| City of license | San Francisco, California |
|---|---|
| Broadcast area | San Francisco/Oakland/San Jose, California |
| Branding | "106 KMEL" |
| Slogan | The People's Station, The Bay Area's Home for Hip Hop and R&B |
| Frequency | 106.1 MHz (also on HD Radio) |
| Repeaters | 106.1 KMEL-FM2 |
| First air date | 1947 (as KGO-FM) |
| Format | Urban Contemporary |
| ERP | 69,000 watts |
| HAAT | 393 meters |
| Class | B |
| Facility ID | 35121 |
| Callsign meaning | CAMEL 106 (name of former branding and camel mascot) |
| Former callsigns | KGO-FM (1946-1955) KFRC-FM (1960-1968) KFMS (1968-1972) KKEE (1972-1973) KFRC-FM (1973-1977) |
| Former frequencies | 96.9 MHz (1946-1947) |
| Owner | Clear Channel |
| Sister stations | KIOI, KISQ, KKSF, KNEW, KOSF, KYLD |
| Webcast | Listen Live |
| Website | 106kmel.com |
KMEL (106.1 FM) is an Urban Contemporary-formatted radio station located in San Francisco, California, and owned by Clear Channel Communications.
KMEL broadcasts at an effective radiated power of 69,000 watts from the San Bruno Mountain area south of San Francisco. The station's powerful signal can easily be heard all over the Bay Area and covers areas as far north as Santa Rosa, as far east as Concord and the Livermore Valley, and as far south as the Santa Cruz Mountains and, reputedly, the Salinas Valley. There is some difficulty reaching the signal from the city of Fairfield and areas North of Concord due to the topography of those areas. It is currently one of the highest rated stations in the Bay Area, with the largest listening audience males 18-to-34 demographic.
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The 106.1 FM frequency was originally home to KGO-FM, sister station of KGO. The FM station was originally licensed at 96.9 FM in 1946. KGO-FM moved to 106.1 FM on November 3, 1947, with facilities at a former General Electric plant on East 12th Street in Oakland. On January 14, 1955, KGO-FM moved from 106.1 to 103.7.
RKO General, owner of Top 40 powerhouse KFRC, eventually purchased the station and on November 30, 1960 it became KFRC-FM. The station's call letters changed to KFMS in November 1968, then KKEE in October 1972. In September 1973, the KFRC-FM call letters were reinstated, and the station began a Bill Drake and Paul Drew-programmed "nostalgia rock" format. playing oldies and soft rock as "K106" (Don Sainte-Johnn, PD). On July 2, 1977, after Century Broadcasting purchased the FM station, K106 was rebranded KMEL, playing Album-Oriented Rock ("AOR"). Its mascot was a camel (hence the call letters) and was known on-air as "Kamel 106".
KMEL was a top-rated station during that time with their tightly-formatted approach,[1] and with newer rival KSFX helped force legendary rival KSAN to switch to country music in 1980. That same year, KMEL signed popular New York radio personality and San Francisco native Alex Bennett as host of its new morning show. Bennett, along with newsreader/sidekick Joe Regelski, helped propel KMEL even higher in the ratings. During this era, afternoon DJ Geno Mitchellini also helped give KMEL one of the highest ratings in the Bay Area market for his afternoons time slot.
The year 1982 saw many changes at Bay Area rock stations. In January 1982, KMEL obtained a new rival when KCBS-FM (97.3) transformed itself from an Adult Contemporary-format station into KRQR, "The Bay Area Rocker," and began its long run as a dominant rock station. In May of that year, KSFX dropped rock and went to a talk format as KGO-FM. A month later, Bennett and Regelski both left KMEL in a disagreement over a newly hired consultant, only to resurface in August at new rock station KQAK, "The Quake". In September, KFOG entered the battle for rock-listener marketshare after dropping its Beautiful music format in favor of an eclectic mix of rock.
With four AOR stations in San Francisco, in addition to two more in San Jose, KMEL faced stiff competition. Though KQAK gave up its AOR format the following April and switched to modern rock, KRQR and KFOG still put enough pressure on KMEL to bring about a significant programming change at the station.
