Kingston’s Pure Country commits to week of equal airplay

Kingston’s Pure Country 98.9 (CKLC-FM) has committed to playing 50% women artists this week amidst the ongoing controversy over the lack of equal airplay on country radio.

The issue reared its head again last Thursday when country artists Kelsea Ballerini and Kacey Musgraves took to Twitter in response to a post from Variety editor Chris Willman. After hearing two female artists played back-to-back on an L.A. station, he jokingly asked if the station could be fined for that.

That’s when someone at MacDonald Broadcasting-owned 98 KCQ in Saginaw, Michigan station replied “We cannot play two females back to back. Not even Lady Antebellum or Little Big Town against another female. I applaud their courage.”

Artists, fans and radio programmers on both sides of the border were quick to jump into the ongoing debate. According to research from SongData, headed by University of Ottawa researcher Jada Watson, the ratio of spins for songs by men vs. women on the weekly charts in the U.S. in 2018 was 9.7:1. On Canadian country radio, men are outplaying women by a ratio of 8.7 to 1. Watson has also found that women are most played in off-peak hours like overnights and least heard during morning and afternoon drive.

Brittany Thompson, program director and an on-air personality at Pure Country 98.9, saw the latest fray as a call to action.

“It seems like every six months we’re revisiting this issue,” Thompson told Broadcast Dialogue. “I’ve been a country fan forever and so being a program director, in addition to having just launched the station in May, I felt we were in a great position to try this. Kingston’s a great city, we’ve had so much great feedback from women and we get a ton of women requests during our request hour. It seemed like a great time to try something substantial.”

Thompson says station policy is always to listen and look at music on a song-by-song basis, regardless of who the artist is. The station already has some of country music’s perceived outliers in rotation like Musgraves and Ashley McBryde.

Starting today and continuing through the weekend, the Bell Media station has committed to playing 50% female artists between 6 a.m. and 6 p.m. It will stand alone as the only Pure Country-branded station in the network to promote equal airplay this week.

“My hope at the end of this is to show people there’s interest, that people don’t have to be scared and people won’t turn off the radio. We hope at the end people will look at the song based on the quality of that song, not based on whether it’s male or female,” said Thompson.

Thompson, who holds a B.A. in Sociology from the University of Prince Edward Island, acknowledges that male artists test better than female artists with listeners, but she chalks that up to better exposure and a human tendency for people to like things they are familiar with.

“I hope programmers say look, they did it for a week and they had great listener support, and we’re going to take a chance and put this female song on. That’s how you start change and see more equality. It will balance out in time if that’s how you approach it. I truly don’t believe people are going to turn the station off.”

While Thompson says 90% of listener feedback has been positive, she’s already received push back from the support department at one of the station’s U.S. software suppliers.

“I had to reach out for support to know if I could reach a percentage for female artists at the end of the day, much like we do for Canadian content, and the woman on the other end of the phone told me I was going down a rabbit hole and I would destroy my ratings,” said Thompson.

“We’ve had most people say this is a great step in the right direction. And it’s been far reaching. We’ve had some people in the U.S. tag their local station saying ‘can you do this?’ We’ve had way more positive response than negative, but I’m prepared for the negative responses. We need a little bit of that to show this a real struggle.”

Subscribe Now – Free!

Broadcast Dialogue has been required reading in the Canadian broadcast media for 25 years. When you subscribe, you join a community of connected professionals from media and broadcast related sectors from across the country.

The Weekly Briefing from Broadcast Dialogue is delivered exclusively to subscribers by email every Thursday. It’s your link to critical industry news, timely people moves, and excellent career advancement opportunities.

Let’s get started right now.