Life without KFAC : What killed L.A.’s only commercial classical station and what’s next

The KFAC story has had more fake endings than a Beethoven symphony.

After months of speculation and denials that the radio station, which began broadcasting classical music in 1931, was going the rock/pop route, it’s now a certainty that it will. Los Angeles will soon be the only city in the United States with more that a million in population that does not have a commercial classical music station.

No official announcement of the change has been made, but a recent visit to the station, in a former swank Hollywood restaurant, was all that is needed to confirm that the transition is surely afoot.

Within sight of a large banner that reads, “What Have You Done For Your Station Today?” newly hired salespeople dressed in natty outfits and sporting stylish haircuts scurried about, popping into each other’s offices and making urgent-sounding phone calls. In the midst of all this activity the more sedately attired on-air personalities greeted each other with the bemusement and resignation of lame ducks as they quietly went about their daily task of putting classical music on the air.

Music director Bob Wennersten was packing up his papers to make way for someone new in his office when Robert Goldfarb, the current vice president for programming and operations, stopped by. With a smile, Wennersten handed him the September music schedule prepared for Ovation, the magazine that has been publishing KFAC’s music lineup for several years. “Here’s the last one,” Wennersten said, pointing out to Goldfarb the last two days of the month. For those two days Wennersten had programmed, at the end of every disc jockey’s shift, a rendition of Haydn’s Symphony No. 45, better known as the “Farewell” Symphony.

“Too bad it won’t ever happen,” Goldfarb said, shaking his head. “Nobody here really believes we will get that far.”

Goldfarb, who has been in classical music radio for 20 years, speculates the changeover will come sometime after Labor Day but before Sept. 21, when the fall radio ratings period begins.

There are no outward signs at KFAC that the change is the result of the station falling on hard times. The station is carpeted, well-appointed and in seemingly good repair, and some of the offices could even be called plush. Indeed, one of the ironies of this situation is that KFAC has been making a respectable, steady profit for years.

But in the age of deregulation, mega-mergers and leveraged buyouts, that is simply not enough. Big-city radio is shaping up as one of the modern, high-finance battlefields upon which there is little room for merely respectable profits. The casuality of the battle might well be all-classical commercial radio, just at a time when public radio is wandering further and further from its original commitment to classical. It’s a prospect that has produced angry statements from local culture administrators and hundreds of letters from listeners.

The outlook is not entirely bleak. Commercial classical radio is doing fine in several smaller cities, including Bakersfield, and a new breed of programmers is confident that, properly marketed, commercial classical radio can still hold its own, even in the big cities.

Many industry observers firmly believe that Los Angeles will not be without an all-classical station for long.

From 1962 to 1989, the selling price of KFAC-AM and FM rose more than 3,187%.

That figure is a measure of how much the business of radio in general, and classical music radio in particular, has changed. In 1962, KFAC was bought by Cleveland Broadcasting for $2 million.

Classical music radio was not a wildly exciting business back then, but a well-run station could build a loyal following and provide its owners with a tidy, long-term profit. As radio entered the 1980s, the profits became more than tidy.

“Classical radio stations are riding a prosperity wave,” Billboard magazine reported in 1983, “racking up billing gains of 10% to 45% compared to a year ago.” The magazine attributed much of the gain to listener interest in compact discs, which classical stations experimented with when the technology was relatively young.

In 1985, the trade publication Television/Radio Age heralded the demographics of the classical radio audience--generally thought to be a more affluent group than pop music listeners--saying that the format was “a classic forged in marketing stone.”

One of the biggest developments in radio in the 1980s, however, came not from advertisers, who were increasingly turning to radio as TV ad time became astronomically expensive, but from the government. The Federal Communications Commission eliminated in 1982 its “three-year rule,” which stipulated that the buyers of a radio station had to wait at least three years before reselling.

“When the three-year rule was in effect, you had to be an operator, not just a banker out to make a quick killing on a resale,” said Matthew Field, senior vice president and general manager of WNCN, one of two commercial classical stations in New York City. “The rule was based on the idea that radio licenses were given in the public interest and were not just a commodity.”

Suddenly, radio stations became an attractive target to those playing the high-stakes financial game of the 1980s--leveraged buyouts. Classical stations, with their modest profits, were judged to be particularly desirable to speculators looking for a relatively low-priced entry into radio ownership.

