Reviewed by Peter Berk, President and Chief Media Strategist, Berk Marketing · Last updated 26 September 2026
Dallas-Fort Worth
Two anchor cities, one ratings market and some of the longest commutes in the country. Berk Marketing buys Dallas-Fort Worth for advertisers and represents no station in it.
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Short answer. Dallas-Fort Worth is a music market at the top of the ratings, an unusually large Spanish-language market underneath, and a place where the biggest talk and sports brands are heritage AM signals that the share table undersells. The most important thing to understand before buying it is geography: Dallas and Fort Worth are forty miles apart with different commutes, different retail patterns and different loyalties, and a station that dominates one side of the metro can be background noise on the other. The practical entry point is about five thousand dollars a week, and the first decision is which side of the market, or both, your customer lives on.
Station by station
These pages cover what each one costs to buy, who is actually listening, and how the schedule should be built for that format.
The market in numbers
iHeart holds the top three positions with adult contemporary, hot AC and top 40, and the Spanish-language stations together out-share every English-language signal in the market.
| Station | Dial | Branding | Format | Owner | Share |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| KDGE-FM | 102.1 FM | Star | AC | iHeartMedia | 6.0 |
| KDMX-FM | 102.9 FM | Mix | Hot AC | iHeartMedia | 4.8 |
| KHKS-FM | 106.1 FM | Kiss-FM | CHR | iHeartMedia | 4.1 |
| KLNO-FM | 94.1 FM | Que Buena | Regional Mexican | TelevisaUnivision | 4.0 |
| KSPF-FM | 98.7 FM | The Spot | Classic Hits | Audacy | 3.9 |
| KJKK-FM | 100.3 FM | Jack FM | Adult Hits | Audacy | 3.8 |
| KRLD-FM | 105.3 FM | The Fan | Sports | Audacy | 3.8 |
| KKDA-FM | 104.5 FM | K104 | Hip Hop and R&B | Service Broadcasting | 3.2 |
| KVIL-FM | 103.7 FM | Alt | Alternative | Audacy | 3.0 |
| KRNB-FM | 105.7 FM | Smooth R&B | Adult R&B | Service Broadcasting | 2.9 |
Top ten commercial stations by share. Star leads the market at 6.0. The news, talk and sports signals (The Fan, NewsRadio) combine to 5.2, and the Spanish-language stations to 12.7. Source: Nielsen PPM as published on our radio stations by market page, which is updated with each book.
How Dallas-Fort Worth listens
It is two cities that share a ratings book. Nielsen measures Dallas and Fort Worth as one market, so every share in the table above is a metro figure. On the ground, Fort Worth listeners and Dallas listeners do not commute the same way, shop in the same places or follow the same teams with the same intensity. A schedule built on the metro numbers alone can look efficient and still miss the half of the market your customer is in.
Spanish-language radio is bigger here than in almost any market outside Los Angeles. Que Buena, La Grande, Latino Mix and Luna between them reach an audience that no single English-language station matches. That is an opportunity for an advertiser who can serve Spanish speakers properly, and a trap for one who buys it with an English spot and an English-only phone line.
Talk and sports live on AM, and the share table undersells them. The Fan on 105.3 is the FM sports signal, and NewsRadio 1080 KRLD is the news station, but the heritage talk and sports brands on AM reach a male, established-household audience that responds to direct offers out of proportion to its share. For a considered purchase, that audience is often the best value in the market.
The listener is following a story or a conversation, so fewer commercials a day do the job and a spot written to match that delivery carries more information. In Dallas-Fort Worth that means KRLD for news, The Fan in season, and the heritage AM talk signals for an older male audience.
The listener is half attending, so the message needs repeating, which means weight on one station rather than money spread across four. Star 102.1, Mix 102.9 and Kiss FM each reach a large habitual audience, and a country schedule reaches a different one again.
Why format decides frequency, in full, is on the local radio advertising page.
Money
The top of the Dallas-Fort Worth market is an iHeartMedia cluster, with Audacy holding the classic hits, adult hits and sports signals and TelevisaUnivision and MediaCo controlling most of the Spanish-language audience. Each group would prefer to sell you a package across its own stations. We buy the station your customer listens to, and negotiate each group against the others for it.
The practical entry point for a terrestrial campaign here is about five thousand dollars a week, the same floor as every market we buy, and it needs to run long enough to build frequency rather than a week or two to see what happens. What sets the rate, what moves it and how remnant inventory changes the arithmetic is covered on the radio advertising costs page.
Berk Marketing represents advertisers and holds no Dallas-Fort Worth inventory. We go to the stations and the groups for availability and price, negotiate each against the others, write and produce the commercial in house, place the schedule and track what it returns by station. Where a station has unsold airtime, we buy it as remnant, typically 40 to 60% below the published rate card, and you are refunded or credited for any spot that does not run.
Fit
Worth knowing first
We work with advertisers who have not already been in contact with a radio station’s sales rep. We are not in the business of taking clients away from stations, and once an advertiser has been quoted directly, our ability to bring remnant pricing on that station is compromised.
The consequence lands on you rather than on us. If Dallas-Fort Worth is on your list and you have not spoken to anyone yet, that is exactly when this is worth a call.
We will run a competitive monitoring report at no charge and with no obligation. It shows which Dallas-Fort Worth stations your competitors are on, at what times of day, how many spots, and it includes the actual audio of their commercials.
In many cases nothing shows up at all, and that is worth knowing too.
Get the ReportQuestions
It depends on who buys from you and where they live. For a considered purchase, the news and talk audience on KRLD and the heritage AM talk signals gets more across in fewer spots. For a broad consumer offer, the big iHeart music stations reach the most people and need the most frequency. For Spanish speakers, the Spanish-language stations are the largest single audience in the market. We would not name one before hearing what you sell.
The practical minimum for a terrestrial campaign is about five thousand dollars a week, here as elsewhere. Beyond that, the rate depends on the station, the daypart, how long you commit and whether the airtime is bought at rate card or as remnant inventory. How the rate is set and negotiated is covered on the radio advertising costs page, and a written plan for your budget costs nothing.
Not on the big signals, which cover the whole metro. There are smaller stations licensed to the Fort Worth side whose audience skews that way, and a schedule can lean on them, but the honest answer is that you buy the market and use the creative and the dayparts to speak to your side of it.
If you can take the call in Spanish, it is worth serious consideration, because the Spanish-language audience here is larger than any single English-language station. If you cannot, buy it later rather than badly. A Spanish spot that lands on an English-only phone line wastes the buy.
No. We represent advertisers only and hold no station inventory, so there is no Dallas or Fort Worth signal we are obliged to recommend. We go to the groups for availability and price and negotiate each against the others.
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Berk Marketing represents advertisers, not radio stations or media companies.
