By Steve Faguy
MONTREAL — Evanov Radio has pulled the plug on its only French-language station, Montreal’s CHRF 980 AM, which it admits “never really got off the ground” and was draining millions of dollars from the company.
Carmela Laurignano, vice-president and radio group manager, lays some of the blame with the CRTC, saying the Commission’s failure to accept its frequency swap plan for its Toronto stations prevented it from getting enough additional revenue to keep subsidizing the station.
CHRF launched in 2015 after a competitive proceeding in 2011 to award licences for two clear-channel AM frequencies in Montreal. Evanov won neither, but was approved to take the former frequency of the TSN station that got one of those clear channels (690AM). Evanov’s plan was “Radio Fierté,” a music-and-talk station aimed at the city’s LGBTQ+ community, similar to its Proud FM station in Toronto.
Not long after launch, however, Evanov discovered it had vastly overestimated the community’s appetite for music on AM radio. “The Radio Fierté concept never really took off,” Laurignano told Cartt.ca. Within a year, the Radio Fierté format and brand was dropped, replaced at first with an all-Christmas-music format and then “AM 980 Classique et mélodique,” similar to the English-language Jewel stations.
That shift also failed to build an audience. In the last Numeris quarterly ratings report, the station managed a share of only 1.1 per cent among francophones in Montreal. Overall, only CBC Music and the all-traffic station had a lower average audience among measured stations.
Laurignano listed several reasons for the failure: AM radio is expensive to run and not very popular; Montreal is “a very competitive market, especially in the French language”; and because it was the only French-language station, it couldn’t share programming or even sales staff to spread out the costs.
“The biggest challenge for the station was that it had to be operated almost as a standalone,” she said. “It just became a situation of the station being subsidized for a long time.”
There were other problems, too. Evanov wanted to pull CHRF out of Numeris ratings, but Numeris policy requires an all-or-nothing approach to subscriptions for broadcasting companies, except for ethnic stations, stations in single-station markets and stations covering only a small part of the market. “Numeris membership was a killer for us,” Laurignano said. “They would not bend on their policy.”
But she also pointed to problems in Toronto getting the CRTC to agree to a plan to get another full-power station in the Toronto market.
Evanov owns CIDC-FM (Z103.5), officially licenced to Orangeville, Ont., and CIRR-FM (Proud 103.9), a 225-watt station in downtown Toronto. After the Commission denied a power increase to allow Z103.5 to cover more of Toronto because it “is licensed to serve Orangeville” but also licensed another station to serve Orangeville because Z103.5 was seen as too Toronto-centric, Evanov made another proposal, moving CIRR-FM to 103.5, boosting its signal and turning it into a pop music station (keeping LGBTQ+ content on an HD Radio subchannel) and moving CIDC-FM to 103.7 and beaming its signal away from Toronto to protect CIRR-FM.
“With the downturn of radio revenues, we really thought our resources and energy could be deployed elsewhere. … We felt it was a responsible thing to do, as sad as it is.” – Carmela Laurignano, Evanov Radio Group
The CRTC however rejected that proposal in January, saying this would allow Evanov a back-door entry into the Toronto market without going through the usual licensing process.
Solving that issue “has been critical to how we handle the business going forward,” Laurignano said. Had a favourable decision come, CHRF would still be running.
She added this doesn’t mean the company is in trouble financially. “It’s a move to reinforce those stations,” she said. “With the downturn of radio revenues, we really thought our resources and energy could be deployed elsewhere. … We felt it was a responsible thing to do, as sad as it is.”
The Covid-19 pandemic and its impact on advertising revenues also accelerated the station’s demise.
“Prior to the pandemic, CHRF had been able to continue broadcasting despite its poor financial performance because there were other stations that were performing well and could subsidize CHRF’s operations,” Laurignano wrote in the CRTC application to revoke the licence.
“However, with the current economic downturn and the sharp decline in revenues across the board, this is no longer the case. It is now more important than ever for Evanov Radio Group to cut its losses with CHRF and deploy its limited money and resources to other stations that have a better chance of recovery in the near future or that operate in less well-served markets.”
Evanov tried to cut costs, “including asking suppliers for financial relief,” but it could not make it viable.
By the end, CHRF only had two employees assigned to it. Both of them have been reassigned within the company, helping its other two stations, CFMB 1280 (an ethnic station it shared studios with) and CHSV-FM (Jewel 106.7 in Hudson, west of Montreal). CHRF host Serge Plaisance announced his show would move to CFMB, and an infomercial program is also moving to the ethnic station.
CHRF went off the air at 11:59 p.m. on Sunday. On Monday, the CRTC officially revoked the licence.
