Co-founded by the late, great Dick Clark, United Stations Radio Networks (USRN) has been in the business of syndicated, network programming for over three decades. The company currently offers a wide variety of programs from the likes of Dee Snider, Little Steven Van Zandt, Alice Cooper, Mark McGrath and others; as well as short-form content, prep services, news, weather and more. USRN also recently launched Time Warp, a new Classic Rock program from Bill St. James and Dan Fermento. In this week’s eQB, USRN EVP of Programming Andy Denemark discusses what makes successful network programming, the genesis of Time Warp and how USRN competes in the crowded world of network programming.
By Joey Odorisio
Andy Denemark
Co-founded by the late, great Dick Clark, United Stations Radio Networks (USRN)has been in the business of syndicated, network programming for over three decades. The company currently offers a wide variety of programs from the likes of Dee Snider,Little Steven Van Zandt, Alice Cooper, Mark McGrath and others; as well as short-form content, prep services, news, weather and more. USRN also recently launchedTime Warp, a new Classic Rock program from Bill St. James and Dan Formento. In this week’s eQB, USRN EVP of Programming Andy Denemark discusses what makes successful network programming, the genesis of Time Warp and how USRN competes in the crowded world of network programming.
What are the origins of USRN?
The company has a pretty long and interesting history. The brand actually goes back to 1981 and [until his passing] Dick Clark was still a partner in the company. It’s a privately held company and he was one of the several partners that hold an interest in the company. Dick Clark and [current CEO/Chairman] Nick Verbitsky were really the two engines that started the company and propelled everything. United Stations grew through the ’80s with the acquisition of what was the old RKO Radio Network. Then they merged actually with a company that was a 24-7 format company called TransStar, and the merged company became known as Unistar.
Around 1993, Unistar was merged into Westwood One, and Nick and Dick were sitting out a non-compete at the time. In early 1994, their non-compete expired and they wanted to go back into business, so they started a new company. They realized the United Stations name had gone unprotected in the merger, so they were able to go back into business reclaiming a name that was very familiar in the industry.
In ’94, the company was started with just a handful of programs. I joined that May and the directive was: We have a blank canvas, let’s fill it. So we developed programming for Country, Triple A, CHR and Smooth Jazz. A lot of what we did immediately was fill niches, including Rhythmic CHR. Smooth Jazz was a big format but there really wasn’t big syndication for it, so we developed something with the Broadcast Architecture people. Triple A was the next big thing and Album Rock programmers were trying to figure out what direction to take things. We partnered with WXPN in Philadelphia, and Todd Rundgren was the host of the show that we did that year.
How were you leveraging the show on the programming side at the time?
We got up on our feet by doing what a radio network is supposed to do: doing something that local stations don’t have the resources, time or manpower for. Historically this company has turned to national celebrities to be a centerpiece of our programming. Hiring Alice Cooper to do five nights a week is something a network can do that a single station is probably not going to do. Dick Clark for years was a centerpiece of our programming, because before Oldies morphed into Classic Hits, who was bigger than Dick Clark? We’ve worked with Dee Snider, Mark McGrath from Sugar Ray. It’s interesting because a lot times when you reach out for star power, you reach out for people who haven’t necessarily been in the medium of radio their whole careers, like Rock stars. From a station’s point-of-view, they may ask: is this person going to stick with it? Are they going to go on tour? But Alice Cooper just celebrated his eighth year with us in January, so he loves it. Pretty much everybody we work with loves the medium of radio and likes having their outlet to say the stuff they want to say and turn people on to some music. A lot of the things we do at this company aren’t really programs at all. We’re very deep into prep services, comedy and other production services. We also marketAccuWeather’s weather forecasts and Bloomberg’s Finance News.
What conceptual rules have guided the company through the years?
We try and cut through the din of everything that’s out there by giving people top-notch production and top-notch shows that are formatted. When a local station turns to a network show they have certain expectations that it’s going to be well produced and delivered on time. Everything about it is going to be professionally done. All of the companies that have survived in the network business have had to do the fundamentals correctly, and if you don’t, you’ll be out of business. Over the years in the network and syndication game there certainly have been smaller players that have been shaken out because they didn’t do the fundamentals the right way.
What are some of the more popular and successful shows USRN currently offers?
There’s two ways to look at station lineup in the network business. I simplify it as “length and strength.” First, the length of a list of how many stations you have. There’s a fallacy in network radio where someone will call me and say, “We should partner, my show is on 40 stations.” Well, 40 stations is a nice number but then they tell you which 40 stations they’re on, and they’re not necessarily stations that have any impact or audience, so that’s where “strength” comes in. Strength of a show is its penetration in each market, with good average quarter hours and cume. We don’t really want stations airing our programs after midnight, or at five in the morning.
Some of our shows have a very long list, with lots of stations, but maybe not tremendous major market coverage, and then sometimes we have shows all in the major markets. Dee Snider’s House Of Hair is one of the bigger shows that we have. Its 2-3 hours on the weekend. Alice Cooper may not have the number of stations that Dee has, but Alice has 30-hours-a-week of programming. He’s five nights a week plus there’s a Saturday show.
