It seems like this day has been coming for a long time.
We learned on Dec. 1 that the Pohlad family's radio stations are being sold, and their formats are expected to die with the completion of the sale next month.
Nobody is shocked.
I was surprised to learn that the Pohlad brain trust has been shopping their two FM frequencies since giving up the dream of retaining the broadcast rights to their baseball team's games. (They own the Minnesota Twins, I'm sure you know.)
It seems like the Pohlad radio empire will be remembered as an extravagant failure.
Let's see how accurately I can remember the history. Full disclosure, I refreshed my memory six hours ago with a perusal of the 96.3 Wikipedia page.
The Pohlads got into the biz more than a decade ago, buying the local hip hop station B96. They didn't immediately dump the format, but eventually softened the playlist. On the old Red and Nater discussion forum, the programming genius that announced the switch was the butt of jokes for his claim that the new 96.3 Now wasn't going to play Disney pop in sanitizing the play list, yet the new era launched with the Miley Cyrus "Party in the U.S.A." song.
The sanitized playlist didn't win over billions of listeners, so the Pohlads flipped it to K-TWIN, making it some sort of alternative station. I never listened religiously, but I'd flip to it occasionally, and remember hearing an old song I hadn't heard on the radio in many years.
I don't remember what the difference was, but when it became GO 96.3, it seemed the main idea was to abandon older alternative. They use to like to claim the station was where modern music was going, or something like that.
I think the "modern music is going" angle was dropped along the way, but I never got a sense the station ever fascinated the masses, no matter how they tweaked the playlist.
The Pohlads eventually added 95.3 to their holdings, and turned some sort of Jesus frequency into a hip hop station, perhaps a lot like the B96 station they killed off years earlier.
And at some point the Pohlads bought the gimmicky Bring Me the News. Buying a former weekend TV anchor's online news aggregator was an odd move, I thought, and I'm hard pressed to cite any value that acquisition brought to the Pohlad media empire. The whole thing seemed to die on the vine, although we have a bastard child of Bring Me the News available via the internet, which throws a few peanuts to Sven Sungaard, somehow. Weird world we live in, isn't it?
The Pohlads famously tried to broadcast Twins games on 96.3 for a couple of years. I don't get why that was a failure. Perhaps it wasn't, as far as baseball broadcasting goes. I can't imagine it helped build listenership for that modern music they were dedicated to. But it was an odd pairing, for sure, and the Pohlads abandoned their dream of owning their broadcast rights and started pimping them to WCCO-AM.
I never sensed the Pohlads made a dent in Twin Cities radio ratings. It wasn't for a lack of trying. They promoted their stations in traditional ways, as you'd expect, had concerts at Target Field, driven by the alternative station, and made a point of connecting their stations to the local music scenes they served.
I read a few online comments after the death announcement. They're what you expect. The small audience 96.3 attracted is mourning the loss of that station as if it was the greatest, most important station in the history of Twin Cities radio. I get that.
I can't say how important the GO stations were to local music, but their demise seems to be a loss to the local music scenes they served, if you believe what you read. I have no reason to doubt that.
For all the effort the Pohlads put into building a modern/alternative music station for eight years, 96.3 never seemed to be more than a blip on the radar when it came to ratings. They seemed to do better, not surprisingly, with their 95.3 hip hop. Ironic since they killed what seemed to be a reasonably successful B96 years earlier.
As I said, the death of the Pohlad media empire ain't a shock, or a surprise. Critics of the Pohlads, when it comes to their baseball team for the past 25 years, have been underwhelmed by the financial moves the team has made. I suspect the Pohlads are making money in Major League Baseball, because it seems like they're afraid to spend it and go the extra mile to bring a championship to Minnesota. Yes, the Pohlad regime, under the old man, won two World Series. MLB is a very different animal today than it was in 1987 and 1991, and the Pohlads have underwhelmed as owners, even with that spiffy new stadium they said was essential in order for the team to compete in the 2000s.
The fact that the Pohlads have underwhelmed as owners of a radio/media conglomerate, and are bailing out of a hemorrhaging industry during a pandemic that is only exacerbating terrestrial radio's decline, should be a shock to nobody.
