Hey there, you cats and kitties out there in radioland. We're coming to you on the late-night show from New York, New York, and we want to know: have you got a niche that needs scratching?
Here in the Big Apple, courtesy of the slightly free market and with a whole lot of help from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, various foundations and some college students doing the gigs for love and no money, you can spin the dial and hear sports, talk and talk about sports; you can hear progressive rock, classic rock and plain old classical; you can hear big bands, jazz combos and gospel choirs; you can even hear half a dozen stations in Spanish and still more playing something called "adult contemporary" music.
Later this morning, you can tune into Mile Failte on the Fordham University station, WFUV, and hear a programme about sickness as a theme in Irish singing. (Insert your own cheap joke here.)
Yes, there are even a few Top 40 stations.
As the question of who's going to get the so-called "niche market" licences for the Dublin area and of what they'll do with them, move towards the top of the IRTC agenda, it's interesting to hear what the market will bear here in the megapolis. For example, of 56 FM stations in the New York City area, only three are described in the New York Times listings as playing "country", and they're all relatively peripheral.
On the other hand, that's a larger number than those described as "varied" - broad-spectrum broadcasting in anything like the Radio 1 mould. Only on medium wave do you find stations (notably WABC, home of Howard Stern, various less notorious talkers and a truly incredible amount of advertising) that don't scream their demographic targeting and actually pretend to aim for all listeners.
The talk-radio ads, by the way, repeatedly play on listener panic about everything from investments to children's reading ability. My favourite offers a phone number, 1888 320 FOOD, to "secure peace of mind for you and family" against fears that the Y2K bug "will affect the food-transport industry". It's not clear how this works, but it seems to have something to do with freezing.
New York's niche-radio success story of recent times, however, is a station that surpasses its demographics. "Jammin' 105", WBIX, plays "jammin' oldies" - meaning black pop of the 1960s to the 80s, everything from funky soul and disco to George Benson and the Temptations. (The playlist computer is funny: I heard On Broadway at the same time on two consecutive evenings, and the Tempts' Papa was a Rolling Stone and Backstabbers within a half-hour of each other.) There's nothing very overtly African-American about the presentation; one DJ may be called Famous Amos, but he's chirpy rather than soulful.
However, the station and its advertisers are happy to exploit the penetration of black culture into the cool end of the mainstream; McDonald's is actually referred to in its own ad by the ghetto moniker of "Mickey D's". And Jammin' 105 is the most popular music station in the city.
No such luck for WNEW, currently far removed from its tradition as the most loose-formatted of the big rock stations. Its only saving grace is the Sunday evening show which brings us six hours of the world's greatest DJ, Vin Scelsa, back at the station he called home in the late 1970s and early 80s - his hearty laugh and infectious love of the music only slightly dimmed with time.
And formats be damned. While the station was celebrating the Memorial Day holiday with an all-80s weekend, Scelsa played a New York set stretching from an On the Town cast recording of the 1950s, through Bob Dylan's first album all the way to 1975 and Bruce Springsteen's Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out. After the interminable ad break, he assured us that "the one advantage of the long ads is it gives me a chance to think about these sets. I think the second song in this next set is going to be from the 80s, so I can give the appearance of being a team player". If the team is corporate-style, you can still be sure Scelsa is not playing.
No doubt he fitted in a bit better at WBAI, which took him in for a couple of years between big-station jobs in those fateful 80s. The station, flagship of the strife-ridden Pacifica network, still genuinely merits the label "varied", with its wonderful ethnic and jazz programmes and talk that offers a radical alternative, albeit for a relatively small audience of the already converted.
At the opposite end of the spectrum (and on the other waveband), a far more cynical piece of niche marketing is embodied by the nationally syndicated Radio Disney on WQEW in New York; it broadcasts what I'd call a danger signal for people who reckon radio aimed at children must be a Good Thing.
Radio Disney ("we're all ears") most closely resembles those morning kids' shows on TV, full of would-be manic energy and silly competitions; insert pop songs (B*witched are favourites) where television would show cartoons and you get the audiopicture. Oh, and don't forget ceaseless promotion of other media products from the Disney empire.
But, yeah, where you've got kids you're gonna get some charm. I liked the young fella, maybe 10, who got on the phone to one Radio Disney programme and sang, to the tune of New York, New York, "My name is Marty/ I go to Blessed Sacrament School/ In old New York."
I'm tellin' ya. Don't believe me? Go on, try it.