Sean Copeland is the morning host at Radio One’s B105.7 in Indianapolis. Copeland also serves as the station’s Program Director and guides 97.1 Hank-FM. He is a certified Mental Health Therapist as well.
“The Sean Show” and the station consistently sit at or near the top of Indianapolis ratings with double-digit shares.
However, the AC format has a reputation as challenging to program given that there are not many artists the format can own or has what Copeland calls a “passion point.”
“We’ve had the challenge. I’ve been doing mornings here now for almost 15 years and programming for the last six. We’ve had to decide a couple of times in those 15 years what we will do. Do we age with the audience?”
“Do we kind of tweak and young ourselves up again? And that’s what we have done every few years. You have to shift. When I started here 15 years ago, we played Neil Young and James Taylor songs in rotation. And now we’ve got one Nirvana song in regular rotation. I’ve got a Tupac song in rotation.”
“I do think that this station is a little bit different. I mean, it’s sort of a hybrid AC with a little adult hits flair to it. That’s maybe the challenge on the music side.”
Copeland says another challenge for the AC format is a lack of passion points for event revenue.
“One of the biggest challenges for AC stations is NTR or event revenue. When I look at every other station in our cluster, there is this built-in passion point that you can build events around. Like with our sports station, it’s obvious. With our conservative talk station, it’s obvious. With our country station, it’s obvious. Just the passion point for the format and the music and Country concert season all summer long. And the accessibility of the artists that we can build events around.”
Copeland believes that this is where personalities can make a difference.
”It’s unclear what that passion point is for AC because I don’t necessarily think it exists. It’s discouraging to me when I hear not all, but I hear a lot of AC stations with what I would consider to be pretty wallpaper personalities. And I’m like, well, what else do you have? We’ve got to build around our personalities and how our personalities intersect with event business opportunities.”
Positioning also plays a large part, and dropping soft rock for variety was the move made by B105.7.
“That is a much more favorable identifier. We did what many of the iHeart stations have done over the years, and we became Indy’s best variety of the 80s, 90s, and today. My brain sometimes can be pretty literal. I was like, this is nonsense because we’re negating 25 years of music by saying 90s and today. And so last summer, we stripped it down. I think The Arch in St. Louis uses the same positioner, but our positioner is just 105.7. It’s all about the variety.”
“The Sean Show” leans into lifestyle and authenticity.
“When they hired me to do this show, the thought was there were two kinds of morning shows. There is real talk, heavy bit driven morning shows, and music intensive.”
“I thought, well, why can’t we create a hybrid show that is doing meaningful content that connects but also plays a good amount of music? I’ll be real honest. I think I did a really poor job at it for the first however many years. I think I was afraid to mess up, and talk too much, maybe.”
Copeland’s willingness to be authentic with the audience interacts well with “Midwest Nice.”
“I had an opportunity, an offer a couple of years ago, to work at a station in another city. And I was like, I don’t know if I would work in another city as a personality or at least in my current version of a personality because I sort of have this frumpy Midwestern-ness about me.”
“In 2019, I came out on the air, and that was something that I think I was even more nervous about than station management. We’d had a consultant say, don’t do it. There’s too much risk. And station ownership and management here were like, you know what? We think that people are compelled by authenticity.”
“I think the show has been more consistently successful, and I think it’s deepened my connection with the audience because I have chosen to be vulnerable, and you reveal something that in Mike Pence’s Indiana could have ended my career, and it hasn’t.”
Copeland is optimistic about radio despite what he sees as a messaging problem.
“Deon Levingston, one of the leaders here in our company, says, I think this is a borrowed quote from him, that we have more of a perception problem than we have a consumption problem. I see that just in the local direct advertising that we do.”
“The local direct clients that I’ve been able to be an endorser or an ambassador for, like radio, it still has a place. We can talk about the pitfalls of Nielsen, or we can talk about the pressures that we have from our shareholders or whatever.”
“You can go down that whole list, but where the rubber meets the road is that we’re still getting results for local businesses. As long as we can do that, I still think there is a place for this business.”
I ask my normal do you have anything that you want to add a question.
“I know this is an AC profile, but I also am the Program Director of our Country station here, Hank FM. That’s been something that I’ve only been doing for almost four years now.”
“That has really been just a delightful chapter in my career. I know that you share some of this. Part of it is because my paths have crossed with people like you. I started working with Hank in September 21, and I met you in December 21.”
“I’ve had an opportunity to meet all kinds of other great radio folks. In Country and record folks, many of whom have become lifelong friends. That is another, maybe not an external weakness, but an internal weakness in the AC radio side. You don’t have this sense of community, or at least I don’t in that format. Country really does. And it’s cool to be a part of it.
Connect with Sean Copeland by email here. Stream “The Sean Show” here.
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Jeff Lynn serves as Editor of Barrett Media’s Music Radio coverage. Prior to joining Barrett Media, Jeff spent time programming in Milwaukee, Omaha, Cleveland, Des Moines, and Madison for multiple radio groups, including iHeartMedia, Townsquare Media, NRG Media, and Entercom (now Audacy). He also worked as a Country Format Editor for All Access until the outlet shut down in August 2023.
To get in touch with Jeff by email, reach him at Jeff@BarrettMedia.com.
