From: "tesug" <...>

May I change the direction slightly as I feel there will be enough BigL
knocking by everyone so I'd rather come at this way.

We used AM for a while and quickly found out that whilst it was a great
marketing tool it only served to get people onto better platforms such
as the Net or Satellite. Sure there were a few annoyed truckers when we
gave up on AM, but it would have been cheaper to send them CDs.
However, I still think that very local projects can do good things on AM
if they have incredible local content.
So that begs the question – what's up with AM?
To start with anyone in the agency world will not think AM is sexy – so
that kind of hurts the business model. Next the demographics, which I
don't fully understand as there's lots of older folks these days, is
such that an MOR/Gold station isn't sexy either – double woops.

I guess there is a chance for a personality led station on AM, but as we
are now seeing the Net is grabbing that area and with Net radio in cars
from next year – well the writing is on the wall.

I suppose we could argue/discuss the merits of a decent quality AM signal all day, BUT, In Big L's case they have never had a good enough signal in their target area to merit such an argument.
Their whole business plan must have been as an AM lead station backed up with other platforms like satellite and internet, but I'm sure AM must have been their main focus, so frankly they failed to deliver on that platform.