The numbers behind the papers.
Every figure used in the three white papers, with its source and date, plus what it actually means for strategy. Anything unverified is flagged as unverified rather than smoothed over.
How many stations are we actually talking to?
| Figure | What it is | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 2,007 | Licensed LPFM stations in the United States | FCC Broadcast Station Totals, March 31 2026 |
| 33,552 | Total licensed broadcast stations in the US, all services | FCC, March 31 2026 |
| ~200 | NFCB member stations nationally, roughly two thirds serving rural communities | NFCB sector data |
| ~125 | Community volunteers per station, on average | NFCB |
| 6 in 10 | Community stations operating on under $100,000 a year | NFCB |
| 191 | LPFM stations licensed in Texas. Pulled station by station from REC Networks' official LPFM directory, which tracks and classifies every LPFM in the country. Wikipedia's 43 was an undercount by a factor of four. | LPFM.us / REC Networks, retrieved this research pass |
What it means
The target universe is finite, public and now counted. This is not a mass marketing problem, it is 191 named organizations in Texas. That should change how the outreach is built: direct and personal, not broad and hopeful.
Not all 191 are worth a stamp.
REC classifies every station by whether it is genuinely on the air with its own programming. Sorting the Texas list that way changes the campaign completely, because a station relaying a national satellite feed has no local programmer to say yes and nothing to gain from a content network.
| Segment | Count | How to treat it |
|---|---|---|
| Featured and confirmed active, own local programming | ~31 | Founding cohort. These are real community stations making real programming. Personal outreach, by phone, from one operator to another. |
| Likely active, unconfirmed | ~9 | Same treatment, verify they are on the air first. |
| Status unknown, limited information available | ~128 | Needs a listening pass and a phone call before any mailing. Heavily church-licensed, with a large Spanish-language Christian segment worth its own approach. |
| Relaying national satellite networks | ~20 | Deprioritize. No local programmer, no local clock to fill, nothing to trade. |
| Travelers information and weather rebroadcast | ~3 | Exclude. Not programmable stations. |
The number that should worry you
The confirmed-active, locally-programmed Texas LPFM universe is roughly 40 stations. "A few dozen stations" therefore means recruiting most of the ones that exist, which is a very high bar for a first campaign.
Two ways to widen it. Add Texas NCE full-power community and college stations, which are a separate FCC category not counted here and probably add another hundred-plus prospects. Or work the 128 unknown-status stations properly, since a share of them are certainly active and simply undocumented. Realistically you need both.
Warm names to start with
From the confirmed-active list, the stations most likely to say yes are the ones already doing community programming rather than religious automation: Wimberley Valley Radio (KWVH-LP), North Austin Community Media (KXPE-LP), Lone Star Community Radio in Conroe (KZCW-LP and KZCC-LP, licensed to the City of Conroe), San Marcos Community Radio (KZSM-LP), Lockhart's KLKT-LP, Dripping Springs (KDRP-LP), Rice University's KTRU-LP in Houston, Brownsville Society for the Performing Arts (KXIQ-LP), Victoria Texas Community Radio (KVLJ-LP), and Radio Georgetown (KGTN-LP).
Worth noting: KRYH-LP in Temple is licensed to Power-Up Radio and currently carries a national satellite network. That is a station in KTCP's own backyard with no local programming, which is either a competitor or the easiest first convert in the state.
Benchmarks, then the arithmetic.
| Figure | What it is | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 16.5%+ | Reply rates achieved by nonprofits, museums and religious institutions, well above other sectors. This is precisely who holds LPFM licenses. | Cold outreach benchmark studies, 2025–2026 |
| 3.4% | Average cold email reply rate across all sectors in 2026, down from 8.5% in 2019 | Belkins / industry benchmark studies |
| 5–10% | What counts as a good B2B reply rate. Top performers exceed 15% on focused campaigns. | Industry benchmarks, 2025–2026 |
| 4.4% | Average direct mail response rate in 2026, roughly thirty times email | Direct mail benchmark reporting, 2026 |
| 55% | Share of replies that arrive only after multiple follow-ups. Four to seven touches, three to five days apart. | Outreach benchmark studies |
| 50–125 | Word count band where cold emails get their best reply rates | Outreach benchmark studies |
The model, built on those numbers
Tier A, the 40 confirmed and likely active stations. Multi-touch, peer to peer, with a phone call rather than only email. Sector baseline is 16.5% but a station operator calling another station operator with a free and genuinely useful offer should beat that. At 40% reaching a real conversation, that is 16 conversations, and at 65% closing on a free first year, roughly 10 founding members.
Tier B, the 128 unknown-status stations. These need a listening pass and a call before any mailing. If half turn out to be genuinely active, that is 64 real prospects, 16.5% engaging is 11 conversations, and half converting is another 5 or 6.
Texas NCE full-power community and college stations. Not yet counted, likely another hundred plus prospects, and probably worth 8 to 12 more at similar rates.
Referrals. The single strongest channel in a network product. If each founding member brings half a station, that is another 8.