Then there’s Lex & Terry, who might only have 25 stations that are on their network, but they’re in morning drive. So whenever people ask “What’s your biggest show?” it’s actually hard to answer. As is the question: How many shows do you do? I don’t actually know, and part of the reason is there’s a lot we produce in-house but there’s a lot of stuff we produce in partnership with others like the new Time Warp show we’re doing with Bill St. James. That’s being delivered to us by Dan Fermento’s new company RTE Media. We have a lot of distribution deals where we’re just doing affiliate marketing and sales, but we’re not actually even involved much in the production of the show.
Little Steven’s Underground Garage just joined our lineup. That’s another one where Steven is a star and the product is completely unique. He’s been doing this on his own with his small vertically integrated company, and he’s been on the air for ten years doing an incredible job, but he thought, “I’m on tour with Springsteen this year, and we need to have a larger organization help us.” He has a lot of going on: a recording studio, a TV show filmed in Norway, on tour with Bruce…So we’re going to be taking that show over, and again it fits right into that philosophy of delivering a star that nobody else can. It’s already on the air in Philadelphia, Chicago, Los Angeles and New York City, so before you know it that could turn into one of our bigger shows in terms of a show with a lot of big market affiliates.
USRN announced recently that Time Warp had already passed 50 affiliates in under two weeks. How did that show come together?
I have known Dan Formento for 30 years and actually was involved in the team when Flashback was first created for the NBC radio network. Later, Dan took Flashback and went elsewhere and had a very long relationship with the ABC Radio Network, which became Citadel Media Networks, and then in September the deal closed for Cumulus to take over with Citadel Media. At some point, both Dan as a producer and Bill St. James as the voice of Flashback got separated. Flashback was one of the biggest shows in the Classic Rock network business. It was enormously successful, and you had the creative force and the voice that anchored it no longer part of the show. We got a sense that stations weren’t happy, and if that original creative team reappeared somehow on the dial, stations would grab it, and that’s what has been happening. It was just an opportunity that presented itself where talent we’ve known and respected for a long time but didn’t think would be available to work with, suddenly became available. And of course, Flashback still exists, but the creative team and the voice that lent a certain sound into the show and really made it what it was aren’t involved anymore. So we felt if we could grab them, create something new, and get even half of the success that Flashback once had, we’d all be happy campers. So far it seems to be heading in that direction.
At its peak, I think Flashback was almost at 200 stations, so it’ll be a little while until we catch up. The week of March 19 we were between the first and second Time Warp show when the 50th contract came in. By now, it could be 75 or 80 stations, maybe pushing 100, but that would be our goal.
Like I said, Flashback still exists, and there are only so many time slots available at radio. So if we got up to 100 stations in a hurry we would all be quite pleased, and it’s heading in that direction.
It feels like there’s an increasing amount of competition in network syndication, especially with Clear Channel creating so much national programming in-house. How does USRN stand out in this crowded marketplace?
Clear Channel has its radio station group and also Premiere Radio Networks, which is of course a direct competitor of ours. It’s a matter of identifying the unique stars and unique talent, looking at the marketplace and just filling a hole that nobody else is filling. Just because somebody does a Classic Rock show or Country or a countdown program, it doesn’t mean they’re doing it the same way. There are four long-standing countdown shows in Country radio. We entered the field last July with a fifth. But we did it with a guy who is young, a lot more active in social media and on one of the “Wolf” branded stations in Seattle.
What is your approach in selecting a host?
You have to identify who you think the talent of the future is. Clear Channel had Ryan Seacrest working for them at Star FM in the afternoon in L.A. when American Idol was born. His star rose quickly and they took advantage of that and moved him to mornings atKISS, put him in syndication, replaced Casey Kasem with him. That’s what you have to do. You have to identify who’s a star and also identify a trend. The analogy I use is that the radio network business is like surfing: you can’t be too far ahead of the wave or you’ll go nowhere. And you can’t be behind the wave. You kind of have to catch the wave as its happening and ride it for as long as you can, because some formats come and go.
I don’t know if anybody expected the Smooth Jazz format could disappear the way it did in a lot of markets. It’s still vibrant in some cities, and there are people trying some things out with Jazz now on translators and other signals. I hope that works because we still have a vested interest in that format. The Rhythmic Oldies format only lasted two years. It was hot as a pistol and then went away. So somebody rode that wave for those two years and did nicely with it. That’s what you have to do.
But with most radio talent, there is only one of them. There’s only one Lex & Terry, There’s only one Carol Miller who has been on the air in New York doing Get The Led Out for a long time. There’s only one Alice Cooper. There’s only one Mark McGrath. So how do you compete? You go out with something nobody else has on in the market. Again, we’re an independent company, so we don’t get involved in ownership politics. We do business with every group and nobody’s looking at us as a company that owns radio stations in the same town, where if they work with us they’re kind of feeding the competition. They just look at us as pure play, program suppliers that do a good job delivering programming that works and is on time, that delivers audience and gives the local sales department something to go out and sell that’s a little different from the typical daypart. That’s what we try and do.
[eQB Content by Joey Odorisio]
