According to the article Cumulus has cut two dozen people from the division.
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Layoffs Hit Westwood One’s 24/7 Formats
- Thread starter Y2kTheNewOldies
- Start date
According to the article Cumulus has cut two dozen people from the division.
Do many stations still even use these? I’ve only ever really heard oldies or standards satellite feeds, and maybe only a couple AC, definitely not some of the other ones they offer.
Satellite delivered formats were big in the 90s-00s but seem to be getting more difficult to find on terrestrial or maybe it’s just me. I’ve never heard too 40, active rock, or classic hip hop via satellite delivery.
Satellite delivered formats were big in the 90s-00s but seem to be getting more difficult to find on terrestrial or maybe it’s just me. I’ve never heard too 40, active rock, or classic hip hop via satellite delivery.
Yes. Hundreds and hundreds do.
They are not satellite delivered any more due to cost. The formats come in ways that assemble to fit local spot and service loads and don´t sound "canned".
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The "WW1 Total" formats are still delivered by satellite. They do offer "WW1 Local" formats, which are assembled from workparts.
WW1 offers all of these. I can't say I've been able to identify any affiliates for any of them, but they must exist...
Cumulus offers Rock 2.0 on a handful of its smaller market stations. 98.1 The Phantom in Abilene was running it last I'd heard. Not sure about the others, though.
One of our local stations, WNOX, Knoxville, carried Westwood 1 Classic Hits from workparts, and in travels, I heard it several other places.
Hip hop on a crappy mono AM station? Ugh! Can you say placeholder?
No, but I can say "AM that feeds an FM Translator."
What it is... is..... the automation computer sits at the local station, programmed by the network and the jocks VT's get pushed directly to the automation computer. Much more chances to localize better then before
I should know.. I'm a jock on one format run by a competitor to Westwood one
It may have changed or otherwise been improved since, but I toured the old Waitt Radio Networks facility in Omaha about 20 years ago. The satellite basically had a data and an audio stream. The jocks voice tracked each station's breaks to the STORQ box at the local station. The music logs that showed up on the jocks' machines also were loaded into the stations' machines. If the jock switched them around or otherwise made changes, that data was transferred to the affiliates, too. The audio stream would be for live announcements across the entire network and was usually used to presell optional songs. Seems like some of the ramps were also generic and went across the entire network. The three breaks an hour were usually localized.
It was a pretty sophisticated system, and I never could figure out why anyone would want to use the ABC/SMN or WW1 systems after that. Of course, I later worked for a company that relied on ABC/Citadel in the after hours and didn’t even have music on the hard drive.
Its kind of the same todday.... theres X amount of tracks per DJ shift, say in my 6 hour classic country show.. i have 4 per hour... i record 24 generics breaks
Those go out to the entire set of stations on the classic country format
then some stations elect for local content....so if 105.5 WVIG elects for 3 local breaks in that shift, they pick where they want them to go and they get them instead of the generics
Westwood One Classic Hits a few years ago had a thing for mid-charters from 1980. "Him" by Rupert Holmes was a top-of-the-hour song. My wife and I were somewhere in the middle of nowhere in Arkansas on the way to Texas, tuned to a random station. Them I hear at 11am Central "Him". I said, yes, Westwood 1. I told my wife that that was the same program as 93.1 back home and she said she recognized the jock
Back in the day it cost more to run Waitt. Not sure if that's still the case with WW1 Total/WW1 Local. And it also took effort to set up the network jocks with good local content. So unless the station had the ability to send talking points to the network at least once a week, it wasn't worth the extra cash.
Well, it kinda makes sense, to bury the lesser-performing songs in parts of the hour that are likely to be occupied by a local break. Except when they don't get the timing exactly right, and you hear a second or two of the beginning of a song that isn't played otherwise, right before the station cuts away to a news or commercial break. Lately iHeart's "Sunny" has been doing that with Helen Reddy's "Delta Dawn".
IIRC, WLKR-FM Norwalk uses the music logs for Rock 2.0 (which is totally doable with WW1 Local). The air talent is in-house, both live and voice-tracked.
That's a problem especially when you're feeding different commercials to different parts of the country and different users. Just on 30 second spot that's 31 and that's the effect
WDDH-FM St Marys, PA uses logs generated for the mainstream country format.. but except for a morning show form nashville, its local. never has run WW1.
Its a service they offer.
It's super easy to get local content to WW1 and LRN jocks these days.
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