Gene Autry. Buck Owens. Dolly Parton. Now Garth Brooks has joined the group of legendary Country artists who became radio station owners.
Brooks’ $3 million purchase of AAA “Lightning 100” WRLT Franklin TN to become “FM 100” WFLP is beneficial to radio in multiple ways. Starting simply with Brooks joining the station ownership club. While most stories about radio in recent years that reach the mainstream have been about layoffs, this is about a beloved artist putting his money behind the medium in a way we have not seen in quite some time. Before even getting into anything else the station does, simply having Garth Brooks as a radio station owner is a positive for radio as a medium.
Even if Brooks decided to do every interview about the station in character as Chris Gaines or demanding to be asked about his MLB Spring Training tenures, he will bring a star-power as an ambassador for radio sorely needed.
Everything on the programming side is what will make Brooks planned launch of “FM 100” worth following as everything he mentioned in the blog post hyping the new station goes against many established programming “rules”
- “I was looking for a station for this idea I had about an information station for Nashville locals, visitors, and tourists.” – Building a station around public service is not usually where most radio station operators begin when looking to establish a brand. Should Brooks be able to convert his personal brand equity into a station capable of serving the public in a way that other operators can capitalize on, all of radio will succeed by differentiating from streaming and giving listeners a reason to come back to radio.
- “This is an opportunity to bring the entire family of country music together in one spot … the legends, the greats, and the future greats.” – While broad playlists in Country radio work well in small markets, doing so in a market with five other stations already playing Country music in various niches as well as a non-comm playing American Roots music including Folk, Bluegrass, and Country, will not give listeners a real reason to stick around. If WFLP can make Morgan Wallen fans appreciate George Jones or Swifties to become Mandrellholics and vice versa, Country music as a whole will benefit.
- “We NEED both sides telling the story of country music.” – Brooks intends to play a significant amount of female artists on the station reigniting the long battle for equal play from female artists and becoming one of the few to ensure their airplay.
- “We PROMOTE anything the other stations have posted that’s going on. If it’s going on in Nashville, we want the people of Middle Tennessee to be aware of it.” – Brooks is intending to promote events put on by competing stations in the market. The days of promotional wars are long gone. By cross-promoting other stations, Brooks can help build back lost CUME across the Nashville dial and not worrying whether his station is a listener’s P1, P2, or just an occasional tune-in.
Brooks also plans significant severe weather coverage and tourism information for people visiting Nashville. Neither of those will be ratings draws, but instead can help reimagine how to make money off of those and similar programming elements for other stations.
The Class A 100.1 signal is not going help “FM 100” against the rest of the Nashville dial. The current AAA format has not subscribed to Nielsen in nearly a decade with Ratings Expert Chris Huff noting that over the final 12 months it did show in 2017-18, WRLT averaged a 1.4 share.
But this station won’t be about ratings or programming success. Even if we remember “FM 100” down the line the same way we talk about “Blink 102.7” or “FM News“, Garth Brooks do more for radio than anyone else has in a longtime.
Brooks said, “I owe this city. I owe country music,” but radio could end up owing Garth Brooks more.
Garth had the right idea with the Big 615 with its echoes of WSIX back in the Gerry House era when “The Big 98” was Music Row’s community center. To some extent, SiriusXM’s The Highway has become that. So, recently, has WKDF, since its music became more aggressive. But the Big 615 came closer to proof of concept than any streaming-only radio station. So it speaks volumes that Brooks still feels the need to own an FM stick, even as a placeholder for a worldwide brand.
I was in Nashville on a monthly basis in the early ’00s and, during that era at least, WRLT was also the voice of the songwriter community. The people I met might have written for WSIX, but they listened to Radio Lightning. (Every now and then, there’d be a Triple-A hit followed by a Country hit six months later that it seemed to have influenced, e.g., Crash Test Dummies/Superman’s Song and Toby Keith/Should’ve Been a Cowboy.) WRLT doesn’t seem to have benefitted from the recent excitement about the format. Maybe almost losing Radio Lightning will make people appreciate them more.