Here is a brief history of how KalaMusic started. MetroMedia bought WOMC in 1973 and didn’t know what to do with the station they had just purchased for, I believe, under $400,000. They didn’t care much because they bought it with John Kluge’s (CEO of MetroMedia and one of the wealthiest men in the world at the time) pocket money.
The WOMC Sales Manager, Bob Reinhardt, drove out to Kalamazoo to make a sales call on Consumers Energy, whose ad agency was based there. He heard our own WQLR-FM, loved what he heard, and came to our offices in downtown Kalamazoo (what was then the ISB building, now Comerica) to ask what syndicator we used. We told him—gulp—that we helped build the Susquehanna FM station group based in York, PA, and programmed our own station.
The very next day, he called my partner Stephen Trivers and asked if we would program WOMC. We said we were too new and couldn’t afford the investment needed. The next day, he called again and said John Kluge would cut us a check for whatever was needed to set us up in the business, IF we’d program WOMC on a minimum three-year contract. The rest is history.
We never intended for the company that became known as KalaMusic to be anything more than the company that programmed our own FM stations—WQLR “Clear 106” in Kalamazoo, MI; WEZV in Fort Wayne, MI; and WNCW “Nice 97” in Lexington, KY—plus MetroMedia’s WOMC in Detroit. Had we intended to create the next SRP (Jim Schulke and Phil Stout are still to be commended for being the single company that finally put FM stations on the map) we probably would have called our programming company FBC (Fairfield Broadcasting Company), not KalaMusic. The “Kala” is obviously the key part of the city we still call home, 30 years later.
By the way, WOMC moved from 28th (in a market of 30 Arbitron-rated stations) to 3rd overall in our very first Arbitron in Detroit. We were fortunate that WJR-FM, which was an SRP station, didn’t have the same commitment as WOMC’s ownership. WJR-AM was by far the #1 station in Detroit, but WJR-FM was fully automated. The Motor City loved the fact that WOMC was live and—though we didn’t use the phrase—lively. We mixed music into our EZ format that was considered taboo within the then–beautiful music format.
It worked for us in Kalamazoo, where WOOD-FM was a “twin” of WJR-FM: WOOD-AM was the #1 station by far, and WOOD-FM was an outstanding radio station. Without SRP’s great programming, WOOD-FM would never have been one of the first FM stations (I believe it was the first) to rank #1 in 12-plus ratings.
SRP was, by far, the best competitor KalaMusic could have had. Their format was in many ways superior to ours, especially in the early to mid-70s. However, many of their clients had huge AM or TV stations (or both), and the FM was relegated to a closet. Despite those odds, SRP’s strength was in its simplicity: run our format exactly as needed and your station will be #1.
This worked so well that the FCC conducted a formal inquiry into who controlled the FM licenses of SRP’s stations—the licensee or SRP. In hindsight, 20+ years later, the FCC was politically correct to ask. Still, many of those FM stations might still have been waiting for FM to come of age if not for SRP.
IBMA was a collection of broadcasters: KalaMusic/Fairfield Broadcasting, Greater Media, Susquehanna, EZ Communications, Park Broadcasting, Jerry Lee’s WEAZ in Philadelphia, Tribune’s KCTC in Sacramento, and Ed Winton’s WWBA in Tampa. Jerry Lee, Ted Dorf (Greater Media), the late Ed Winton, Art Keller (EZ), and I comprised the Board of Directors. It was mostly a loose collection of similar interests pooling resources to produce new EZ music, but we were incorporated and spent lots of money over the years, creating some great music.
As Paul Harvey would say, “the rest of the story” is how IBMA ended. Jerry Lee convinced all of us to fund a research project on the future of the EZ format. I produced several different clusters of music—one similar to SRP’s style, one in Bonneville’s style, one in KalaMusic’s style, and several forward-looking clusters. The research was conducted under Bill Moyes, who ultimately used the IBMA-funded project to create what became known as Format 41. This was the beginning of the end for the EZ format as we knew it.
We sold KalaMusic to Broadcast Programming in Seattle in 1990 so our own stations, WQLR-FM in Kalamazoo and WEZV-FM in Fort Wayne, could program the “cluster” that scored best with the research targets. The first couple of years after transitioning from EZ to Lite A/C were great musically because we still incorporated instrumentals (including excellent material by artists like David Lanz, Jim Brickman, and others) alongside Lite A/C artists like Neil Diamond, Elton John, and Whitney Houston.
Sadly, the Lite A/C format was in many ways doomed because major record labels devoted fewer and fewer resources to new material. At the end of the day, any format that does not introduce new music and artists becomes a nostalgia format and will ultimately fail as a mass-appeal format.
Bill Wertz, Fairfield Broadcasting Company/KalaMusic
December 2001
IBMA addition, April 2002
Photo: Stephen Trivers (left), Bill Wertz (right).
