Cities where a format dominates?

[Scott Fybush]

At 02:53 AM 10/5/2004, David Tomm wrote:

>While Univision does have some English language stations in their 
>portfolio, their mission is to reach Spanish speaking audiences, just as 
>Radio One exists as a specialty group targeting African American radio 
>listeners.  To them, Spanish is a "format," with different offshoots of it 
>to reach different demos.

My friends at Univision Radio would disagree with you strenuously on that 
point. To look at their clusters in Chicago or Dallas or here in LA and say 
they're all a "Spanish format" with various offshoots is as ludicrous as it 
would be to walk into Clear Channel LA (as I did this afternoon) and say 
that the eight stations there are all an "English format" with various 
offshoots.

>You talk about the diversity of "English language" formats.  This really 
>does not exist in Hispanic broadcasting.  There are basically three major 
>formats targeting Hispanics--Contemporary, which tends to be more AC-ish 
>in nature, Regional Mexican targeted to Spanish speakers of Mexican 
>descent, and Tropical, which caters to Hispanics with Caribbean 
>heritage.  A few markets have Spanish news-talk stations, but that format 
>really hasn't done all that well. There is the same amount of "flavors" of 
>Spanish language stations as there are with Urban stations (Urban AC, 
>Urban Oldies, Urban Contemporary.)

Come out to California and you'll also hear...

Spanish language religion of various flavors (music-based and 
preaching/teaching)
Cumbias (Central American dance music)
Rock en Espanol
Spanish hits (essentially a high-energy CHR in Spanish)
Spanish oldies (Univision's very popular "Recuerdo" format)

And the most popular drive-time shows among the Hispanic audience out here 
(El Cucuy, for instance) are essentially Spanish-language analogs of Howard 
Stern - mostly talk, very little music, and VERY raunchy.

>Like Hispanic radio, stations targeting African Americans tend to be 
>lumped into one classification. Both Urban and "Spanish" target specific 
>minority groups, which are only the majority in a handful of markets.  Why 
>should Spanish language stations, at least at this point in their 
>development, be categorized any differently than Urban stations?

They shouldn't be - there's a wide variety of formats targeting black 
audiences, too. It's just less obvious in more homogeneous markets like 
Boston (6% Hispanic, 6% black) than in Los Angeles (37% Hispanic, 8% black) 
or Miami (41% Hispanic, 19% black).

(Note that the Los Angeles market has more Hispanics than the entire 
population of Puerto Rico...)

s