In the Weeds: Handwritten Note Made Bobby Cry, A Band is Mad at Him, & Giving Away Over $50,000!

Bobby Bones (0:00)

Bobby Bones Presents The BobbyCast Alright, let's talk about my syndication and when cities leave or come on to the show. And when I very first started doing the radio show, to me, the more cities I could be on, the more successful the show was. I very much assigned my success to how big we were getting and how much we were growing with just more radio stations. In the past three, four, five years, I don't do that anymore. That's a part of it for sure, but man, I'm watching podcast downloads like crazy. But I did in the past week and a half or so begin to get two kinds of messages that are never that pleasant to get. The first kind are, what the heck is this? We hate you. And that's when we joined a new station. So we're very different than any other show. If you're watching this, you know about our show by now. But we've never been a show that was like any single show that we followed. Even when I moved to town, the first couple years were brutal for me here. And revisionist history by most folks, I moved here, it was easy. Next thing you know, we're rocking. Not at all, miserable couple of years, because whenever I moved to Nashville, we weren't even replacing the big country show that was here. We were replacing the show that replaced the big country show that was here forever. But also we were replacing through syndication a bunch of other morning shows that the company had decided, hey, we're either going to move them out or we're going to flip a station. And so everywhere that got us that first year or two, we were completely different sounding than anything that existed in country music. Now there's a lot of shows that model themselves after us and we weren't breaking any new molds, really. We were just being ourselves. I should say we weren't purposefully doing that. We were doing the show a lot different than other folks because we had decided and I decided a long time ago that when we were doing the show, we weren't just going to be, okay, the only music we listen to is country. I wasn't going to wear a cowboy hat. I wasn't going to wear a bell buckle. But I would get all these messages all the time on Facebook and Instagram, just being like, this show sucks, we hate it. And I get it because when you're new and you have a habit of listening to one thing and then something new comes in, one, you're mad because your old thing's gone. But two, if the new thing is way different than the old thing, I can see where people would get irritated at that. So what's been happening the last couple of months has reintroduced me to some of those feelings. Luckily I've been through it before, but we've been put on a bunch of stations. And sometimes I don't know what stations we're going on. I don't get an email going, you're going to be new in this city, this city, in this city, and you're going to be off this city. And so we've launched in a few places, and the only reason I know that is because I'll get DMs going, hey, you suck, what happened to my old show? And to me, I'm going, I never been to your town before. I didn't even know I was on your town. And hopefully I'm in a decent mood, or I only check comments or DMs on Tuesday. And I'll reply back to some of them going, hey, just give us a chance if you don't mind. The other thing is sometimes we get pulled off a station, and we got pulled off in Richmond, Virginia a few weeks ago. I didn't know this. I was flipping through on TikTok, and I saw a media minute blog from this place called Barrett Media that does a lot of covering radio and podcasts. And it said, hey, and off in Richmond, Virginia, The Bobby Bones Show. There was a picture of me. I was like, oh, dang. And I like Richmond a lot. I've been there a lot, I would tour through there a lot. And they said, and replacing The Bobby Bones Show is, it was a single female host. Now, there's a couple of reasons that our show would get pulled from a city. And the first reason could just simply be bad ratings. And this wasn't that case this time. It's been that before, but it wasn't this time. Another reason can be, so the stations that are not owned by my company, iHeartRadio, they have to pay a licensing fee. So this was a station that was not owned by iHeartRadio. And we're on a bunch of those. Now, if you're owned by iHeartRadio, you don't have to pay a licensing fee because, well, the company already owns it. Why would you pay the same company a license fee for the... So if they put us on any of those stations, it's just free to you, have at it, the company owns it, now you have it. In a situation like a Richmond, where it wasn't iHeartRadio, they were paying, let's say, $10 for the show. It was significantly more than that, but let's say they were paying $10, and the contract ran out with that market, with that radio station, and let's say they can hire another host for $6.50, especially a solo host that's not gonna do a lot of talking, it's gonna play a lot of music. First of all, you're gonna be saving $3.50 right off the bat there, which in this age, money is very hard to come by, especially in media. Across the board in so many different kinds of media, just constant cuts in television, radio, digital media, you're seeing constant layoffs, and it sucks for everybody involved, so it's not like the 90s where money's just growing, and let's just keep throwing money at it to fix it. So, by not paying us and hiring somebody for cheaper, you're saving hypothetically $3.50. Now, if that same person you're hiring can also do a second job, let's say as a promotions director, and you would pay a promotions director $1.50. Now, they're doing the morning show for $6.50, and now the promotions director fee of $1.50 is also added, you're not having to pay, so basically now you're paying $5.00 for a show instead of $10.00 because you're covering her, the morning show, and she's also doing a promotion job. So in the end, many times it just comes down to money. And look, if we were making a ton of money on that station, they probably wouldn't have cut us. I never see the financials for non I Heart Stations. We are not on enrichment anymore, which stinks because we've been on there for a long time, but also I don't get upset about that because it is totally a money decision, and it is very hard to consistently make money now. And if you can hire somebody for cheaper than you were paying the show and also have them do another job so you're saving money with that job, it makes all the sense in the world. So I'm never going to be bitter about that because it's a business. It ain't show friends, it's show business. So in the same way that it's a business, I'm sure we've been put on in places for the same reason. But, yeah, I got a lot of messages going, hey, you're new and you suck. And I go, oh, we must be on somewhere new. Or where did you go? And I was seeing a lot of that, where did you go? And if for some reason we're not on in your city, we're on in every city because you can download the podcast. And we do two shows a day on the podcast, the whole show you hear on the radio, and then we do a whole second show as well that's basically anywhere from 50 minutes to over an hour just that second podcast feed. And then also we do a half hour of tell me something good. So all of this to say, I just kind of wanted to talk about it because I would never talk about it on the actual radio. But I feel like in this, this is in the weeds. I just kind of wanted to share the reasoning behind us leaving an affiliate. Three reasons. One, we are not getting good ratings. Two, they need to save money. Or three, the station flips. That happens to where it's not even they're changing out the morning show. Sometimes, they change out the entire format. We were on in Portland. They actually changed ownership there. And so, this is now it's been a while, but when we left the station in Portland, well, when we were cut from Portland, the contract had expired. And not only that, a new ownership group had come in and their whole thing was, we're just going to hire everybody local. And you got to respect that for sure. Like, again, it's not show friends, it's show business. And I can admire a company that goes, we're going to dedicate to whatever strategy it is. I just like people that dedicate themselves to one strategy and they stick by it because it's so easy then for the company and for the people in it to know the vision. And so when that happened in Portland, and they said, yeah, they're not going to pull any syndicated shows at all from anywhere. They're just going to hire locally. I was like, got it.