Friday, September 17, 2010
Hot Goss VSC Board Member: Student Listening Habits 'Not the Main Motivation' For Proposed WRVU Sale
Posted by Steve Haruch on Fri, Sep 17, 2010 at 3:38 PM
A post this morning on radio-info.com states that, "The immediate local speculation centers on a potential buyer such as K-Love parent Educational Media Foundation, which doesn’t have a Nashville outlet for its contemporary Christian network service." I'm not sure where this speculation is coming from. Wollaeger says that no potential buyers for the broadcast license were ever discussed in the "extensive talks" the board held on the subject. A call to Educational Media Foundation has not been returned.
As for the sale of the broadcast license: "As the board sees it, we have a valuable asset of declining value, at a time when ad revenues for print ... which is the main source of revenue for WRVU ... are declining," Wollaeger says, "and ... the possibility of selling the license came up because, by selling it, there's a chance for endowing VSC, and thereby being independent of ad revenues."
So in Wollaeger's view, this is pragmatic: With revenue streams slowing — if not quite dried up yet — cash in your most valuable asset while it's still worth something, and build a new media model. In addition to the money from the sale of the license, WRVU would "instantly have $25,000-a-year savings," Wollaeger says, because it would no longer have to rent the broadcast tower or pay an engineer.
Of course, cost savings are going to come as cold comfort for fans of 91 Rock who, like me, have never attended Vanderbilt but discovered and became regular listeners by stumbling across the station on the FM dial. "People in the general community can also listen to it streaming," Wollaeger says. And while he says that, like me, he mostly listens to WRVU in the car, even that's not a reason to mourn the loss of the FM version. Citing smart-phone apps that are able to stream Internet radio, Wollaeger says, "The car industry is betting that this technology is the future."
Still, Wollager admits, "I'm not going to pretend there isn't going to be something lost."
Even so, Wollaeger says, WRVU's audience as it stands is "very small," and "with more money to promote it, there might be an even bigger audience." Some have suggested a parallel with WOXY, the Austin-based Internet radio channel — motto: "the future of rock ’n’ roll" — that went belly-up in March. Key passage from this obit at Radio Survivor:
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.
A new, all-streaming WRVU would start from a much different place than WOXY: It would have the endowment established by the sale of the broadcast license to lean on — assuming that's enough capital to sustain the station, its new infrastructure and, potentially, the bandwidth required to reach a larger audience in and beyond Nashville, in perpetuity.
In an email that went out to WRVU DJs in advance of the public announcement, VSC Board secretary Paige Clancy wrote, "We’re eager to hear comments and reactions from you." Wollaeger admits that feedback from alumni has so far been "universally negative," adding, "I think I'd feel the same way."
Comments (16)
Showing 1-16 of 16
Wow, $25,000 in savings each year! Are you kidding me? That's not enough to even be an arguable point for the sale.
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WRFN speaks with Theatre Intangible on their likelihood of buying the WRVU license:
http://www.theatreintangible.com/?p=931
The correct figure for annual savings associated with no longer broadcasting over the air is 75K.
-- Mark Wollaeger, VSC Chair
Hey Mark
From what I have read you have lost that and more from alumni support to the university if you pull the plug.
Oops, let me correct the savings figure once again. The annual expense associated with broadcasting WRVU is indeed closer to the first figure I gave Steve: 15-20K. The larger figure, 70-75K, is the actual annual expense of running WRVU (which includes WRVU's share of rent, accounting, etc.). @WRVU listener: WRVU receives no donations from alumni support, or at least it has not (with one exception) over the years. VSC is an independent nonprofit to which people *could* contribute, but they have not. Vanderbilt University contributes no money to VSC, so alumni donations to the University do not affect WRVU.
There is a meeting about the VSC's "exploring the migration of radio station WRVU to exclusively online programming and the sale of its broadcast license" today at Vanderbilt in the Sarratt building at 3pm. The media has been invited. This is extremely short notice but the Scene needs to get someone out there.
Oh geez... thanks for the heads up on that meeting today. This is all really disheartening. More christian rock on the bottom of the dial to annoy people trying to use their ipod FM transmitters that don't actually work.
THE most horrible idea Vanderbilt's board of trustees has tried to sneak in for quite a while! Yet I am not surprised after noticing how the university itself has put much less effort into the station as a whole. If you only play DJ HAl and "Future of Jazz with Chris" 8 times a day, people WILL stop listening.
Meanwhile distracting us with stories about "student interest" will not cover up the fact that this mythical board of trustees is trying to squeeze as much money they can from a not-for-profit entity. If this station is sold off, a huge pillar of Nashville's character will be greatly compromised. Simple as that.
For whatever it's worth, I have not seen fit to lodge a protest, based on what I know so far -- even though this development makes me very sad.
My years at 91 Rock (autumn 1982 through I think early 1987, including a little time post-graduation) were fun and formative. I took the responsibility of broadcasting to all of Nashville (we boosted from a tiny signal to 14,500 watts in about '83) very seriously, and many of my colleagues there did too.
We worked hard to make the production quality of DJ sets as professional as possible and to establish individual air personalities based on our program niches, which ranged from various alternative-rock obsessions, to Wes Green's and Gil Gilliam's weekly Beach Party of '60s oldies, to P.S. Marchand's Sunday morning broadcasts in Mandarin Chinese.