KMEL dropped AOR and flipped to a mainstream, Contemporary hit radio ("CHR")[2] format on August 25, 1984. The new "106 KMEL" (pronounced K-Mel back then) was successful in capturing marketshare, and its success eventually helped push main CHR rival KITS toward a modern rock format. Century Broadcasting launched the same format on Los Angeles sister station KPWR. By 1987, the station's programming started to drift in a rhythmic direction under the slogan, "106.1 KMEL, Northern California's Power Station," even going as far as promoting its signal coverage over the air. Program director Keith Naftaly helped make this incarnation of KMEL again one of the top stations in the Bay Area.
In early 1987, KMEL hired popular club DJ Cameron Paul away from rival KSOL, gaining his forward-thinking mix show and its sizable audience in the deal. This was a harbinger of a very progressive change in format and, as the 1980s gave way to the 1990s, KMEL became one of the first crossover pop stations in the nation to target young multiracial audiences with not-yet-mainstream hip-hop, dance, freestyle, house, and reggae music. The station also embraced new jack swing R&B music at its heyday, which was the basis for KMEL innovating the annual two-day Summer Jam concert series. These parallel music and marketing developments paved the way for KMEL's evolution into its present-day Urban Contemporary format.
By September of 1992, KMEL had finally evolved into its current urban contemporary format with the slogan "KMEL Jams, even as the station was sold by Century Broadcasting to Evergreen Media. The present-day format has made the station less synonymous with the previous short lived formats and became more recognized in the Bay Area's African American community all the while targeting a wider audience to date, thus giving it heritage status through the callsign. At the same time, KSOL retooled itself and became Wild 107.7 (KYLD), quickly emerging as KMEL's prime competitor for their mutual core audience demographic.[3] The fierce competition over the coveted 18-34 "urban" listening audience continued for another four years until the passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 made it substantially easier for radio stations to solve their problems with competitors by simply buying the competition. KMEL's owner, Evergreen Media, ended the ratings war with KYLD by purchasing it later that year.[4] Meanwhile, a third competitor, KHQT out of San Jose, was also in competition with the two stations until 1996 until it changed formats under new ownership.
Chancellor Broadcasting (later AMFM Inc.) later purchased Evergreen Media (along with subsidiaries KMEL and KYLD), and AMFM was then swallowed up by Clear Channel Communications via a $24 billion deal in 1999. After that, KMEL started to solely go up against urban adult contemporary station KBLX, except for majority of 2004, when KBTB (now KREV) had the same urban format as KMEL.
6-10a weekdays
10a-2p weekdays
2-6p weekdays
6-10p weekdays
Weekends/Fill-in
The station's slogan has changed numerous times over its history, most recently changing from "The People's Station" to "The Bay Area's Home for Hip Hop and R&B." The station celebrated 20 years of broadcasting on the air as a hip hop station in 2007.[5] It also has been the longest tenured urban station in California; this comes after several urban stations in Los Angeles recently flipped formats or retooled them to rhythmic or urban adult (see KRBV, KHHT, KPWR and KDAY).
The majority of KMEL's playlist features music under rubric of the Urban Contemporary format, heavy with hip-hop and R&B . In addition to competing with sister station KYLD which uses a Rhythmic contemporary format, KMEL also competes with its Urban adult contemporary ("Urban AC") counterparts: sister station KISQ and pioneering Urban AC station KBLX (owned by ICBC, while KBLX would be pretty much KMEL's only competitor today). While most hip hop stations elsewhere tend to have a mainstream urban format should it be co-owned with an Urban AC, KMEL has been allowed to protect its format approach only because KISQ leans more mainstream/old school R&B and KYLD leans partially Top 40/Pop-ish in its format. KMEL reports as rhythmic contemporary per Mediabase, even though they're not a rhythmic contemporary (other urban stations on the rhythmic panel of Mediabase & urban panel of Nielsen BDS are KBXX in Houston, Texas & WJHM in Orlando, Florida). Per Nielsen BDS reports, they are urban contemporary. WPGC-FM in Washington, D.C. & KBFB in Dallas/Fort Worth are rhythmic contemporary stations per Mediabase reports, but they report on the BDS urban panel despite being the only rhythmics in those areas where there are existing urban contemporary stations (WKYS/WERQ & KKDA-FM).
