On a frigid night in January 2003, tropical radio disappeared from Chicago’s airwaves. Salsa listeners who set their alarm clocks to La X Tropical, at 1200 AM, woke up to a canned simulcast of Viva 93.5-103.1 FM, the city’s mainstream Latin pop station.
“There’s no La X because it’s corporate,” he says. “When you’re not raking in five million a year, it’s not worth it for them.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Cesar Canales, who was the Chicago operations director for Hispanic Broadcast Corporation, which owned La X when it changed formats, says, “We did much market research in Chicago. We called people, checked with communities, and saw the need for another station that was Latin pop. For the young crowd 18 to 34 years old, reggaeton, Latin hip-hop, and Latin pop is the new trend.”
Cruz estimates that La Clave’s audience is in the range of 60,000 listeners. He hasn’t contracted for a rating with Arbitron, which charges an annual base fee of $250,000, so “we can’t come up with a guaranteed number of listeners,” he says. Instead he does what WAIT and other small stations do, using a formula that multiplies call-ins, Web hits, and e-mails by 100.
Though it’s impossible to tell for sure, Cruz believes his bilingual format has had an effect on larger corporate radio stations over the past year. “Now B96 is running Spanish ads, and commercial Spanish stations are running English ads and their DJs are trying to announce bilingually in their broken English,” he says. “Is it us? Are they listening?” Canales, now director of operations for Viva 93.5-103.1, is unconvinced that there’s been a change. He says that though his station has been airing some ads and occasionally even responding to on-air calls in English, 95 percent of the broadcast remains in Spanish. Of La Clave itself Canales says, “That’s not really a formal station. It’s a broker station where they’re buying some of the hours. I think they are appealing mostly to the Caribbean community.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Joeff Davis.