Total realistic path: 30 to 36 stations. That lands on "a few dozen," but only if all four channels run, and only if the NCE list gets pulled. Texas LPFM alone will not get there.
Two operational consequences
First, this is a sequence and not a send. More than half of all replies come after the fourth touch, so a single mailing or a single email will produce almost nothing and will read as proof the idea failed when it was really just under-worked.
Second, the phone matters more here than in almost any other campaign. Radio is a phone business, the licensees are volunteers who do not live in an inbox, and the peer-to-peer advantage only exists if an actual station person is the one calling.
The numbers that end that conversation.
| Figure | What it is | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 84% | Of US adults 18+ reached by AM/FM radio every week, more than 225 million people | Nielsen, Audio Today 2026 |
| 79% | Weekly reach among adults 18 to 34 | Nielsen |
| ~90% | Share of ad-supported in-car audio listening going to AM/FM rather than streaming | Nielsen |
| 61% | Radio's share of all ad-supported audio time, adults 18+, ahead of podcasts and streaming music | Nielsen, Q4 2025 |
| 65% / 68% | Share of weekly radio use that is out of home, and the share of that happening in a vehicle | Nielsen |
What it means
Radio remains the largest reach medium in America. What collapsed was local ownership and local newsrooms, not listening. Every paper should lead with reach when talking to anyone who has absorbed the streaming narrative, which is most funders and most boards.
The most strategically important finding in this dossier.
| Figure | What it is | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 70% | Of US adults with at least some trust in information from local news organizations | Pew Research Center, September 2025 |
| 56% | The same measure for national news organizations | Pew, September 2025 |
| 44% | Republicans and Republican leaners with at least some trust in national news organizations | Pew, 2025 |
| −20 pts | Decline in trust of national news organizations since 2016. Local trust also fell, from 82% to 70%, but far less. | Pew |
What it means
Local radio is close to the last medium in America with cross-party credibility. A nonpartisan civic project cannot run on national media without immediately being sorted into a side, and it cannot run on social platforms at all. Local stations are not just a convenient distribution channel for Texas Stands Together, they are the only channel where the nonpartisan claim survives contact with the audience.
This is the argument to lead with when recruiting civic supporters and funders, and it is currently in none of the drafts.
Why the station matters more than it did ten years ago.
| Figure | What it is | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 213 | US counties with no local news source at all, up from 150 in 2005 | Medill State of Local News, 2025 |
| 1,524 | Additional counties down to a single remaining local news source | Medill, 2025 |
| ~50M | Americans with limited or no access to reliable local news | Medill, 2025 |
| ~3,500 | Newspapers lost over two decades, along with 270,000+ newspaper jobs | Medill, 2025 |
| 136 | Outlets that closed in the past year, mostly small independents | Medill, 2025 |
What it means
In 1,524 counties the local station is one closure away from being the only source left. That reframes membership from a nice-to-have into infrastructure, which is the language grantmakers fund.
Real dollars, and a claim we need to drop.
| Figure | What it is | Source |
|---|---|---|
| $154–$277 | ASCAP annual blanket fee for an LPFM, scaled by wattage (1–10W up to 75–100W) | Prometheus Radio Project, 2017 rate table |
| $345 | BMI annual blanket fee, LPFM | Prometheus, 2017 |
| $149 | SESAC annual blanket fee, LPFM | Prometheus, 2017 |
| ~$650–770 | Rough all-in over-the-air PRO cost per year for a typical 100W LPFM | Derived from the three rows above |
| $683 / $683 / $149 | ASCAP / BMI / SESAC for non-LPFM noncommercial stations covering populations under 250,000 | Prometheus, 2017 |
| $500 | SoundExchange flat rate for noncommercial webcasters, if the station streams. Add $100 to waive reporting for microcasters under 44,000 tuning hours a year. | Prometheus / SoundExchange |
| $390–$1,109 | Copyright Royalty Board rates for college and university stations, scaled by enrollment | CRB via NACUBO, 2023 |
Correction, now applied
PRO licenses are blanket fees. They cost the same whether a station plays one indie song or a thousand. So Radio Records does not lower anybody's licensing bill unless a station drops its blanket licenses entirely, which is only possible if literally none of its music is PRO affiliated. That is not a realistic promise, and a station manager would have caught it.
The line claiming bloc negotiating leverage on licensing has been cut from the stations paper. It now makes the honest argument instead: a catalog of Texas artists no chain station can play, and those artists sending their own fans to the stations that play them. Differentiation and promotion, not savings.
NFCB already exists, and already does part of this.
| Figure | What it is | Source |
|---|---|---|
| $500 | Where NFCB annual membership dues start, tiered by station budget, with a documented financial hardship reduction | NFCB membership pages |
| Group buys | NFCB already runs collective purchasing for music licensing and station insurance | NFCB |
| Discounts | Member stations get reduced SoundExchange reporting rates through the NPR Member Partnership, plus vendor discounts | NFCB |
Strategic read
The "shared buying power for small stations" position is occupied. If Radio Co-op is pitched as an association with group discounts, it is a weaker version of something that has existed for decades and has a national membership.
