To the consternation of many music fans in our area, WAMU dropped bluegrass on its main 50KW 88.5 FM blowtorch several years ago and rebranded itself into a more typical NPR news/talk station with no music at all. This has done them well as they are consistently either the first or second rated station in the market here, neck and neck with all-news WTOP.
A short while after they kicked bluegrass off their main stick they stood up www.bluegrasscountry.org as an internet radio station, which has itself grown reasonably popular over the years. When the HD Radio thing came along, WAMU put Bluegrass Country on their HD2 channel on 88.5 FM. Of course virtually no one has an HD receiver so they get very few listeners that way. Much more recently WAMU started relaying Bluegrass Country on repeater W288BS-FM 105.5 FM in Reston, Virginia (west of Washington DC), putting out 100 watts. I can barely get it at my workplace in Rockville, Maryland, north and west of DC. When Harold Camping's last end-of-the-world prediction failed, Family Radio ran out of money and had to sell off a couple of their big FM properties. One of them was 107.9 in Annapolis, Maryland, which was sold to CBS and is now Spanish-language music. 107.9 had a 22 watt repeater in Frederick, Maryland, which was not part of the CBS deal and eventually became another repeater for Bluegrass Country. The Frederick repeater is W228AM 93.5 FM, that puts out a flame-throwing 19 watts. I can sort-of get it where I live about 15 miles south and east of Frederick, if the wind's blowing the right direction. For all intents and purposes there is bluegrass on the air in our area, it's just damned hard to hear and is restricted to a very small audience. I get better luck where I live with a semi-local West Virginia Public Radio outlet, which plays some decent Americana music on the weekends. WAMU, despite its big success as an all news/talk operation, has been running deficits for several years now. A new manager started this year and has been slashing personnel, local programs and costs since then, and Bluegrass Country is one of the properties on the block. It is true that the demographic trends in our region do not seem to support a viable bluegrass radio station, and like I noted above, there is nothing like Bluegrass Country on either AM or FM except for the aforementioned West Virginia Public Radio outlet WVEP 88.9 FM, with its 3600 watts on a stick west of Winchester, Virginia. It will be very sad if it is forced off the airwaves. Regards, Lw On Sun, Jul 10, 2016 at 1:50 PM, david goren <[email protected]> wrote: > JJ Yore was also longtime editor of Current, the public radio industry > newpaper. > > Interestingly about Bluegrass in Washington is that when I lived there in the > 80’s there were two full time traditional country music stations on AM WKCW, > Warrenton, VA, and WPWC, Loudon County. They both played a lot of bluegrass > and were quite audible in DC (about 30 miles from the transmitters. Much of > the audience for WAMU’s bluegrass I suspect was out towards the Shendandoah > Valley where they had a huge signal. > >> On Jul 10, 2016, at 1:45 PM, Richard Cuff <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> Interesting that JJ Yore, quoted in the article, was at one time the >> GM of APM's "Marketplace" business / economic program, suggesting that >> a bottom-line focus is at work. >> >> Good news is that there are 92 other program listings in the >> "bluegrass" category on Publicradio fan.com >> >> (http://www.publicradiofan.com/cgibin/progsearch.pl?type=country/bluegrass+music&when=listall). >> >> It's pretty straightforward to use an audio stream grabber with public >> radio stations -- that stream using HTTP and generally in MP3 or AAC >> formats -- so you can schedule a download of audio and build up an >> inventory of radio you can then transfer to an MP3-playing device...I >> use a a cheap un-activated Straight Talk Wireless smartphone for that >> purpose. >> >> That's what I do with "big band" shows and baroque-themed classical music. >> >> Anyone needing a "how-to" on that just give me a yell. >> >> Richard Cuff / Allentown, PA USA >> >> On Sat, Jul 9, 2016 at 9:10 PM, Thomas Sundstrom <[email protected]> wrote: >>> https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/after-nearly-50-years-bluegrass-could-disappear-from-washingtons-airwaves/2016/07/08/d0bccf74-448e-11e6-88d0-6adee48be8bc_story.html >>> >>> Say it isn't so. Good bluegrass music programming may come to an end in >>> Washington unless WAMU can sell its station by year end. I came around to >>> bluegrass music through Philadelphia's WIFI-92.5 airing wonderful folk music >>> in the early 1960s when I was in college. >> _______________________________________________ >> Swlfest mailing list >> [email protected] >> http://montreal.kotalampi.com/mailman/listinfo/swlfest >> >> To unsubscribe: Send an E-mail to >> [email protected]?subject=unsubscribe, or visit the URL shown >> above. >> >> For more information on the Fest, visit: >> >> http://www.swlfest.com >> http://swlfest.blogspot.com > > _______________________________________________ > Swlfest mailing list > [email protected] > http://montreal.kotalampi.com/mailman/listinfo/swlfest > > To unsubscribe: Send an E-mail to > [email protected]?subject=unsubscribe, or visit the URL shown > above. > > For more information on the Fest, visit: > > http://www.swlfest.com > http://swlfest.blogspot.com _______________________________________________ Swlfest mailing list [email protected] http://montreal.kotalampi.com/mailman/listinfo/swlfest To unsubscribe: Send an E-mail to [email protected]?subject=unsubscribe, or visit the URL shown above. 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