I hate writing these diaries. Too bad for me, because there will, inevitably, be lots more of them.
Joe Weber, owner of Atlanta’s WMLB 1690 AM (“The Voice of the Arts”), has announced that the station will be closing down before month’s end. One DJ/programmer has relayed a report that the broadcast license of Weber’s second station, news-talk WCFO 1160 will be sold to a Catholic radio outlet. For the time being, Weber will retain the license and transmitter of WMLB, but the studio will be shut and the eclectic music/theater/literature outlet will go dark.
Mr. Weber, at 73, is certainly free to do whatever he wishes with his station, which has never been a money-making proposition.
WMLB started at 1190 in 1997 before moving up the dial in 2006 to 1690, a signal which he purchased for $12 million. Weber, 73, who was a successful bakery supply company owner in his younger days, said the media world shifted around him and made it impossible for him to make any money on the AM dial with two stations.
“The stations,” he said in an interview today, “were never profitable. My timing was akin to a man who bought two state-of-the-art buggy whip manufacturing facilities in 1914… Once the iPod and the iPhone were out, people had so many other ways to get music and entertainment.”
Still, it is sad to learn that this unique voice on ATL’s spectrum will be silenced, just four years after Georgia Public Broadcasting took over the license of highly influential WRAS.
While streaming services offer convenience for listeners, they are a terrible deal for writers, publishers and artists and, despite their choice-y hype, are no more suited to introducing listeners to new content than the most rigidly-formatted top 40 station, and miles behind an open-format wonderland like WMLB.
RIP 1690. You were the best radio could be.