One of those posters also thinks 104.5 “exploded.” So judgement may not be their strongest suit.
But considering past history…
But considering past history…
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radio format change at 104.5?
- Thread starter CassChopper96
- Start date
There's a ton of great music being made by fantastic musicians right now. The creators don't need to wake up, the record labels do.
We can't ignore the fact that unlike the glory days of rock and alternative, three labels control nearly all the new music on commercial FM radio now. And of course massive consolidation has also taken place in the radio industry since the 90s so the number of people responsible for choosing which songs get airplay has vastly shrunk there as well.
College and public radio stations are less reliant on the big three labels, have more local programmers and have essentially taken over the spirit of what indie/alternative rock radio used to be. All those once-great commercial alt/rock stations are now mostly gutted if not totally extinct.
NACC 200 Radio Chart
The North American College & Community Radio Chart tabulates weekly airplay from College and Non-Commercial radio stations in the United States and Canada.
naccchart.com
104.5 has been below a 4 since Winter of 2018, and remained in the 3's for three whole years before descending to the 2's last year (based on three month rolling averages), The station is gradually getting lower and lower (Spring of 2016 showed a 3-month average of 5.0 and Fall of 2021 was a 2.1).
This is a dying format as much as an under-performing station. There is no "back" to come to.
The issue is not about that. The newer music is polarized into sub-groups so that no single station can appeal to all of the subsets. What happens is that the only consensus music is older, and the new music is divisive. There are few new songs that appeal equally to all groups of alternative partisans, so the audience fragments.
so IYHO would you say Alternative will be off the airwaves in major/smaller markets (250,000+) by 2025, like SJ, classic oldies, classical and standards, that is really sad.
Rock and especially alternative formats were never about consensus though. Those stations were happy to carve out their own audience of engaged fans. The music was exciting and that's what attracted listeners. There were advertisers who loved selling to that kind of focused, enthusiastic audience.
Today's radio corporations have more of a too-big-to-fail quality to them. They have to play a hook to a test group that's heard the song a million times before to find "consensus." The result is a total snooze fest of repetition, the complete opposite of what rock and alternative are supposed to be all about. The formats have been strangled by spreadsheet-wielding executives in suits.
Some markets, specifically those that are less ethnically influenced, will still be viable for a decade or more. Others are even now at the borderline.
The "engaged fans" have now splintered. I first started seeing this in alternative rock music tests as much as 12 to 15 years ago. As the newer music is polarizing, the only commonality is with older broad based songs.
Most advertisers look for traffic and sales. They don't care what kind of music they like.
Sure, so let's play a lot of songs that listeners think "that sucks" when they hear them.
A music test asks, "how much would you like to hear that song on the radio today". And in a library test, we don't test brand new songs. The system there is the same as always... play it if it sounds right and kill it if it stiffs after three or four weeks.
If you're a fantastic musician making great music, you need to get out of your basement and let people know. Nobody becomes a star without support. How do you sell a million records? You shake a million hands. A very wise person once said to me "Market thyself." If you don't know how to do it, reach out to someone who does. Maybe it's a record label, maybe it's an agent, maybe it's a manager, maybe it's someone in radio. But great musicians can't just sit in their basements and expect the world to come to them.
BS. If it wasn't, how did those artists sell millions of records? The music attracted a consensus, and that consensus gave them money and power. The music got played on the radio and people listened in mass numbers that got attention, and led to more stations in the format. Then one day, it all just ground to a halt, and all we have is 30 year old hits. That's where we are now.
There have always been executives in suits. The way you keep the wolves out of the henhouse is you do your job so well, the wolves stay in their office. But when you get a 1 share, that gets the attention of the CEO, and he asks the suits to fix it. The problem happened because the PD got lazy or the music just sucked. Now we have a little of both.
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Iheart could move The Breeze to 104.5 and put country on 106.1 as Eagle 106.1 can even use the WEGX calls which are down in South Carolina on ihearts Eagle 92.9 as those calls used to be in Philly
Keep in mind that some of those formats are still on the radio but on non-commercial stations. Right now you have WRTI that plays jazz and classical, and WXPN plays a lot of older rock and folk music. In fact they did a great documentary about Woodstock a couple years ago. The radio dial offers a wide range of programming if you just look around.
104.5 and 106.1 have virtually the same coverage, and 106.1 hasn't been Eagle 106 for like, what, three decades?
Just listen to WJSE, with a very limited signal, is their even a significant alternative audience in the off season months, there is no comparison, they blow 1045 out of the water. why?
They could. They would have precisely zero reason to. Even if they wanted to make the Eagle pull a phoenix from the ashes—already a dubious proposition—why apply that name to a format it never was in the market?
Different strokes for different folks.
Imagine the paper cuts!
Lord, I'm old. 💀
They could call them Sunny 104.5 and Eagle 106. And suddenly, I wouldn't be old anymore. LOL. But seriously, there's no upside in swapping frequencies.
WRFF didn't "explode" when it was launched. Yes, numbers were higher than the VERY short lived "Rumba" format, so it looked like it jumped.
WPLY existed in the Diary-ratings era. WRFF has existed in the PPM-ratings era. It's hard to compare apples to oranges. (It's also been 17 years since WPLY flipped, so the market, the format, other listening options have all DRASTICALLY changed.)
IF iHeart were to dump Alt, I doubt Audacy would attempt to pick it up. WTDY is sold as a package with WBEB, and often gets better younger numbers as CHR than WRFF gets as Alt.
Alternative music is getting fractured, as DavidEduardo points out, and it's harder and harder to build one station around all these fragments.
I've wondered myself if a Classic Alternative format could work in Philly. Pull from the old Y100 and WDRE playlists in their heydays (back when there was more consensus in the sound of Alternative). Possibly pulling some male listeners from WMGK and WMMR. Ben FM briefly did that, spiking in some songs like "Freak of the Week" by Marvelous 3 and "Open Up Your Eyes" by Tonic, both of which have some history of airplay in Philly thanks to WDRE and Y100. They dumped the deeper Alternative cuts though when they aimed their focus at WOGL.
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