Frank Oteri can be reached by e-mail at frank@amc.net

Letter No. 1

Date: Wed, 29 Sept 1999 
From: Neil Best
Station/Program Manager
 KUNC-FM
Carter Hall 2009, University of Northern Colorado
Greeley, CO 80639
nbest@kunc.org
PHONE:  970 351-1765
FAX:  970 351-1780

       It was very disappointing to open the Music Notes this morning and  read the article by Mr. Oteri. While I appreciate his right to express his opinion, his lack of understanding of the subject he writes is appalling.
      Those of us who pay attention to audience research don't use the  term "CUM ratings."  The standard term is "Cume rating."
      As a Colorado resident I have the opportunity to listen to KCFR  from Denver. I think it would be fair to say they utilize the information from the "Denver Project" to decide what music to play. 
       Mr. Oteri offers an unfair and untrue characterization of what I hear played on KCFR. I would strongly suggest it is time to begin using  reality instead of urban legends to further the discourse of how to  best serve the listening audience in the presentation of classical  music.
       For the record, I am not, never have been, and doubt I will every be an employee of KCFR. Nor do I have any connection with the "Denver Project."

Regards, Neil Best
 

Response from Frank Oteri:

      I don’t want to further the antagonism, but it's inevitable. I was equally disappointed and appalled by Mr. Best's posturing in his response to my article as I am to the lack of contemporary music broadcast on many public radio stations.
      Mr. Best rightly calls me to task for misspelling the word “cume.” I've never seen the word in print. All my attempts at trying to get a copy of the Denver Project have proved unsuccessful. Calls were not returned. Ed Trudeau of CPR responded to my first email 
inquiring about the Denver Project as follows:

“I don't recognize your name.  Frank ______?”

I responded as follows:

      “My name is Frank Oteri. I am the Editor and Publisher of NewMusicBox, a web magazine for new American music created from the American Music Center. I have attended the AMPPR Conference for the past 5 years and last year gave a presentation on THE CENTURY LIST, a list of 100 repertoire entries of 20th century music arranged according to durations.
      It's a pity that there is no URL for the Denver Project; it would have been great for visitors to the AMC web site: http://www.amc.net to be able to learn more about it.”

      It soon became clear to me that information contained in the Denver Project was not public information which is pretty ironic for something designed for public radio audiences. I also learned that the people running the Denver Project were charging a large fee to any program director who wanted this proprietary information. If this is an “urban legend” that should be dispelled, let's set the record straight by publishing the statistics and their application here in this forum.
      While Mr. Best states that KCFR uses the Denver Project and that I have offered an unfair characterization of what they play, he never describes what they play. Based on his defensiveness, I can only infer that he is a less than disinterested party despite his closing 
disclaimer. I’d be more than happy to continue the discussion.

Thank you,

Frank J. Oteri
Editor, NewMusicBox
http://www.newmusicbox.org/
The Web Magazine from the American Music Center
 

Letter No. 2

Date: Sun, 03 Oct 1999 
From: Mike McCurdy
Program Director WGLT 
Campus Box 8910I llinois State
University Normal, IL
61790-8910
309-438-2394
FAX:  438-7870
www.wglt.org

