The last four months have been a whirlwind for Damon Amendolara. It started with the announcement that he would leave the morning slot at CBS Sports Radio. That was September 27. By the following week, he was hosting a new morning show on SiriusXM with Mike Babchick.
It could be what he talks about on stage at the BSM Summit in New York next month. Honestly, he is just happy to have the platform. He doesn’t quite know what it is he wants the audience to take away from what he has to say quite yet.
“I really appreciate a place where bright radio minds and bright media minds and people that care about the medium congregate,” he said. “We don’t get that very often. Everybody’s kind of in their own silos.”
The chance to be a part of a gathering of such minds matters to him. He notes that no matter what level you are doing sports talk radio on, the format lends itself to thinking a bit narrowly. Hosts on national networks know what is happening at their networks. Hosts on local stations know their own station and the competition down the street.
Amendolara will see former co-workers and old friends at the Summit. It’s what happened last time he came. He will make new friends and meet colleagues that maybe he could see himself working with one day.
He’ll ask for opinions on what the people he trusts think he could be doing better. He knows some of those people will ask the same of him.
One thing Amendolara can share is the value of paying attention to what matters to the audience and meet them where they are. It’s a building block of his entertainment philosophy and something he has done well his entire career.
As his SiriusXM show was starting, America was abuzz with talk of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce. He found that despite objections from a vocal minority, a large chunk of his audience was just as interested in talking about Swift on Monday mornings as they were to talk about how Kelce and the Kansas City Chiefs did on the field.
“I think that there’s a there’s a stronger appetite than maybe most of the sports media realized before this for sports-adjacent stuff,” he says. “You hear a lot of, very sports-centric shows finding ways to talk about Taylor Swift due to talk about this dynamic. So, I think they’re probably sensing from their audience that people like it, and it certainly seems to have opened up a different avenue of conversation where maybe once it was just sports only.”
Amendolara says that the Swift/Kelce romance didn’t just effect what people heard on their radios. It seemed to have changed the way the best team in the nation’s most popular sport is perceived.
When he worked in Kansas City, the market was thrilled with the Chiefs making the playoffs at all. Now, the team has become the epicenter of sports. Even before some fans had Swift/Kelce fatigue, they had Chiefs fatigue.
Amendolara says it’s no mystery how we got to this point. America has been caught up in plenty of pop culture phenomena before, but nothing like this. The popularity of Swift is undeniable, and it has been since before the Chiefs dropped the season opener to the Detroit Lions.
“It was impossible to ignore the Summer of Taylor because everybody was going to her concerts and everybody was bringing their kids to her concerts. Even adults were going to the concerts alone and it was all over social media. Every Instagram post, every Twitter post, every Tik Tok seemed to be from her concert. There was this drumbeat of Taylor Swift during the summer. I think a lot of people that might not pay attention to her music, it was definitely in their face. Then it was the movie that came out in the in the fall and you saw again on social media all of these people bringing their kids to see the movie that became an event itself. Then it was her with Travis Kelce and then it was another layer of sports fan being confronted with Taylor Swift. Then the television networks began talking about Taylor Swift, referencing her during games and showing her entering the tunnel. And then the celebrity fans came with her to that Chiefs and Jets game in New York. And so I just think we’ve kind of been in like a Taylor Swift tornado since like June.
“So, it’s different than a Marvel movie that is made to premiere, then you talk about it, you watch it. This has been like different slices of life have all interwoven with Taylor Swift, even if you don’t listen or have never listened to Swift.”
Amendolara will have plenty to say when he is on stage for the BSM Summit next month and he hopes that he can make an impact. He doesn’t intend to lecture the programmers and other hosts in the crowd about Swift, but he thinks the impact she had on America’s favorite sport this year is worth paying attention to, because she mattered so much to the way we talked about the sport.
The lineup, as usual, is impressive for the 2024 BSM Summit. That’s why Amendolara wants to do more listening than talking.
What do the leaders of the industry say to the idea that radio is dying? How do we tell the story of 98.5 The Sports Hub’s monster numbers or of WFAN’s wins in revenue and ratings in a way that makes the people that have already decided that the medium is on a road to nowhere stand up and take notice?
“We all have to be nimble. We all have to be flexible,” he says. “I try to do this on a daily basis, understanding where things are going and where to be and how we utilize and leverage other tools such as social media or YouTube, but what’s really valuable is people that are at the heads of these conversations going, ‘this is what we’re seeing and this is how we attack it, and this is how we’re trying to do things’ instead of just being caught in these overall narratives that don’t work for all.”
Damon Amendolara will be at the BSM Summit to hear and talk about what matters to our industry. He wants to be a part of what is working, and if it turns out he has been doing something this whole time that isn’t, he is willing to hear that and learn what he can do better.
No matter what industry you work in, if you’re great, it’s because you have a desire to be better today than you were yesterday. Damon Amendolara doesn’t just want that for himself. He wants it for all of sports radio.
