Music Director of Indie 103.1 Clears Up Some Rumors

Yesterday we found out that Los Angeles radio station Indie 103.1 would be going off the air due to artistic integrity. Many of you have left questions, comments, complaints, and even some insults about the matter. Today, Mark Sovel the Music Director of 103.1 clears up your questions as he talks about why they decided to pull the station off the air.

To start answering vondrak question of what really happened, the decision was not a surprise, that they had seen it coming for some time:

Mark Sovel: It wasn’t out of the blue. I knew it was going to happen. There had been a back and forth struggle to keep the station going. But to our employers’ credit, they allowed us to go on air and say goodbye to everyone.

It may have had something to do with low ratings, signal coverage, or the type of listeners Indie attracted:

I’ve seen the ratings and I know we didn’t do very well on PPM, but the kind of people who listen to our station are not the kind of people who want to carry around a device to measure what they’re doing. But they are the kind of people who show up to our events in droves. Our signal didn’t cover the entire city. We have transmitters in two places – Santa Monica and Newport – and our signal didn’t reach the Valley where the proportion of PPM is very high. Take for instance the entire area from Echo Echo Park to Beverly Hills to Wilshire, yet they said we had no listeners there. We know we have core listeners in Los Feliz and Silver Lake, but we supposedly had zero listeners there – it is just ridiculous. All stations with eclectic programming don’t register well with PPM. PPM is not even certified in Los Angeles but Arbitron pushed it through early because they make more money from it.

And surprise, surprise, the online 103.1 is NOT going to be exactly the same as the radio station, as BeatCrave commenter I. C has said, the decision to close shop had nothing to do with the staff, but the people who run the station….

None of the primary DJs or music programmers at the station are involved in the website and it’s not being run by people who ran the station – there may be one person from the station. My concern is that people are confused. They are running an ad on the air saying we couldn’t play the corporate radio game anymore and that we didn’t want to change our format to be more mainstream and that we decided to play music on the web. But the guy making the announcement is the head of sales! God love him, he’s a good guy, but the staff of Indie had no control in the decision to shut down the station. I guess they had some success with the web and want to keep it going. But I don’t want the listeners to be confused.

The future of Indie on the Internet (sorry mrgarci1), for the moment, is more of an iPod shuffle, than a radio station:

It’s like playing an iPod of the music we left on their computers. It’s just ironic they have a loop running on the radio station talking about how we don’t want to play the corporate radio game and they play the Sex Pistols and Black Flag… and the funny thing is they just got rid of Steve Jones and Henry Rollins, two of our former DJs.

Another common question is if this has anything to do with the economy, which was brought up by RadioGuy:

Advertising in the market as whole is down—just like the overall economy. We were straddling the line of profitability and in the last few months we dipped below where we weren’t making a profit. We suffered from the bad economy.

As for Jonesy, quite possibly one of the most loved members of the Indie crew (such as Digg commenters bixby1, montanask8, and more pointed out), he’s gone, he’s disappointed, and at this point it doesn’t look like he’s coming back:

He was disappointed, but I don’t want to speak for him. I helped him clean out his desk. He said, “It’s weird, I’ve never done anything for five years.” His wit is unique. I’m really gonna miss Jonesy. KROQ had tried to hire him away in the past, but they would never let him on the air and do what he did at Indie.

As for you  SgtAl with your sarcastic comments about it turning into a Latino radio station, it looks like you might be right, although nothing is set in stone yet:

They’ll put up something that requires little or no overhead and they won’t have to hire. They can just use a format that is all ready running in other cities.

For all of you that might have been hoping that Indie would return, it’s not looking too good right now, but there is still hope!

There are people who are making an effort to bring the station back on the air with the same people, but I can’t say specifically.

If you feel like Pheoyro who said “I HATE THE CORP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” and want to join the fight (I know you don’t Krytos or demonbaby) then you can e-mail Entravision and tell them to bring Indie back. E-mail Walter Ulloa (wulloa@entravision.com), the CEO, and/or Jeffrey Liberman (jliberman@entravision.com), president of the radio division.

Read the full Mark Sovel interview here.

Oh and for all of you who caught the word “intregrity” in the title. That was me. Sorry.

More to come on this I’m sure!

What do you think? Should they have gone off the air?