Despite being among one of the most well-programmed urban radio stations for the past 20-plus years, KMEL has suffered a setback in ratings between 2009 and 2010. This was mainly due in part to Arbitron phasing out the diary keeping approach to ratings for the PPMs. This contributed to the brief decline of KMEL's ratings since the station has a specific audience target. While any longtime urban contemporary stations in other major cities (like KPRS in Kansas City) had to introduce songs typical of what is played on rhythmic radio stations to reboost ratings, KMEL programming executives decided not to revert back to its rhythmic/churban roots; it remained urban and instead the playlist rotation was tightened as of 2010 in order to keep the longtime station from changing formats.
In addition to its typical daytime mixture of hip hop and R&B, KMEL plays R&B and soul slow jams ("The Lounge") from roughly 10pm to 1:30am Sunday through Thursday and Urban contemporary gospel Sunday mornings. KMEL is one of two stations to play gospel; KBLX is the other. It even plays Old School hip hop and soul during midday mix show, on Friday mornings, and mixed in general during their weekend playlist rotation.
In line with its slogan, "The People's Station", KMEL broadcasts the community-affairs show Street Soldiers, hosted by Dr. Joseph E. Marshall, on Sunday evenings.[6] However, the station's commitment to community activism in its programming was notably questioned by the activist community in the aftermath of the post-September 11th firing of DJ and long-time Community Affairs Coordinator David "Davey D" Cook. Though the station stated that economic considerations had forced it to let Cook go, many felt that he had been dismissed for programming decisions and on-air remarks construed as "unpatriotic" in light of the country's "earnest" mobilization for the War on Terror.[7] (See "The controversial firing of Davey D," below)
KMEL is noted as the station that helped launch the careers of many "West Coast" hip hop artists in the 1990s, such as Tupac Shakur, MC Hammer, E-40, Too Short and Mac Dre.[3][8]
Many popular Bay Area and national media personalities either got their start or spent time working at KMEL, including Theo Mizuhara, John London, Ron Engelman, Howard Hoffman, Sonny Joe Fox, Don Sainte-Johnn, Rick Shaw, Mark McKay, Cameron Paul, Michael Erickson, the late Rick Chase, Billy Vidal, Diana Steele, Carmen, Evan Luck, Rosary, Lisa St. Regis, Efren Sifuentes, Renel Lewis, Trace and Franzen, Kevin Nash, DJ "X" Who is currently know as "DJ Earl Gray",Gill Alexander, Short-E (currently at KHHM in Sacramento), Slim (currently at KDHT in Denver), Kimberly Clemons, MTV's Sway and King Tech,[8] and the regular guest DJ's: The Boy Wonder (Sarthak Shah) and Larry Jackson.
The station has played a significant role in the genesis and promulgation of the "Hyphy Movement" in the San Francisco Bay Area by playing music from many of the local artists associated with hyphy. KMEL's mixshows have long contained exclusive hyphy music which can seldom be heard over the airwaves elsewhere in the country. Because the station broadcasts live via streaming audio from their website, it gives the genre a platform for possibly worldwide exposure.
On October 1, 2001, radio personality and hip-hop activist David "Davey D" Cook was terminated, due to what the station said were consistently low ratings. His dismissal occurred after new Program Director Michael Martin took charge of the station, happened at the same time as the station changed many programming elements, and coincided with the layoffs of several other station personnel, including on-air personalities Trace-Dog Nunez, Rosary Bides, and Franzen Wong. Cook, however, claims his departure was due to his political views, including his having aired statements from California Congresswoman Barbara Lee and rapper Boots of The Coup voicing opposition to the War in Afghanistan.[9]
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