By 1986, TV/Radio Age was admitting that classical music radio was “facing some unsettling times” and warned that “many feel it is being threatened, by both outside and inside entrepreneurs whose ambition to turn a high profit is primary.”

Instead of waiting for takeovers, some classical station owners, including ones in Houston, Phoenix and Boulder, Colo., changed format themselves and went in search of the pop/rock fortunes.

Classical music lovers feared that when KFAC changed owners in 1986 it would soon be given a new format. But the new owners, Louise Heifetz--then a sales executive at rock station KIIS and daughter-in-law of violinist Jascha Heifetz--and Edward Argow, who together bought the AM-FM station for $33.5 million, announced it would remain classical.

They did sell the AM outlet for $8.75 million to a Spanish-language broadcaster in 1988, but the vast majority of KFAC’s listeners were tuned to FM anyway. And after an initial rough period in which they replaced several beloved announcers who had been at the station for decades, the fortunes of KFAC seemed to improve.

Although its share ratings was in the “low 1s” at the time of the 1986 takeover, Goldfarb said, they rose impressively to as high as 1.9. (The latest ratings survey by Birch/Scarborough Research showed KFAC with a 1.7 share, which means that about 1.7% of all listeners were tuned to the station when a 15-minute sampling was taken. KUSC-FM, the non-commercial L.A. station that programs mostly classical music, had a 1.3 share.)

Goldfarb also said that the operating profit was holding steady at $2 million to $3 million a year.

Meanwhile, when the Heifetz administration was at KFAC, other L.A. stations were getting caught up in buyout mania. KRTH-AM and FM sold for $86 million, KROQ-FM for $83 million and KTWV-FM (the Wave) and KJOI-FM for about $75 million apiece.

Perhaps the most significant sale involved KIQQ-FM, a soft-rock broadcaster sold in 1988 for $56 million to a company that clearly intended to change its format.

“With that sale we basically set a new ‘stick price’ level for an L.A. FM,” said Gary Stevens, one of the top radio station brokers in the country. Stick , in radio circles, is slang for antenna, and the “stick price” is the cost of acquiring the right to get a license and put up a stick, as it were. The buyers of KIQQ were not interested in its current programming. They were willing to pay those millions just to get an L.A. stick.

“It was not an outrageous price,” said Stevens, speaking from a hotel room in London, where he was on vacation. “These stations had been undervalued for a long time.”

The new owners transformed KIQQ into KQLZ and made a frontal assault on the rock market as “Pirate Radio.”

----

The offer KFAC’s owners could not refuse came in late 1988. On Jan. 18, 1989, they announced the station had been sold for $55 million, the highest price ever paid for a classical music station.

“The station was not on the market,” Heifetz said at the time, “but for such an incredible amount of money, we thought that it was an offer that deserved consideration.”

As high as the price was, it was clearly a stick price, and although the new owners, the Dallas-based Evergreen Media Corp., said the station would remain classical, industry observers knew that would not last long. Goldfarb said the new owners did consider keeping the station classical, but the numbers just didn’t add up. KFAC’s operating profit of $2 million to $3 million a year was far below what was needed to service Evergreen’s payments on the debt it took on when it bought the station.

“We had enough advertisers,” Goldfarb said. “During much of the year our quota of ads was virtually full. We just didn’t have the audience in sheer numbers to justify charging the kind of advertising rate we needed. The bottom line for advertisers is their cost-per-thousand listeners.”

KFAC charges about $250 for a one-minute ad during the morning drive-time period. KPWR-FM, the highest-rated L.A. station, gets about $900 a minute during the same period.

“There is no guarantee that the new KFAC format will succeed,” said WNCN’s Field. “Rock has gotten very competitive. But with that kind of debt to service, they have to risk it.”

A couple of months ago, the management quietly circulated word among the staff that a change would be made away from classical. “So, it is no shock that it is finally happening,” said Goldfarb, who is one of the employees facing joblessness.

When word that KFAC planned a change leaked out to the community, the reaction from classical music organizations was sharp.

Peter Hemmings, general director of Music Center Opera, noted that KFAC had made the public aware of his organization’s productions: “They gave us a lot of free publicity, played our music, interviewed our people and mentioned our work a great deal. We also could advertise on the station and reach our exact target audience.”

