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10 Questions with ... Gene Sandbloom
October 18, 2021
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BRIEF CAREER SYNOPSIS:
1982-1987 Intern, Music Director, KIIS-FM, Los Angeles
1987-1989 Associate Director A&R, MCA Records
1990-1992 Managing Editor, Network Forty Magazine
1992-2019 Music Director, Assistant Program Director, Operations Manager KROQ-FM and JACK, Los Angeles
2019-present Alpha Media
1. The sound of KINK has evolved since you took over programming. How would you describe the music on the station now?
I loved the KINK that existed when I arrived and was a longtime fan of KCRW in Los Angeles -- both Triple A. But looking at the numbers, they were not great. We were 18th 6+, and what audience we had was all over 55. Fortunately, we had a broader based cume. So, if we made changes, we could hopefully hook the audience popping in for a couple minutes a week.
When I arrived in Portland, I would ask Uber drivers… waiters… grocery clerks… if they listened to KINK. I almost always got the same response. “I listened to them a long time ago. I don’t listen to the radio anymore.” So, instead of looking to hack into the dwindling number of radio listeners, I thought if we could keep people from going to Apple Music a few times a week, that we could rebuild the station. And radio by extension.
2. How does KINK fit into the Triple A world?
If you look at people who leave radio and go to DSPs, the average song on the Top 40 radio chart gets about six million streams a week. The average song on the Alternative chart gets about two million streams a week. The average song on the AAA chart gets about 80,000 streams a week. So, you are dealing with a highly defined audience, which is fine if they spend a lot of time with the station and are loyal to your brand. Our research unfortunately said that our audience wasn’t very loyal, were confused what we were, and we had virtually no images for being a place to discover music.
Then I watched a pattern develop. Songs would be added and then played for a few months, and then mostly dropped. Very few songs were making it to recurrent, which is the most important category on a radio station. And thus, you had about 375 old songs that were familiar hits but stagnant and 40 new songs that were constantly coming and going.
About the same time, Glass Animals released “Heat Waves.” A song that we thought sounded like KINK and that no radio format was supporting. So, we added it almost immediately to Power. We began to question the definition of Triple A. Our audience doesn’t subscribe to Mediabase or BDS, so the sound of KINK became as we defined it. And that has been evolving for the past two years and will continue to evolve.
3. How do you decide what music to play?
You can’t look at KINK on paper and understand it. You have to listen to it. Cort Johnson (APD), Jared Aman (MD), Mitch Elliott (Mornings), Gustav (Afternoons) and I get together weekly to do music and we are constantly pushing the envelope. The station is based on a sonic thread. As long as we play music within that thread, you can segue from decade to decade and Triple A to Alternative to Pop. We debated Post Malone “Circles” for weeks. It fit the sonic thread, but we were concerned about the image fit. When we put it on the air, there was a sign in the studio for a month that said, “do not front or back announce.” We didn’t get a single complaint. We heard Olivia Rodrigo “Driver’s License” and put it straight on the air. Again, because it fit the sonic thread. And again, zero complaints.
I’m sure long-time Triple A programmers are rolling their eyes at that, and I can appreciate that. These pop songs within our thread make up a very tiny fraction of the overall sound of the station. But I can’t overstate their importance to the stations original issue, our entire audience was 55+ and we had no music images. We needed to cast a line to a fresh audience.
In less than a year KINK became #2 in teens in Portland. All while retaining our 55+ audience.
4. How does the traditional older KINK audience gel with the new younger KINK audience?
We had pulled all ‘70s music off the air when I arrived because our mission was to redefine KINK as a more broad-based music station. Once we went #2 in teens, we felt safe to put one ‘70s song back on the clock every hour. I listened to 600 classic rock songs and found 130 that fit the new KINK sonic thread. For the 55-year-old, these songs were comfort food. For the 25-year-old, these songs were a Quintin Tarantino moment. Within two months, KINK was #1 in teens with a 14 share. KINK had become Coachella on the radio. You came for Billie Eilish, but hung out for Paul McCartney, Of Monsters and Men and New Order.
So then came the bizarre task of filling in the middle -- 18 to 55-year-olds. As expected, women were the first to embrace the change. Six months later, KINK was #1 in Women 18-34, 18-49 and 25-54.
5. I’ve never heard anything quite like the KINK music mix on the radio. How do you put it together?
Over the years, I’ve hand scheduled music for KIIS-FM, KROQ and Jack in Los Angeles. Music scheduling for KINK is by far the hardest as we segue 55 years of music. If you break the sonic thread it can sound like a train wreck. And you want every decade represented every half hour.
Jared builds the log from scratch. Then I go over the logs. Then Jared goes back over the logs adding the imaging. We have long-form music sweepers called reveries that can sometimes run more than 20 seconds. The style of the reverie has to match the style of the song it’s going into. So that means physically playing the segues in Music Master to find the correct match. Additionally, we have specifically produced -- with music -- more than 70 artist IDs that are hand-scheduled into songs by those artists. A lot of work, but it’s what separates KINK.
6. How has the imaging on KINK changed?
The imaging on KINK has gone through a huge evolution. Working with APD Cort Johnson and Production Director Blair Schultze, we set out on a monumental task to remove every piece of sound on the station that came from a production library. I have collected five decades of music on my phone, and we started with that to create our imaging. Using music between music to identify the station acts like glue. Basically improving on the experience you get from a DSP. It took more than a year to hand build all of our imaging, and whenever we hear something new that strikes our ear, we build more imaging out of it.
