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WXKS vs. WZOU (OLD)

S

ssetta

I just found an interesting article in an issue of Radio & Records magazine from 1991, and it's about comparing Kiss 108 and 94.5 WZOU. There's even sample hours of each station on the page. It makes me wonder if they were even considering changing formats at the time. I know the change didn't occur until 1993, but I noticed that both stations played a lot of recurrents at the time. But I would like you guys to read it, and see how it compares to WXKS vs. WODS today. Do you think it's a similar competition?

https://www.americanradiohistory.com/Archive-RandR/1990s/1991/RR-1991-08-02.pdf
Article on page 46.
 
When Steve was leaving WZou I suspect he sabotaged the morning show by firing Scott McKenzie. After that happened and Steve left, Ron Engelman was let go. So Steve had a head start at Kiss with Matty while JR came to town. Scott & Ron were on a roll, how else do you explain it? Scott discussed in his fairwell interview on WOMX Orlando. He was told he didn’t fit in Boston, but it all makes sense to me to sink the morning show before walking across the street.
Great Scott & Ron video here:
https://youtu.be/DRA0GrtS1DE
 
Without reading the article, but being a strong listener at the time, there is no comparison between the radio war between Kiss/ZOU and WODS. ZOU was winning in the ratings and the late Sunny Jo White was having problems with his boss.

The whole Kiss 108/WZOU fight was nothing short of a blood bath! WODS on the other hand is just a station that Entercom has on the air perhaps for corporate brand issues if nothing else.

Musically it was obvious, people wanted contemporary pop over rhythmic disco. Both stations had strong on air personalities that I can still name both stations line up to this day.
 
I wanna bring up something else which is sort of on the same topic. From reading a lot of these old R&R magazines from the early 90s, if you look at the station reports section, it seemed like they had categories of P1, P2, and P3. It seemed like P1 was major markets, P2 medium markets, and P3 small markets. Obviously, both WXKS and WZOU would be in P1 since they're in Boston, but so was WPRO (and sometimes WWKX) from Providence. I never thought of Providence as a major or large market. Do you think this could have been because Providence was considered to be part of Boston at the time?
 
From my recollection, Providence was never part of the Boston market. I believe that R&R's P1's were based on cumes of 1,000,000 or more. P2's were in the middle, and of course P3's were last.
 
Retro said:
From my recollection, Providence was never part of the Boston market. I believe that R&R's P1's were based on cumes of 1,000,000 or more. P2's were in the middle, and of course P3's were last.
Click to expand...

WPRO was, in the late 70's, around 400,000 in cume in the TSA.
 
It could've been 500,000 plus, but I was always puzzled though as I believe Billboard listed 92 Pro-FM as a Silver station, which would be 250,000 and 500,000 in cume, so I dunno.
 
Providence used to be top 30 market before the 1990s. While the Providence (and all of RI in general) population has stayed relatively unchanged, the populations of other markets have increased, bumping Providence's rank down to the mid-40s.
 
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