BARRIE, Ont. – Christian radio is a bit of an immature niche in Canada.
Until 1993, such stations simply were not licensed in Canada so – while the market for Christian stations grew in the U.S. for years (and is apparently 600-stations strong there) – only recently are similar operations seeing growth here (about 30 so far).
One such station is Barrie’s Life 100.3. On the air for over six years now, the station has added repeaters in Owen Sound, Peterborough and Huntsville. Currently, the Barrie station operates at 1,800 watts, but wait for early 2006, when the signal strength is boosted to 18,000 watts.
The not-for-profit station is also setting its sights on Iqaluit, where it thinks it can deliver its music-based message to a population which general manager Scott Jackson (pictured) says could use the message within the music.
How different is Christian radio? If you’re not aware of the lyrical message, listening to Life 100.3 is not all that unlike listening to many A/C stations. Then again, the on-air staff lists their home churches on the web site. So maybe it’s a little uncommon after all.
What follows is an edited transcript of a recent conversation between Jackson and www.cartt.ca editor and publisher Greg O’Brien.
Greg O’Brien: What’s your market size like? How many people do you cover?
Scott Jackson: About a million.
GOB: So, you don’t get quite as far south as Toronto then.
SJ: People tell us they get us to Highway 7 but the power boost should take it much further than that.
GOB: When might that come on line?
SJ: That’s a really good question. Probably February or March.
GOB: How far will that extend your signal then?
SJ: I can’t really say. Wherever people pick us up as a fringe signal now it will be much stronger. You can’t really say until you flip the switch. Even though it’s 10 times the power, it’s not going to go 10 times the distance because, as you know, the airwaves don’t work like that. So, we can’t really say specifically. The other reason is I don’t want people to get their hopes up and be disappointed. I’d rather they be pleasantly surprised.
GOB: What’s the demographic like? Is there a “typical” sort of listener?
SJ: Yes there is. Daytime is 25 to 54. The night time audience is 12 to 25, and is aggressive CHR. It’s a combination of hip hop, punk, rock… If adults enjoy the night time then we’re doing something wrong. In fact, we have a station ID on the air at nights that says “If you’re an adult, go and watch the news.”
GOB: Now, please forgive my ignorance on this, is there enough Christian-themed music in those types of genres?
SJ: Oh yeah.
GOB: Where do you find it all?
SJ: The Christian music industry has its own labels and distributors and the main distributor in Canada is CMC in Niagara Falls. They distribute about 95% of the music… so all the labels go through them.
GOB: As far as finding Canadian Christian music – is that a challenge?
SJ: It was in the beginning. The last year and a half, it’s really grown. We’re finding a lot of really good artists that we’re proud to play and I don’t think I could really use that word before. There’s some really quality stuff out there now and we only have to play 12% anyway whereas mainstream has to play 35%.
GOB: What are the predominant genres of Canadian Christian music?
SJ: Same as mainstream. There’s A/C, CHR… as far as urban goes, there’s very, very little Canadian. The Canadian Christian music is either inspirational, which is a bit softer than A/C… or if it’s not that, it would be punk. There are a lot of punk bands in Ontario – lots.
GOB: What’s making you want to expand up to Nunavut?
SJ: I don’t know. Mainly curiosity. I do a little bit of traveling and looking at a map, I wondered, “Who lives up there?” “What do people do on their day off?” “What do you do sitting on Baffin Island after you’re done seal hunting for the day?” I wondered if they had any Christian radio up there and how many McDonald’s they have in Iqaluit. So, I went on the web and started checking and found out there are no McDonald’s – that’s how small it is.
Iqaluit is 6,000 people. Half the population is under the age of 25. A good majority of them have children but are not married. They get drunk a lot. We thought it was a great opportunity to bring them another music format.
We do a fairly good job with this format and we can do it relatively cheap by putting in a repeater station. I went up to Iqaluit with our engineer and poked around. I spoke in one of the churches and asked if there was any interest in having a Christian radio station from Barrie repeated in Iqaluit. Even though there would be Barrie news and Barrie traffic, still the music is universal and they thought it would be great and asked “what can we do?”
Interest was phenomenal. So, we want to put a repeater station in there.
GOB: So, part of it is delivering a (religious) message there as well.
SJ: Yeah there is. The message is in the music. All the songs are about God. Everybody we play is a public, professing Christian. Part of the Christian faith is to be public about your faith and that’s the criteria for our station. So, if Elton John was to release a religious song, we wouldn’t play it.
So, most of the songs are directly about God and about 10% would be about a relationship or whatever. But, it’s contemporary. We don’t really like the word religious because it sounds old-fogeyish and the station is not like that. We sound like CHUM-FM during the day.
GOB: I was listening to it, so there’s no talk or preachers or anything like that?
SJ: There’s a couple. We have a show at 9 and 9:30 and there’s another one at noon. But otherwise it’s a music-driven station and that’s our vision – to try to be a real station and play music and have contests and traffic reports and everything a normal station has.
GOB: It does sound like that, too. Do you envision yourself as a province-wide, or southern Ontario wide superstation in terms of Christian music?
SJ: No. “The Ontario Christian Superstation” is just a positioning statement, nothing more serious than that. Even though it sounds like we are, we’re not really trying to grow. But, when a door opens and somebody offers an opportunity, you look at it and you weigh it and see if it’s viable. But, we turn down an awful lot of stuff. We’ve had offers to build in Hamilton and Guelph and that’s just from listeners who have heard us and would like us to be in their city. But, it’s pretty expensive to start a radio station so unless someone comes with funding, we tend to turn it down.
GOB: What about the business side of it? Obviously it’s a viable business but you take in revenue from sources other than advertising?
SJ: Advertising is 50%. Listener donations – we’re a registered charity – we would make about 35% of our income from there. And every March we do a fundraiser called Share-athon, a two-day benefit where we ask our core listeners to give and to support us on a monthly basis.
GOB: You’ve got some American experience as well. How can you compare Christian radio in the States compared to here? It looks a lot different here than there.
SJ: It’s partly because of the population difference but it is also partly that the CRTC made it illegal to have Christian radio, up until 1993, so we’re still trying to catch up. Also, the experience, the talent pool, is not very deep in Canada – and that’s also because we have not been on the air that long.
It’s also climate. Because it’s cold and winter up here, six months of the year, the artists don’t like to come here. Plus, the population in the States is much more dense and it’s easier to maintain a tour and not have to come up here.
And, also partly because Americans don’t know what’s north of the border and really, could care less.
GOB: As far as Christian broadcasters are concerned, you’re part of the industry, but then again, you’re not. You’re niche is often overlooked when people talk about commercial radio and public radio. Do you come up against that attitude at all? Does it matter? Few talk about the niche broadcasters like yourself. Does that have an impact on your day-to-day business at all?
SJ: Maybe a little. We’re not as well known. Private broadcasters don’t talk about the not-for-profit ones or community stations and… we’re a registered charity… We do a lot of external advertising though. We do newspapers and billboards – we have an entire bus wrap in Peterborough. We’re pretty aggressive promotionally. We have a street team where we do anywhere from three to 10 appearances each week. We go to lots of mainstream, not Christian, events like the Terry Fox Run…
I think because the Christian format is really new in Canada, the general public doesn’t really know anything about Christian radio or even that it exists. So, we had to educate our advertisers that we have a viable audience.
We went to a car dealer who told us, “well, you’re the religious station and you just read your Bible and go to church,” and I said “yeah, but do you know how we get to church? In a car.”
To comment on this or any other story, drop us a line at editorial@cartt.ca.