Ernest Fleischmann, managing director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, was angry. “What is at the bottom of this is the crazy leveraged buyout stuff that is going on throughout the radio business,” he said. “People buy stations with no money and then get themselves into such enormous debt that in order to service that debt they have to go for the lowest-common-denominator listener.”

Fleischmann does not see KUSC-FM, the mostly classical public station, as a good substitute for KFAC. “KFAC has a much clearer, cleaner signal. The sound is so much more vivid and goes a lot further,” he said.

KFAC broadcasts with 43-kilowatts of power from Mt. Wilson, with an antenna whose top is 2,910 feet above sea level. KUSC is licensed to operate with 25 kilowatts from Flint Peak in Glendale with an antenna height of 667 feet.

Fleischmann also took KUSC’s programming to task. “KFAC was becoming more and more interesting. It had begun to treat its audience as rather more intelligent human beings, whereas KUSC was going the other way, towards a soft-core classical sound.”

KUSC officials, who say their station plays classical music 90% of the time, had said that they plan to introduce other types of music into their format. “It’s not going to be radically different, but we have to recognize that there are music forms that are shaping the interests and ears of the classical audiences of the future,” said Wallace Smith, KUSC general manager and president. “We have to do things to attract younger audiences to classical music. It used to be that they were introduced to it in the public schools, but that doesn’t happen anymore.” Smith said that the changes, which would be integrated into the programming gradually, would include playing jazz, film and theater music, lighter classics and even some New Age.

KUSC will soon get a boost from KFAC. KFAC will be urging its listeners to tune in to KUSC, after donating some of its rarest records to the public radio station. KFAC general manager Jim de Castro said he will run $100,000 in advertising over the next month on both his station and KUSC to urge KFAC listeners to switch over.

“There will be specially produced spots to get out listening audience to transfer over from our position on the radio dial to theirs,” De Castro said. “The spots will say something like, ‘You can go find terrific classical music that you love with such a passion at KUSC.’ ”

KUSC’s Smith said the chance to pick up some of KFAC’s audience--estimated at 800,000--will be a boon for his station, which has an estimated 318,000 listeners.

One local commercial station has announced that it intends, in the wake of the changes at KFAC, to play at least some classical music on a regular basis. The owner of KKGO-AM and FM, which have been all-jazz since 1960, said he will definitely be programming a jazz and classical mix, although he has backtracked from his original announcement that he might put jazz entirely on the AM, with the FM reserved for classical during the day and evening hours and jazz late at night. That plan whipped up a protest among KKGO’s listeners.

“We always felt we had a larger audience than the ratings service gave us credit for,” said Saul Levine, founder and general manager of L.A.’s only commercial all-jazz station. “The volume of letters we got proves that.” Levine said that a mix can’t help but upset some listeners.

“It’s going to take a little compromise on the part of both,” he said. “It’s like our children. They can’t get candy all the time but they get their share of it. The overriding thing I am saying is that the city is now in a crisis situation, culturally, and that we are going to help relieve that by making time for both formats.”

It could also help boost his ratings, which have been consistently lower than KFAC’s.

Levine’s plan to mix formats, however, is looked upon with great skepticism by industry observers. “No one has successfully mixed two entirely different formats in commercial radio, as far as I know,” said Edith K. Whaley, a vice president at the International Communications Group, one of the major media buying services for advertisers on the West Coast. “People tune into a radio station for a certain sound. They want to know what they are getting. It’s not like television, where they tune in for a specific program.”

Several consultants said they believe that if Levine does introduce classical music onto KKGO, he will eventually have to go with an all-classical format, at least on his FM outlet, to make the move commercially viable.

If Levine’s plans falter, it’s likely that another station will step in to give classical a try. “I can think of several stations out there that are either not profitable at all or marginally profitable,” said broker Stevens. “The owners might try and take them classical. KUSC’s level of profits might be just fine for a station that does not have to service a big debt.”

KFAC staffers had harbored hopes that a station might still take over their format at the last minute, offering them new jobs. But after the new management announced that it was giving away the station’s library of recordings, it seems less likely that any station will step in to buy the format without getting the library in the bargain.

