unclear if the funding and revenue is there to bring the spirit back to life.

For rock music fans over the age of 30 the call letters are often drilled into memory: WNEW in New York, WMMS in Cleveland, KSAN in San Francisco, WBCN in Boston and WXRT in Chicago. At the beginning of 2009 only WBCN and WXRT remained on air in a form with any semblance to their former glory. As of last Thursday WBCN had joined the off-air list.

WBCN's last analog FM logo

WBCN DJs from the late 80s

Ad for Little Walter's show on WBCN during the 1970s.

As of the third quarter of 2008 total HD radio sales totaled 600,000. Being very charitable, let’s say that even 1 million HD radios are out there by the end of this year. How many of those are in Boston, and then how many of those Boston-area HD radio owners are likely WBCN listeners?

WBCN’s winter 2008 Arbitron ratings gave the station a 2.1 share, making it 15th in the market. With a metro population of 3,912,000, that gave WBCN an average audience of 82,152. Obviously it’s not market leading, but not too shabby either.

For argument’s sake, let’s say Boston has as many as two per-cent of all HD Radios out there–making it a little more HD-radio-rich than it’s proportion of the population would suggest–and that there are as many as 800,000 HD radios in the US. Then it’s plausible that there could be 16,000 HD radios in the Boston market. Even if every single one of them is tuned to WBCN, that’s a loss of about 80% of its former analog audience.

Well, you might ask, what about the online audience? It’s a little harder to crunch the numbers since the ratings for individual stations don’t get released in any systematic fashion. The best we have right now are ratings for whole radio groups. By that measure, CBS Radio, WBCN’s owner, looks pretty good, ranking number one with a cumulative listener base of 4.4 million. But those millions of listeners are spread out over hundreds of online streaming stations. According to the company,

In addition to CBS RADIO’s nearly 200 stations and custom channels, the company also powers AOL Radio’s 200+ stations and Yahoo! Music Radio’s 150+ stations. …

Averaged out, that’s 8,000 listeners per station. Of course it’s unlikely that the distribution is anywhere near that even. Nevertheless it illustrates clearly how going online-only means a massive step down in audience size for WBCN. Since audience size determines ad dollars, it’s a pretty big revenue drop, too.
And since revenue pays for programming and air talent, I’m betting that means the digital-only WBCN will experience a loss of staff, too.

The essence of progressive rock radio was always people; passionate programmers and DJs picking music that resonates with them personally and with their audience, often interacting directly with the artists themselves, whether local or touring. I sincerely doubt that much of that essence will be retained at WBCN in the coming months and years.

Instead WBCN will become another Chrysler K-car version of rock radio. Like the K-car became a sports coupe by slapping on some fancy trim and a classic name, the digital-only WBCN becomes progressive rock by sprinkling in some of the trademark artists and leaning heavily on a storied past. Just don’t expect that strategy to work out any better for WBCN than it did for Chrysler.

What does Kingsford the Pig have to do with any of this? Read on.

It was definitely a feel good moment last week when Clear Channel announced that it plans to donate four radio stations to the Minority Media Telecommunications Council. The MMTC says it will work with the National Association of Broadcaster’s Leadership Training Program to “use the stations for training and to incubate new minority and women broadcast owners.”

If Clear Channel were giving these stations to me, I’d be, like, “THANK YOU CLEAR CHANNEL. DUDE. WOW. THANKS.” David Honig, President and Executive Director of MMTC, did the formalities with a lot more class. “Clear Channel Radio’s generosity and support creates an enormous opportunity not only for our own training programs, but for minority and women broadcasters who would not otherwise have the means to operate their own stations,” he said. Very well put.

The donated licenses—all silent for now, it appears—include KYHN in Fort Smith, AR, WTFX in Winchester, VA, KMFX in Rochester, MN, and WHJA in Laurel, MS. It’s a good thing that these signals have gone dark. I took at look at where the content has been transferred. Woah. I wouldn’t want anyone to have to clean that up.

Wikipedia reports that the lights went out on WTFX went a while ago and its broadcast operation moved to WRME Sportstalk 1550. 1550′s web portal actually has a cheesecake page. Yes way. The Babe Section includes the “Thong of the Day (updated daily)” and “Wet on the Net.” Ok. You’re thinking Sports Illustrated, right? But “M.I.L.F. of the Day” and “Lez B Friends”??? There’s also a photo gallery that purports to have serious news shots but is really just dedicated to more nookie stuff. A little desperate for traffic, are we?

Then there’s KYHN, which is presently silent but apparently has a twin, KWHN, both located in the Fort Smith, Arkansas market region. My favorite part of KWHN’s site is the Viral Videos and More page. I mean the tube of Kingsford the Pet Pig is sort of cute. But the jokes? Be sure to check out, Why Some Men Have Dogs and Not Wives. I had to read it, so you do too.

1. The later you are, the more excited your dogs are to see you.
2. Dogs don’t notice if you call them by another dog’s name.
3. Dogs like it if you leave a lot of things on the floor.
4. A dog’s parents never visit.
5. Dogs agree that you have to raise your voice to get your point across.
6. You never have to wait for a dog; they’re ready to go 24 hours a day.
7. Dogs find you amusing when you’re drunk.
8. Dogs like to go hunting and fishing.
9. A dog will not wake you up at night to ask, If I died, would you get another dog??
10. If a dog has babies, you can put an ad in the paper and give them away.

Wow. That’s really, uh, funny. Through the week the station airs the views of those great friends of women and minorities, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Sean Hannity. These days Rush is taking a break from calling Supreme Court pick Sonia Sotomayor a racist and is doing predictable cartwheels over the Henry Louis Gates mess. Hannity is taking the high road and doing everything he can to stop health care reform. The station’s local host Gary Elmore seems like a decent sort of guy, actually. How’d he get stuck in that place?

How are these stations doing? Arbitron says that in 2007 WTFX (now WRME one presumes) had less than a one percent Average Quarter Hour share in the Winchester, Virginia market—this despite the “Lez B Friends” photos. KWHN pulled in a 3.4 percent share. That’s on the lower end of the scale, albeit better than competing news/talk signal KFPW-AM, which ranked 1.1 share. But many of the music stations in that market have much higher shares, going up to 11 percent.

WJHA of Laurel, Mississippi (“Blues 890″) is silent. Country station KMFX of Rochester, Minnesota (“102.5 The Fox”) is also shut down—maybe. As you can see, the website is still up. And the Rochester Post Bulletin reported about a week ago that an absent deejay is returning to the station. Then it reported on Thursday that the station’s been off the air for a year. So your guess is as good as mine.

Clear Channel says it is going to give the MMTC even more stations. The company says it presently owns 850 licenses. I say donate them all.