7. How important are your DJs to KINK?
Yet another advantage over DSPs is our air personalities’ commitment to show prep. A talk break is never “one oh one nine, KINK- Independent. Portland.” There are eight imaging pieces an hour on the station that say that. So, every break is about telling our listeners something about Portland or the artists we play that they didn’t know before.
Afternoons on KINK is Gustav who came to us from KNRK after two plus decades. His culture of great show prep has permeated KINK, and you can hear it as everyone is at their computers Googling before, during and after their shift. I am constantly in awe at the things I learn listening to the station. And I can’t overstate the importance of silent segues either. Because we maintain a sonic thread, they are almost always surprising and compelling.
Our morning show has evolved as well. When you listen to Mitch Elliott you get a ton of information disbursed throughout the show with only two or three short stop-downs an hour. So, we are able to maintain our music images during the morning show. And in Portland, our public radio station OPB regularly tops the ratings. So, we upped the IQ and now all the trivia games we play with listeners on the show are morphed from NPR trivia games. There are twice weekly entertainment segments, a daily chat about one key news piece with the morning anchor of the news station down the hall, and every Friday we end the show with the KINK Green Room. A long-form artist chat and music segment with guests, including Coldplay, The XX, Tame Impala, Glass Animals, Lord Huron, Imagine Dragon, Olivia Rodrigo and Lana Del Rey.
8. What kind of promotions and marketing does KINK do?
If you allow them, promotions can be more of an interruption than an asset -- 90% of your audience won’t participate, so you have to make it compelling to everyone. Marketing Director Melissa Ives joins our KINK team for weekly promo brain storming. When she was leaked info about Coldplay doing a one-off in Seattle, we alerted our friends at Atlantic quickly who went to work on tickets. We bought roundtrip train tickets and hotel rooms for every winner. A universally fun promotion.
Each March, KINK would do March Music Month with trips to see bands. An impossibility this past March in the Covid world, we shifted and created brackets with listeners voting on the biggest KINK Artist of All Time throughout the month. It was all inclusive -- every Led Zeppelin and Tom Petty, there was a Billie Eilish and Lana Del Rey. You could feel the momentum all month on the air. It emphasized KINK’s commitment to artists. Every time you voted you went into the drawing for a KINK sound system. A modern iPad driven system that included a turntable and vinyl shopping spree at Music Millennium. Old and new -- just like KINK.
We even paid off with deep tracks by the winning Beatles all weekend and playing Abbey Road Sunday night. Anybody can play Abbey Road whenever they want on a DSP. But we created an event out of nothing, and our meters surged that Sunday night. As a kid, I remember when radio did stuff like that. All part of bringing back those Uber drivers, waiters and grocery clerks who don’t listen anymore.
As for marketing, here’s one of the TV spots we have been running on Portland TV: youtu.be/tptBqXeC5N8
9. You changed the positioning statement of KINK to “Independent. Portland.” What was behind that?
We wanted a label that wasn’t currently being used in either Radio or Portland, so as to set us down the path of being a unique brand. I am most fortunate to be working with Alpha here in Portland. Especially Market Manager Lisa Decker. When I arrived and we looked at the issues facing KINK, I asked her, “Are we adding Journey and Foreigner, or would you like to build a brand?” The later netting potentially greater returns down the road, but a possibly risky path to get there. She never hesitated. And so, like KIIS-FM and KROQ, our goal was to make KINK stand out as a unique brand.
KINK has been very much about trust building with our audience. An old saying at KROQ was that people would be willing to sit through a song they were just OK with because they knew they would love the next one. And they wouldn’t hear it anywhere else. So, our secondary positioner at KINK is, “There’s so much great music out there, let us help you find it.”
And that’s not just new music. Jared has been on the hunt for songs having a second life via Tik Tok or You Tube. Only a small fraction of songs will translate to KINK. But over the past year, we have resuscitated and treated like currents 2015’s “Runaway” by Aurora, 2013’s “Another Love” by Tom Odell, 2010’s “The Less I Know The Better” by Tame Impala, and currently on our playlist, 2015’s “Space Song” by Beach House. A lot of our new and rediscovered music is played 24/7, and not just regulated to nights. That brings a great sense of forward momentum when you spend time with the station.
10. Where do you see KINK in two or three years?
I wish I could say there was a master plan for KINK, but it has been evolving over the past year. And it will continue to evolve. Our Sunday Brunch show includes hundreds of deeper cuts that I would love to add to the regular mix, and we occasionally pull from those songs during the week if an hour looks boring. But relying too heavily on deep tracks is throwing darts in the Nielsen world.
We are currently flying without callout research. In my early days at KIIS-FM, it was because the programmers at the station were open to a wide variety of suggestions that I was hired from an intern and worked my way up to Music Director. Those early days were all gut and adding my contributions from Talking Heads and OMD to the mix helped make KIIS unique in the Top 40 world, and eventually took us to a 10-share in Los Angeles. As was KROQ when we started altering the recipe and added Nirvana in 1992. It may seem obvious now, but at the time it was a big step. And the station continued to evolve with the music. Weekly research can be a huge asset, but while you are exploring and building a franchise, it’s a choice of rearview mirror or windshield. And we are facing forward.
Listening to music as listening to the radio should be a left-brain experience. But all too often we approach radio with a right-brain mentality with charts and sound codes and looking back at what we did last year so we can do it again this year. Radio has a great future. We just need to stop programming it on paper and listen.
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