It is possible, that even given the high prices, an outsider could buy a station here and take on the classical format. If anyone could do that, it is Howard Tanger, who is often referred to as the “King of Classical Radio” in trade publications. The Boston-based Tanger has bought stations in Detroit, Miami and Philadelphia and programmed them successfully with all-classical formats that are nothing like anything heard in Los Angeles. “It’s a contemporary presentation,” he said. “High promotion, high visibility, contests, promotions. It’s like a high-energy rock station except that we play only classical music.”

WNCN’s Field said that the New York station has gone a similar route and even has a comedy duo as disc jockeys in the morning. “The other day they did a satirical sketch about Jessie Helms passing judgment on ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ ” he said. “The audience loves it.” WNCN-FM is now doing better in the ratings than the FM service of New York’s other commercial classical station, WQXR.

Tanger said he would love to get his hands on a station in Los Angeles. “We tried to buy KIQQ a number of years ago but were not successful,” he said. “Recently we were looking at another deal, but it’s now on the back burner.” He acknowledges that the prices here are high. “A company could manage it if it was very well capitalized, had a relatively low debt and a significantly high cash flow. And that is our company.”

Tanger said his goal is to have classical stations in Los Angeles, New York and Chicago.

Southern California classical music fans can only wait, now, to see if there is a place for their favorite music in the hot--some would say overheated--commercial radio economy. In the meantime, smaller metropolises that are often considered provincial by the high arts crowd have thriving classical stations.

“Those smaller cities might be the only place commercial classical radio can grow, right now,” said Maurice Lowenthal, the general manager of a commercial classical station owned by the City of Dallas. “Anyone in a big city with a big signal is so vulnerable. I think that in a few years many of the big-city classical stations will be no more. But look at what is happening out your way. There is a new station in Bakersfield.”

Robert Duffy, in radio since 1945, put KIWI-FM on the air in Bakersfield in February, 1986, as a 24-hour, all-classical station. He had never owned or worked at a classical outlet. He didn’t have a particular fondness for the music. “Country and Western is the big thing, and if you go up against the big station owned by Buck Owens up here, you are in for a dogfight,” Duffy said. “When I went on the air with classical, I got no resistance from the other stations. I think they even touted us. ‘Bakersfield is now such a big town it has a classical station,’ they would say.”

Duffy found an economical way to operate. Except for a disc jockey who does a weeknight show, all of KIWI’s music and announcements are taped by a service in San Francisco that also provides programming to stations in Anchorage and Albuquerque. “We don’t run it like a radio station,” Duffy said. “We don’t have news, weather, sports or time checks. We just play the music.” Commercials are inserted by an automated system. “We don’t have any high-priced talent, big record collections or fancy furniture,” he said.

Duffy reluctantly admitted that KIWI , with its low costs, does a bit better than breaking even, but he wanted to stress that the station was not rolling in profits. “I think some people who love cultural things advertise with us because they like to help us out,” he said. “They take community pride in the station.”

Back in the big city, Goldfarb was continuing his office rounds at KFAC. He pointed out a mural on the outside of the building that depicts KFAC announcers intermingling with composers of the ilk of Bach, Beethoven and Verdi. Goldfarb hoped the new administration would keep the mural.

But the announcers in the mural are the ones from the post-1986 regime. They were the announcers Goldfarb fired. “When I came to KFAC, we did what we needed to do, and now the people here are doing what they need to do,” he said with a smile. “There are people who say it is karmic. You introduce radical changes and so your karma in turn requires you to be the object of radical changes. Maybe there is something to that.”

Goldfarb stepped into the studio to see announcer Mary Fain, who had just put on a recording of Handel’s Concerto a due cori No. 2. They talked a bit about what they will do when the format changed. Goldfarb said he will likely do some consulting and keep his eye out for a station to buy outside of the major markets. He doesn’t care if it is not classical.

Fain, who came to KFAC from a classical station in Seattle, said she would like to relax a bit and do some writing. And she said she would like very much to stay in radio in Los Angeles.

Goldfarb took on the mock tones of an elocution teacher. “Can you say, ‘Guns ‘n’ Roses?,’ ” he asked.

They both laughed, and Fain shooed him out of the control room as she prepared to introduce a Dvorak string quartet.