Six Million Divided by ONE

It has been fun to watch the impact that the arrival of John Paul at Senior Director of Country Programming joining longtime Denver programmer John St. John and the team at Dial-Global/Denver just after the first of the year.

When the staff at DG wants to talk to the boss, all they need to do is yell “hey, John.” I received a note from both of them this morning, making an impressive announcement:

Dial Global now supplies American Forces Radio with their Mainstream Country 24/7 format and rebroadcasts it over their worldwide network.

In addition to our network of over 200 radio stations in the United States that carry us through Dial Global Radio Networks, we are now heard in 188 countries around the world wherever there are military installations, bases, offices, etc. We are heard in every United States Embassy and Consulate around the world. We are also heard on 37 ships at sea, including all aircraft carriers.

In addition, some of the installations broadcast us terrestrially so surrounding English speaking civilian support personnel and the native civilian population can listen.

The conservative estimate is that the audience of Mainstream Country on the American Forces Radio Network is over three million per week. That doesn’t include the domestic cumes of nearly three million, making Dial Global’s Mainstream Country format the most listened to country outlet, not only in the United States, but around the world with a total weekly cume around six million.

Paul tells me that they are starting to get requests from oversees, Birthday wishes and e-mails from all over the world.

“We are making overnights a little more important (since it's midday is the Middle East). Being extreamly topical and throwing in the more songs like "Angel Flight", "Arlington", etc. Many people are getting their "pop culture/Nashville news/things happening at home" from us in real time. Memorial Day we are planning on doing military greetings all weekend. We have to be careful because we can't really promote this on the air. Local affiliates don't care and don't want us to promote it. We can't sell the numbers (since AFR covers our spots with messages). It's a HUGE benefit for Nashville and country music. They get their music and artists exposed to millions oversees.”

I have worked with John Paul since he first started in radio in his hometown of Kelso-Longview and was trained/mentored by the venerable San Francisco, Seattle and Portland vet Bill Dodd, while he was working with GM Jeff Silver and now PD Wendy Lynn at WYRK/Buffalo and then KUPL/Portland and I can testify that he has a positive impact where ever he works, so there’s one thing I know for sure: he has his personalities talking to those six million sets of ears around the world ONE PERSON at a time.

No matter how big your cume becomes, they still experience it in first and second person singular, one at a time.