A little update regarding closing or selling the site.
I was half asleep when this happened, but when a different station bleeds through, insanity sets in. Enjoy the slow pitch voices of Eli & Coughlin, the Musers take shots at themselves and some other voices from another station pop on.
Who are they talking about?
Ok, I’ve held my tongue long enough. This is absolutely pathetic on the part of Cumulus; they have bastardized talk radio and castrated one of the only stations that makes them any money at all. How do I know it’s one of the only ones? Because I’ve worked at Cumulus, and they pour little to no technological resources, marketing or thought into 99.9% of their product because it’s all about just breaking even; we would receive playlists from Houston or Atlanta and were threatened with job termination if we decided to take a song request.
True story: A man called into my rock station requesting a song that reminded him of when his sister was battling cancer; I literally had to debate whether or not to play it, because my job would be on the line. No creativity or thought put into broadcasts at all. Bottom line.
Which is funny, because the kind of technical difficulties The Little Ticket is now experiencing is most likely robbing them of listeners. I can’t listen to The Top 10 because when Jake Kemp starts a cut, the Sweet Jack song plays. Every time. So I stopped. When the stream is down, am I listening? Of course not.
And even when we’re able to listen, the hosts are absolutely castrated and left to the wolves because of all the stupid errors on the part of Cumulus not arming and directing the engineering. The engineers can only do so much, it takes leadership from Cumulus to change a station’s location, TO MAKE EQUIPMENT MOVES DURING OFF-HOURS, you know, basic decisions.
So now you have the hosts who are in the equivalent position of news broadcasters. When a broadcaster is stuttering over words because the reader isn’t working the words weren’t put in properly, you feel sorry for them because it’s not their fault. Or when news pieces won’t run and the broadcast is melting down…who’s sitting there in front of the viewer? The anchor. They get to look like the idiot for the mistakes of others.
The Little Ticket isn’t about having listeners feel sorry for them. Nor have they been all about looking foolish because they can’t even break properly or be heard. They’ve always been about flourishing what what little they have, but Cumulus management has managed to take that away too.
How can The Little Ticket do anything when they’re now left with nothing? Sorry for the long post. Ugh.
*and *with (apologies)
It seems as though there’s one guy that’s screwed things up in the last year that they went off on this morn, I hate to see my Courage Boys struggulling
Someone on facebook said it might be the chief engineer. No confirmation about that though.
@JAB Thanks for the insight and I agree with you 100%. Today I was thinking about all the years I’ve spent listening to sports stations in different cities I’ve lived in. I cannot remember a single instance of fail on the level The Ticket has had repeatedly the past few weeks. I can’t believe that this is acceptable to anyone at Cumulus, yet it keeps happening. If you’re not on the air, you can’t make money. They should have all hands on deck for this, and maybe they do but I’m starting to get the impression no one over there cares anymore or ever did.
The worst part, like you said, is the toll it takes on the hosts. They constantly get hung out to dry, the listeners in turn complain to them, etc. Poor Grubes, too. He’s paralyzed by this and the Hardline just ain’t the same without him. So many great drop opportunities lost during SB week. Maybe Mike was on to something at the campout when he talked about retiring in February.
Do the P1s know the engineer to whom they are referring? Have we ever heard his name?
@Fred Fuchs EXACTLY! That’s another thing I wanted to get into (and do on my blog) but knew my post on here was long enough as it was. If the hosts are not being heard, why keep talking on this station?
Bring back the Skydiving Chief! I doubt he’d have any interest in leaving Kidd Kraddick’s YEA empire to come back to a failboat like Cumulus, though.
What you are experiencing is the death throes of the little Ticket. This started about a year ago and drunk Mike from the Camp Out was actually Pull-back-the-curtain-a-little Mike. The younger guys are already starting to jump ship and listening to the Musers frustrations during Monday morning, I imagine that the contract guys are ready to be done, too. Sad, but nothing like this can last forever. The station can survive losing Greggo, but once it becomes too much of a pain to listen, it won’t survive losing it’s listeners.
@Juan If by “the younger guys are starting to jump ship” you mean “people who made me change the station 100% of the time are starting to jump ship”, then I agree.
Ticket will be fine until a muser or mike leaves. In the latter case, that won’t be to a rival station…he already had that chance. Mike is ~61 years old. He will either die at the mic or retire to Petty Theft and carousing.
“thats weird”
Which younger guys recently left? Who has jumped ship recently?
While it is important that we support the Ticket in anyway we can during this time, something tells me @Juan Openings hasn’t been listening to the station very long if he’s freaking out about younger guys “jumping ship”. Who is he talking about? Friedo? Elf? Off-air engineers? Producers and weekend hosts have been leaving the station for years. That is nothing new and that’s ok — they’re getting opportunities elsewhere.
Let’s not forget that with the exception of Greggo, all the hosts have been in place since 2000. That is remarkable stability.
Having said that let’s not take what we have for granted. If we have to make war on Cumulus I am ready.
Everybody just relax, I’m still at the Ticket.
funny
I don’t get Juan’s post at all. He must not listen to radio at all, little fish jump ship all the time for better opportunities.
@Memz: so am I. Let’s get our pitchforks and torches ready.
@Red You know, I’ve never written to a company to complain about anything because I think it’s SG. I doubt it’s even slightly helpful, but yesterday I went ahead and mailed a letter to the CEO of Cumulus anyway, so call me SG I guess. The Ticket is the only thing I care about enough to waste my time with such a thing, and “I’m really tired” of all the technical difficulties. Complaint letters probably all get discarded to the boiler room with Clarence Murphy, but it’s all any P1 can do at this point. Hopefully things get better.
Aw, I wish you’d caught the rant they all went on a bit later on. I’ve never heard any of the musers that pissed off about anything before in my life. It was awesome. Especially when they ripped on Cumulus. I was leaning into my radio and laughing joyously and maniacally like that Jim Carey in that scene in Batman Forever when he was watching all that crap go down at the circus on TV.