In '83-'84, perhaps uniquely in WRVU's history or not, we had a campus news operation that included nightly and weekly news programs involving dozens of students. They were produced by a British law exchange student named Richard Quest. Richard had already been through a BBC trainee program, and his standards were high. He is now one of the main London-based personalities of CNN.
WRVU is not a vocational school, and neither then nor now would I have expected it to conform to any particular radio niche nor maintain any particular standard of broadcast quality. As much as I appreciate what I learned in my time there -- about dealing with humans more than producing radio -- I can't argue much with VSC's conclusion (which would not have been floated if the decision were not already final) that the FM license is no longer furthering the mission of student journalism.
Much of the 1990s went by without giving me much compelling reason to listen to 91. Nobody has tried to do news again, nor am I aware of audio documentaries like the ones I was involved in featuring acts visiting town. I interviewed Paul Westerberg, for instance, during soundcheck before a 1985 Replacements appearance on the Tim tour, and with help from an engineer friend had the interview, with select tracks spliced in, on the air an hour before they took the stage.
After years of fitfully hoping to find thought-provoking radio on 91, I stopped tuning in years ago to any shows except the excellent ones that my old friends -- non-students -- Pete Wilson and Heather Lose do weekly. And I'm more likely to stream those than to catch them in the car, just as I am with weekly NPR favorites like Wait Wait and various material from the BBC or other foreign networks.
WRVU was my fraternity at VU. It means a lot to me. I have reason to believe that misrule from VSC's professional staff over the years since the late 1980s -- and I'm talking to you, Laura Hill -- has largely brought us to this point.
But I submit that those who want to see the 91.1 frequency belong to a local radio station with local concerns at heart need to raise the money to buy and maintain the station. That's the only option.
I can't afford much, but I'm in if such an effort develops.
Will saving the station be worth it? The latest status-quo of WRVU, and it's mismanagement, is not worth fighting for. It's been the worst I've ever heard. If that is the way it's going to be, then no wonder people have been tuning out.
The internet is a big wonderland of distraction. A very small percentage really listen to internet radio.
I suspect the free engineering help WRVU has received from WPLN will go away if the license is sold.
But, not to worry: ITS knows everything about everything and they'll be so glad to help fix any little thing that goes wrong - goes wrong - goes wrong - goes wrong...
I guess i'm confused as to how this works, VSC is a non-proftit not associated with Vanderbilt that offers the use of its facillities to Vanderbilt for the ends of the mission statement: to paraphrase- "training vanderbilt students for journalism,etc." What does VSC get out of the deal, and where does it receive most of its funding, if it receives little or no funding from Vanderbilt or its Alumni? The recent controversy over dj caps should make it obvious that if Vanderbilt has little or no interest in supporting the station or its use of the airwaves bandwith the community does.
Relatively speaking, 75,000k a year is chump change for operating cost in the non-profit world. Especially if one refines/reduces any unnecessary salaried employees to volunteer positions(i don't have a copy of the budget so forgive any errors)
Wouldn't this be an incredible acquisition for the mayor's music council? I dare say it would be the only station of its kind in the world, simply change the mission statement to something like: The station exists to preserve and present the musical heritage of Nashville and its surronding area. Think the Nashville public library but music, all acquisitions can double as archival material. The broad range of programming could be kept in place, locals can perform-etc. you could even release a vinyl comp each year documenting performances in the station.
When I moved to Nashville about 5 years ago, I was thrilled to find WRVU's eclectic and more accessible mix of programming (I went to undergrad at UNC-CH, home to WXYC - a wonderful but sometimes difficult station to listen to). I turned up the dial on Friday nights for D-Funk. I made sure to listen every Saturday to DJ Ron. I got happy to hear the Sounds of the Bayou. And whenever I'd return from a road trip, I always knew I was close to home when I could pick up 91.1 on the dial. I made sure to tell every new person who moved to Nashville they should check out 91.1. More recently, it has been disappointing to hear about cutting community-based DJ slots, and experiencing the larger reliance on DJ HAL to fill in the gaps.
I'm going to have to read more closely about this situation, because I don't think that a university like Vanderbilt should be without a student voice over the airwaves. I'd be willing to contribute energy/funds/time to keeping the station alive, though without an "official" connection to Vanderbilt I don't know what that would "mean".
It seems pretty obvious what is going on here -- the VSC's actions are very much transparent, manipulating the station into doing what they want. I mean we have heard all those stories about Chris Carroll. And it has all worked according to his plan.
First they pressed the GM to make a community DJ Cap, which made a lot of listeners in the Nashville tune out, since it symbolically severed the connection WRVU had with the Nashville community. The VSC hoped that WRVU would get less listener support, thus making it easier for Nashville to "let go" of the station, as evidenced by the angry comments in previous articles in the Scene about the matter. And then all of a sudden announcing that they are considering selling the station without the knowledge of anyone at WRVU, taking away savewrvu.com/org/net to prevent the station from gathering a strong group to support it (though luckily there's the facebook page), which in itself is simply despicable...
So if you are thinking that it's ok for WRVU to be sold and be exclusively online, please think of it before all of this started to happen (almost 1 year ago)... when Hipbilly Jamboree would still roam the airwaves, D-funk would set the groove every Friday night, and We Own this Town showed you what music in Nashville was all about...
I'm sure that if we fight for this -- WRVU will be back in full swing, being once again a part of Nashville.
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