      I wasn't sure where to send a response to Frank Oteri's article in the Fall 1999 news letter, or if there is even a forum for a response. However, I felt compelled to respond to what seem to be some misconceptions and assumptions in his column, so I'm sending it 
to both of you...Thanks for the soapbox.
      What Frank Oteri fails to understand in his article “How Music can be the Lifeblood of Public Radio” published in the Fall 1999 Music Notes news letter is that stations using “the Denver Project” are attempting to do the very best job they can in what should be the 
main mission of any radio station, public or otherwise: Serve the listener.
      These stations have determined that a large segment of their audience depends on the station for NPR news. The stations have already defined themselves by devoting morning and afternoon drive time day parts to NPR news programming. "The Denver Project” and similar research followed by some public radio stations with an NPR News/Jazz format simply determined what kind of classical music or jazz these NPR news listeners liked the most. The results of this musical testing were boiled down into music types or modes and stations are focusing their efforts on the modes that the listeners responded to most positively. In my opinion it's one of the most important  questions ever asked by public radio music programmers and the listeners answered. Listeners made the musical choice…not the stations. Stations are now successfully programming the music the largest segment of their audience wants to hear.  I fail to find fault with this approach. In fact, it could be argued that these stations are preserving classical music and jazz on the radio since they chose to try to make music work instead of opting for the midday NPR news and information package.
 Regardless of what Mr. Oteri believes, ratings have to be important. You can't separate the concept of serving the listener and ratings. The ratings are a measure of how a station serves its audience and ratings for the station for which I work (WGLT) showed we could do a better job. Stations like WGLT which program music, and in our case jazz, between Morning Edition and “All Things Considered” had significant audience problems.  The ratings showed that our core audience (those listeners who say they chose us exclusively or first), were tuning to other stations or turning off the radio when the music started after Morning Edition. We depend on that very audience segment for financial contributions. These are our paying members. These are our “long-term qualitative listeners" to which Mr. Oteri refers. Without these listeners, WGLT would be in dire straits. WGLT and public radio competes with other stations on the dial for a finite number of listeners and we better be doing all we can to make sure our audience stays with us.
      So over the last two years, WGLT implemented the Jazz Modes research to better serve our audience. The successful implementation of the research has corrected our audience 
problem (according to our ratings). Our audience is larger and listens longer. This type of research has been successful at classical stations like KCFR in Denver and jazz stations like KPLU in Seattle. And while Mr. Oteri’s seems to imply there “many cases” of stations dropping music in favor of news/talk after implementing research, he cites no stations and I am not aware of any. I am only familiar with station success.
      WGLT can be listed among successful stations like KCFR, KPLU, and WDUQ in Pittsburgh because we're programming  the music our listeners want to hear. WGLT has excluded very few artists and instead focused on the songs and sounds our listeners want to hear by jazz artists like Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, John Coltrane, Ella Fitzgerald, Marion McPartland, Ben Webster, Oscar Peterson, Lester Young (insert your favorite jazz artists here) in order to better serve our existing audience and attract a new audience to jazz.
      As a jazz station, WGLT also plays new compositions by new artists, but that fact is irrelevant. The music on WGLT doesn't have to have “immediacy” to connect with an NPR news audience. The music on any public radio station that also airs NPR’s Morning Edition and All Things Considered doesn't have to be current. It doesn't have to have anything, except appeal. The NPR news listeners simply have to like it because they are also our music listeners. They always have been and now WGLT and other stations are doing a better job of serving them.

Mike McCurdy
 

Response from Frank Oteri:

      I'm happy that Mr. McCurdy has had success using the “modal” approach to programming jazz at his station. But I must counter his claim that music does not need to have immediacy.  There is no question  that jazz as one of America's pre-eminent musical languages has immediacy to Americans. Unfortunately, classical music is not the same in this country and this is due to its being  stereotyped as exclusively the domain of Dead White European Males to use the old P.C. war cry. American classical music, in reality, is as diverse as our population but you'd never know it if you listen to classical radio. And that's part of why so few people are listening. Sorry, but 3% of a market share is not success on any level. 
      It is imperative for all of us who care about the future of music appreciation in this country to engage in a constructive dialogue about how to deal with the new. If more than half of the repertoire being played on a given station is more than a century old, I think there's a problem. If more than half of the repertoire being played on an American radio station is of a foreign origin, a certain message is being sent to your audience whether intentional or not. Understand, I'm a huge fan of world music (which for me includes gamelan, ragas, African mbira, reggae and Brahms) and I'm certainly not part of the Pat Buchanan flag-waving brigade. But, see there's the point. Brahms and Mozart and Beethoven are world music; they are not OUR composers and the sound world in which they operate is as fundamentally alien to American audiences today as Indian ragas and West African balofon music. In fact, the language of 20th century American pop music has made the sounds of many traditions equally familiar to a majority of listeners. 
       In a multi-cultural and ethnically diverse society such as ours, to emphasize the past glories of one set of our ancestors over any others is a suspect endeavor on some levels. However, to emphasize the ongoing achievements of our own musical creators could be truly stimulating. 
      As for naming stations that have gone all news or have changed format after bland classical programming, a cursory look through reports in the New York Times in recent years by David Schiff, Allan Kozinn and Antony Tommasini will name all the names you want which include former commercial and public classical stations in Seattle, San Diego, Boston and New York, among others.  No need to name names here and point the blame at anybody in particular.  That kind of activity is ultimately not constructive. Saying that, I will reveal the secret categories of music allowed on the former commercial classical station WNCN-FM in New York now that I don't think anyone will lose money from the secret being revealed:

1. Solo mood
2. Cooking piano
3. Big business
4. Lush life
5. Romance
6. Pops concert

     This format was so successful that they are now a classic rock station. Live and learn, I guess.

Frank J. Oteri
Editor
NewMusicBox
http://www.newmusicbox.org
The Web Magazine from the American Music Center

P.S.: My favorite jazz artist is Eric Dolphy. Do you play any 
recordings by him?

Frank J. Oteri
Editor and Publisher
NewMusicBox
The Web Magazine of the American Music Center
http://www.newmusicbox.org

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