Radio -- Kknw-Fm Has Changed Its Tune

Seattle's lone "New Age" radio station is a thing of the past.

Citing low listenership, KKNW-FM (106.7) made an abrupt change of direction last Friday when it switched to its new "soft adult contemporary" format.

Translation: Say goodbye to Pat Metheny, Sade, and Kenny G. And hello to Neil Diamond, Air Supply and Barbra Streisand.

The station now calls itself "the new Warm 107 FM." Response from some former regular KKNW listeners, though, has been chilly.

"It's awful," said Sheri Benington, 29, a Federal Way homemaker who was surprised to tune in Friday morning and hear James Taylor-esque softies. "I called and asked, `Where's my radio station?' "

She wasn't alone. KKNW management brought in five extra operators on the day of the switch to field angry telephone calls.

"We know we had a very faithful, loyal core listenership," said general manager Dennis Gwiazdon. "Unfortunately, the core wasn't large enough to . . . make this station profitable."

In the most recent Arbitron ratings, measuring listenership last summer, KKNW tied for 8th place among its target 25-to-54-year-old audience.

Three separate research studies conducted in the past two years showed that KKNW couldn't do any better, according to Gwiazdon.

"We'd topped out. Hit the ceiling," he said, adding that KKNW continued to lose money even as its ratings improved during the past year.

Research also showed, though, that a station playing the "soft AC" format could expect to do better than such stations as "K-Lite" (KLTX-FM) and KLSY-FM, which spin a similar mix of music.

"It's not the number of stations in a format, it's how well those stations are doing the format," Gwiadon said. "Nobody has been able to do soft AC as well as we think we'll be able to."

Along with changing its tune, KKNW also fired almost its entire on-air staff and the program director - five full-timers and two part-timers - and applied to the FCC for a change of call letters, to KRWM. No, the station is not dyslexic; the call letters KWRM are already taken by a station in another city.

According to M Street Journal, an industry publication that tracks format changes, the soon-to-be KRWM joins the ranks of more than 300 other "soft AC" stations across the country. That makes it one of the most popular formats of the moment, though still a long day's ride behind the biggest - country.

Gwiazdon says "soft AC" stations now rank in the top 7 in almost all of the 20 largest markets - but not Seattle.

So-called New Age music, on the other hand, has become yesterday's news. After a brief boomlet in popularity during the late '80s, the format is now used by fewer than 20 stations, according to M Street.

"A lot of people thought it would be the `easy listening' of the '90s," said M Street editor Robert Unmacht. "It just never took off."

KKNW originally unveiled a New Age format in 1987, when it debuted as KNUA. The station's owners sold two years later to current owner Brown Broadcasting, which renamed it KKNW and tweaked the format, playing less of the Windham Hill gang and more "soft jazz."

"They cringe at the term New Age, because it makes people think of healing crystals," noted Chip Erickson, a former KKNW salesman, now an account executive at KUBE-FM. He's helping organize a low-key "wake" at a local bar tomorrow for his former station.

Meanwhile, the new Warm 107 FM is planning to unveil a series of TV ads and bus billboards advertising its new format, hoping to attract lovers of the music of Elton John, Whitney Houston and James Taylor.

And an answering machine at the station continues to provide this after-hours explanation: "We . . . created an artistic success but not a financial success . . . We hope you'll give Warm 107 a try."