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[email protected] (800) 275-2840 Friday, March 22, 2013 THE MOST TRUSTED NEWS IN RADIO Hyper-niche formats give listeners new reasons to dust off their old AM radio. Classical in Los Angeles, bluegrass in southeastern Virginia, and a free-form format in the Washington suburbs. These specialized niche formats are helping breathe new life into a beleaguered AM dial. Apart from the small number of big, lucrative spoken word brands found in most cities, operators say it will take more unique destination formats like these to keep the AM band alive. The latest hyper-niche AM started in an engineer’s basement. That’s where Hubbard Broadcasting-Washington’s Dave Kolesar rigged up an automated internet station to stream music from his oversized music collection. Hearing it, SVP/general manager Joel Oxley was impressed enough that in December 2011 he put it on the HD3 channel of news WTOP-FM (103.5). Spanning music from the ‘40s to today, “The Gamut” lived up to its name and generated more reaction than any of the cluster’s other HD side channels. That’s why the eclectic format with 10,000 songs in active rotation now also airs on 820 AM in Frederick, VA and on all of the cluster’s HD side channels. Few stations on any band segue from the Clancy Brothers to Wilson Pickett to Robert Palmer and that’s the point. “The Gamut is so unusual that it might be amenable for AM in the sense that people will seek it out,” Kolesar says.