The defensible ground is operational rather than associational. NFCB does not produce a shared civic program, does not book candidates across a member network, does not run an indie music label arm, and is not organized by state. Radio Co-op should be the thing that actually makes and moves content between stations, with governance and dues as a consequence of that, not the product itself.
Second read: NFCB is more useful as a distribution channel than as a rival. Its membership is a pre-qualified list of exactly the stations we want, and $500 is the price anchor to design dues against. Free in year one reads as genuinely aggressive against that benchmark.
Texas already learned this the hard way.
| Finding | Detail | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 911 outages | Winter Storm Uri disabled several 911 call centers, February 2021 | Post-storm reporting and state review |
| EAS limited | The Texas Division of Emergency Management's ability to use the national Emergency Alert System was limited during the event | State review |
| Cell failure | Cell service was spotty to unavailable across large areas, cutting residents off from news and emergency contact | Contemporaneous reporting |
| Reform | Post-Uri, DPS is required to send alerts to designated media outlets, radio stations among them, when outages are expected | Texas post-Uri reforms |
What it means
Texas law now routes emergency alerting through broadcast stations. An organized, reachable network of local stations is more useful to the state than the same stations scattered, and that is a credibility and grant argument, not just a talking point for the community paper.
Why an artist should care about a transmitter.
| Figure | What it is | Source |
|---|---|---|
| $0.003–$0.005 | Typical Spotify payout per stream, so roughly 250,000 plays to reach $1,000 | Industry rate reporting, 2025–2026 |
| 86.9% | Share of all music on Spotify generating no income at all | Platform analyses, 2025 |
| ~95% | Share of artists with fewer than 1,000 monthly listeners | Platform analyses, 2025 |
| 106,000 | New tracks delivered to streaming services per day in 2025, up from 99,000 in 2024 | Music Business Worldwide, 2025 |
| 13,800 / 1,500 | Artists generating $100k+ and $1M+ respectively from Spotify in 2025, out of millions uploading | Spotify Loud & Clear, 2026 |
What it means
The artist pitch does not need to attack streaming. The arithmetic does it. Pair the 250,000 streams figure with the 90% in-car radio share and the argument makes itself: attention exists somewhere other than the platform, and it is reachable only through a transmitter.
The single most persuasive stat per audience.
84% weekly reach
It ends the "radio is dying" objection before it starts, and it is the number they can carry into their own board meeting. Follow it with 1,524 one-source counties to make the station feel consequential.
250,000 streams for $1,000
Concrete, checkable, and personally infuriating in the right way. Follow with 106,000 tracks uploaded daily to establish that this is a pile, not a market.
213 counties, no news at all
Abstract until you localize it. Pair with the 70% versus 56% trust gap to explain why the station is worth defending specifically.
70% vs 56% trust
Local radio's cross-party credibility is the strongest single argument for putting a nonpartisan civic project on it, and it is the one a foundation program officer will recognize immediately.
Open gaps, stated plainly.
Closed since the first pass
The Texas station count is now real: 191 LPFM stations, pulled and segmented from REC's directory. Outreach benchmarks are now sourced rather than guessed, and the funnel model in section 03 is built on them. Both of those were open gaps an hour ago.
Still open. Do not treat these as known.
Texas NCE full-power stations are still uncounted. This is now the biggest missing number, because section 03 shows the campaign probably cannot reach a few dozen members without them. It needs a pull from FCC LMS filtered to Texas NCE-FM, excluding the religious-network relays the way the LPFM list was filtered.
Music licensing rates are 2017 vintage. The Prometheus table is the clearest public breakdown available but it is nine years old. Current ASCAP, BMI and SESAC noncommercial schedules should be confirmed directly before any dollar figure goes in front of a station manager.
GMR is missing entirely. It is a newer performing rights organization and was not covered in any source found. Any station cost estimate is incomplete without it.
Underwriting rate cards. No reliable public benchmark exists for what small-market Texas community radio underwriting actually sells for. This matters for the revenue model and will have to come from asking three or four stations directly.
The 128 unknown-status stations. Their real activity rate is assumed at 50 percent in the funnel model. That assumption drives a third of the projected membership and has not been tested. A listening pass would settle it.
What to decide from this.
Two of the three findings from the first pass are already fixed in the papers. The licensing claim is corrected, and the trust gap now leads the argument in both the stations paper and the community paper. The third is a positioning call only you and Sarah can make: Radio Co-op has to be operational rather than associational, because NFCB already owns the association ground with a national membership and a $500 price anchor. Being a better version of NFCB is not a plan. Being the thing that actually produces and moves programming between stations is.
The open decision underneath everything else is scope. Section 03 says the confirmed-active Texas LPFM universe is about 40 stations, so a few dozen members means either recruiting nearly all of them, adding the NCE full-power list, or accepting that the founding cohort is a dozen rather than forty. That choice changes the campaign, the timeline, and what the papers promise.