Increasing Frequency of Bilingual Radio

Spin quickly across the radio dial in Miami and you can’t help but feel disoriented. In close order you’ll come across big band sounds, rap music, Caribbean rhythms, salsa, merengue, country-western and a string of fast-talking Spanish-speaking commentators hurling insults across the straits at Fidel Castro.

One station has grown so confused, it simply lists its format as “miscellaneous.”

Yet a radio tower of Babel makes sense for Miami, one of the nation’s most heterogenous cities. And the way one station has managed to make Miami’s diversity its programming strength would seem to offer some valuable lessons for Los Angeles.

WPOW-FM has been Miami’s No. 1 radio station for most of the past two years. And if you believe program director and late-morning deejay Kim “Kid” Curry, more people have listened to his station since its launch in 1986 than any other in the market. A lot more.

The reason for WPOW’s popularity, Curry says, is as simple as it is successful. While many of the station’s competitors have either cast their lot with Miami’s dense Latino community or targeted the area’s suburban white listeners, WPOW, a Top 40 music and dance station, has managed to appeal to both with an eclectic playlist and a team of on-air personalities who move comfortably between the two groups.

“The No. 1 language in Miami is bilingualism--Spanglish,” says Curry. “[So] my disc jockeys are bilingual on purpose. Our promos are bilingual on purpose. I play bilingual songs on purpose.

“So we really reflect a bilingual market in our radio station.”

Well, in theory anyway. WPOW is actually much more of a hip-hop, urban dance station than anything else. Besides, if bilingual deejays, a bilingual audience and the courage to occasionally air songs in more than one language were the only criteria needed to declare your station bilingual, then L.A.’s KLVE-FM (107.5) and KCMG-FM (100.3) certainly make the grade. Yet both argue vociferously they are nothing of the kind.

What does set Curry’s station apart, however, is its ability to reflect Miami’s young, trendy and hyper-energetic lifestyle. And it couldn’t have done that without first erasing the language and cultural borders that have traditionally defined radio formats.

For Curry, a self-described redneck from Colorado, the idea for doing erasing those borders at WPOW came to him about 20 years ago, after he married a locally well-known Cuban-American TV reporter and began to learn Spanish.

“I became bilingual and I thought, ‘There’s not a radio station here that reflects a bilingual style of life.’ It just seemed natural for me to do it,” he says.

The phenomenon isn’t unique to Miami. In Texas, where bilingual stations are common, San Antonio’s KTFM-FM tops the local Arbitron rankings in virtually every demographic category, and in Albuquerque, another bilingual broadcaster ranks among the market leaders. But in Los Angeles, the nation’s largest Latino market, there are no professed bilingual stations.

“As soon as somebody does that, I think it will be a hit,” says Eddie Leon, vice president of programming for Liberman Broadcasting’s four Southern California stations. “It’s a big segment of the population that’s not being served correctly. No one has had the guts in L.A. to do it yet.”

Probably the closest thing Los Angeles has to a bilingual broadcaster is urban oldies outlet KCMG, an English-language station that boasts a number of Latino deejays and a playlist that has tested well among young Latinas.

“But they’re not doing any bilingual stuff,” Leon argues. “They don’t want to offend their non-Spanish listeners by speaking Spanish. And the Spanish stations don’t want to offend their listeners by speaking English.

“You have to go after the ones that aren’t offended. It has to be a reflection of people’s lifestyle. Eventually that’s going to be a normal thing. If I had my own station, with good coverage, I would definitely do it.”

Language, in fact, is just a small part of the puzzle--yet it’s the one everyone focuses on. Tapping into the growing bicultural lifestyle, for instance, has admittedly been a major key to Curry’s success. Still, programming and the number of competitive signals in the market are what ultimately determine a station’s success, says Bill Tanner, a former program director at WPOW and now a programming consultant to stations in five of the nation’s 55 largest markets, including Miami.

“Everything in radio has to do with the number of stations there are to split up the pie,” says Tanner, who helped make Spanish-language stations KLVE and KSCA-FM (101.9) the top-ranked outlets in Los Angeles. As a result, WPOW is helped not only by the fact that it’s Miami’s lone bilingual station, but also by the fact that nearly a third of its 33 competitors--including five stations with powerful FM signals--broadcast in Spanish. So while the most-watched TV station among all viewers in Miami is WLTV-TV, an affiliate of the Spanish-language Univision network, the radio market is so divided that just one Spanish station ranks among the top five.

In Los Angeles, only one in five stations is Spanish and only three of those are FM stations with total market coverage. Not surprisingly, those three--KSCA, KLVE and KLAX-FM (97.9)--have the largest audiences.

But the biggest difference between Los Angeles and Miami isn’t the size of each slice of pie, but the flavor.

“Miami is one of the most difficult markets,” says Phil Jones, who was music director at WPOW before coming to L.A. in October to take over as chief programmer for Mexican regional station KLAX. “It’s hard to put a finger on it. There’s Cubans, there’s Venezuelans, there’s also Brazilian influence. They just have different tastes. On the whole, they just have a larger palette in Miami.”

In Los Angeles, where 76% of Latinos are of Mexican ancestry, Jones says he has the luxury of concentrating on things other than format.

“We’re trying to do the basics here,” he says. “Not talking . . . over lyrics, things like that. There are certain ways to do radio in the U.S. Those ways guarantee results as long as you stick with them. But music is the same. It’s about emotions.”

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Having a Ball (Again): For the third consecutive season, KWKW-AM (1330) will carry play-by-play of Lakers basketball in Spanish. The station will broadcast 41 of the team’s 50 games, beginning with Friday’s season-opener with Houston at 7:30 p.m. Pepe Mantilla and Fernando Gonzalez, the news director at television station KWHY-TV and a former commentator for Fox Sports America, will be the announcers.

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Homecoming: KKHJ-AM (930), which switched from an all-news format to ranchera music last month, has hired a new program director to guide the transition. Alfredo Rodriguez, who was program director at KLAX when that station became the first Spanish outlet to top the Arbitron ratings in Los Angeles, started at KKHJ last week.

Rodriguez had been working as an executive at a station in Texas.

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Noble Prize: KSCA morning deejay Renan Almenadrez Coello will be recognized for his humanitarian work at a reception Feb. 13 prior to the Alejandro Fernandez concert at the Universal Amphitheatre.

Almendarez, who accompanied tons of relief supplies to Honduras and Nicaragua following Hurricane Georges in the fall, will be honored by the Mexican consulate, the Red Cross and a group representing several Central American consuls general.