Revolution Radio

A sixty-one-year reign comes to an end as the benevolent KING-FM announces plans to become another pauper on the radio dial.

For classical music fans, the signal at 98.1 has been the gift that keeps on giving.

In 1948, Seattle’s famed Bullitt family started KING-FM at that spot on the dial. And when the family sold its KING Broadcasting empire (which included KING-TV in Seattle, KREM-TV in Spokane, KTVB-TV in Boise and KHNL-TV in Honolulu) to Providence Journal Corporation in 1992, it kept the station out of the deal to prevent any new owner from killing it and silencing classical radio in Seattle. They could have sold the station for perhaps $70 million. Instead, they gave it, in 1994, to a nonprofit group called Beethoven, set up to funnel KING-FM’s profits to the opera, the symphony and ArtsFund (which feeds smaller arts groups). There were lots of profits: $6.91 million flowed to Seattle arts groups from 1995 to 2009. “KING was a top-five station,” says Joey Cohn, KPLU-FM program director.

Illustration by Michelle Kim for City Arts.

The station is far from those glory days, with an audience that is dwindling in number and growing in age. Ads have fled. KING profits have shrunk. Beethoven’s annual payout to its beneficiaries has sunk from $750,000 in 1999 to zero in 2010. Three KING hosts were sacked last September. In March, the station’s management announced plans to become noncommercial by July 1, 2011. Ads will vanish, and the money to run the station will come from listeners and corporate underwriters. Instead of being a donor to good causes, KING-FM has become the good cause seeking donors.

“They had to do it to stay alive,” says Cohn. “God, they can’t keep cutting their programming to the bone forever.”

Soon, instead of crummy sixty-second ads for dentists, you’ll hear plummy twenty-second public-radio underwriters’ messages and pledge drives on KING-FM, just like on KUOW, KPLU and KBCS. “KING was more of a public station than a commercial station anyway,” says KUOW president Wayne Roth. Cohn adds, “Its top competitors are Warm 106.9, KUOW and KPLU.”

And KING-FM does have a product to sell: classical music and local performers. “We’ll be able to play more music,” says KING manager Jennifer Ridewood. “We’ll do fewer commercials and more live broadcasts of local groups.”

“No other station can do live remotes of the opera and symphony,” says Feliks Banel, the author of the blog I Still Love Radio. “Ten percent of KUOW listeners donate. KING-FM has 250,000 listeners. If ten percent donate a hundred dollars, that’s $2.5 million.”

In the next six months, about five fundraisers will join KING’s staff of six full-time and fourteen part-time employees.

“In fundraising, you’ve got to have a strong, simple message of need, and they have that,” says Cohn. “They’re unique.” If Seattle listeners and underwriters don’t pony up to keep KING going, classical radio will go. “This is going to be a positive for them,” says Cohn. Says Banel, “If they’re smart, they can pull this off.”

Nobody knows if they can. But a radio insider offers one confident prediction: “Don’t expect any more KING-FM layoffs. Not unless someone commits a crime.” •