CA Radio: Listener Engagement Key To Success Of KUIC, Vacaville

Despite the competition from streaming juggernauts, satellite radio and bigger stations in neighboring San Francisco and Sacramento, KUIC 95.3 FM in Vacaville, CA still manages to pull in around 200,000 listeners every week, says Phil D’Angelo, KUIC’s vice president and senior market manager.

“If you live or work in this geographic community, there’s a good chance you’re going to hear KUIC,” D’Angelo tells Comstock Magazine. “You can’t get a haircut or a sandwich in this town without hearing us.”

KUIC has been the little hometown station that could since the late 1960s, when it signed on as KVFS, a 490-watt station that barely covered Solano County. A partnership in 1973 acquired the station and transformed it into the full-fledged operation with the call letters it’s had since.

Over time the format has evolved to keep listeners engaged: In the 1980s, the station skewed more toward an adult-oriented rock format (think Hall & Oates or the Eagles) before morphing into a soft rock hits station in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Today, D’Angelo says the station is adult contemporary, with a scattering of Top 40: It’ll play “Don’t Stop Believing” by Journey, “Uptown Funk” by Bruno Mars and a language-sanitized version of “Truth Hurts” by Lizzo in the same hour.

D’Angelo is aware listeners have more options than ever — people could hear those songs, and more, whenever they wanted, with both free and premium listening options at their disposal, some without the commercial interruptions that traditional FM radio brings. But he points out that recent market research shows 9 out of 10 adults listen to the radio — a higher reach than TV or smartphone media consumption.

Those statistics are popular with radio industry insiders who say claims that the format is “dying” in the face of streaming competition are unfounded. But statistics from the Pew Research Center show both are sort of true: Radio reached around 91 percent of Americans in 2017, but the number of people turning toward streaming options, though low, is growing.

KUIC 95.3 FM (490 watts) (map courtesy of recnet.com)

Still, radio dominates over streaming, especially in the car. Broadcast radio is typically the first thing that comes on in a car, particularly in older models that may lack newer features like online connectivity or Bluetooth. It’s easy to assume most motorists simply flip through the presets looking for something to hear if it means not having to fumble through smartphone settings to stream Pandora or Spotify to listen to music or a podcast.

But D’Angelo and morning co-host John Young think music is only one element that keeps people tuning into KUIC — and it’s a small element compared to the station’s other offerings. “Nobody can cover the area like we can,” D’Angelo says. “Nobody can talk about this community with traffic, with weather, with community events, with lifestyle, with the connection that we can.”

D’Angelo says engaging with listeners, especially in Solano County, is central to the company’s identity: Many residents, he says, don’t identify with being from Sacramento or San Francisco — so the station doesn’t identify itself based on those cities, either.

“KUIC had already done local hometown radio for many years, but they weren’t taking credit for it on the air,” D’Angelo says. That changed in the mid-1990s, when the station went through a major rebranding that placed a heavy emphasis on being local. It even changed its slogan to “Your Hometown Station” to better communicate to listeners that it was right there with them.

The strategy has, so far, worked. It has also kept KUIC’s relatively new corporate owners, Portland-based radio group Alpha Media, from making changes after the company acquired it and two Bay Area sister stations in 2015.