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Aug. 2025 6+

MrRadio said:
97.1 plays alt-garbage and Aerosmith eight times an hour.
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Exaggeration does not make your argument stronger.

WSRV is classified as a Classic Rock station and I just looked at their music logs from last week on Mediabase. That classification fits what they are doing ... hit rock songs from the 70's and 80's and occasionally the 90's. The only Alternative songs I see on there are ones that crossed over big to CHR as currents.
 
TheBigA said:
But they market themself as a classic hits station.

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When The River initially signed on, they stayed away from the harder Classic Rock product. They called themselves Classic Hits to connote this. Note this was before former Oldies stations morphed into Classic Hits stations.

Over the years, WSRV added harder stuff and evolved into a Classic Rock station. And they started mentioning Classic Rock on the air (and still do). But when they play their positioner, they still say “Atlanta’s Classic Hits” since they established themselves with it. In truth, they are more like New York’s WAXQ than WCBS-FM.

But The Big A is correct that Classic Hits stations have gone in a less pop direction recently but still play Michael Jackson and several other pop artists.
 
TheBigA said:
I think they're squatting in an attempt to freeze out any competition. So far it's worked.
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I'll buy that. It's a reasonable strategy, and the playlist is definitely hit-oriented (just without the other usual Classic Hits categories of music).

You are also correct, IMHO, that WCBS-FM is not "pop oldies", which is what @MrRadio seems to think is a winning format. I have to say it again, because it still hasn't universally sunk in to people ... Classic Hits is a format which programs consensus favorites for a 35-49 core demographic (expanding in most markets to 25-54 in most cases), and it is based on what that audience wants to listen to now. As time has passed, a lot of songs that were big hits in earlier decades have fallen from favor with the target audience and the remaining fans of those songs are not demographically saleable.

Oldies is no longer a viable format, and the exceptions are stations which have built up a loyal audience over time and are able to sell that loyalty to local advertisers. Doing it as a new format anywhere, much less a major market like Atlanta, would run off your existing audience and not gain enough replacements to be commercially viable.

I have no doubt that The River's playlist is, at its core, a consensus of rock hits that the audience still wants to hear. One naysayer does not change that fact, and I have my doubts that despite his screenname, our objector has any experience that would counter the facts that I have again had to put forward here.

If it still works for WSRV, they aren't in need of fixing it.
 
K.M. Richards said:
If it still works for WSRV, they aren't in need of fixing it.
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The real question is how someone could slice off a part of their huge audience.

99X really hasn't done that in terms of playlist, but in terms of target demo I think they have to some extent.

The question is whether there's room for a 70s/80s "oldies"/true classic hits station, something that would not include early 70s "AM gold" but would include more popular disco/New Wave hits from the second half of the 70s, roughly covering the same time period as your typical classic rocker these days, but with pop and not AOR.

AC seems to have mostly abandoned 80s pop, something they had a lock on for years. You might have to include 90s pop at this point to amass enough of an audience.

The challenge with any gold-based station is competing with the many narrowcasters online who can often do a better job with a more tailored playlist.
 
jabba17 said:
The question is whether there's room for a 70s/80s "oldies"/true classic hits station,
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Sure there's room. The problem is it wouldn't make money. That's why nobody's doing it.

jabba17 said:
The challenge with any gold-based station is competing with the many narrowcasters online who can often do a better job with a more tailored playlist.
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They can do a "better job" because they're mainly hobby stations that don't make money. Same thing with The Breeze. It's on HD.
 
jabba17 said:
The challenge with any gold-based station is competing with the many narrowcasters online who can often do a better job with a more tailored playlist.
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That, my friend, is the major issue. Why would I want to listen to a bunch of songs I can take or leave when I can listen to my mp3s commercial-free? Or Spotify, which learns what I like and tailors my playlist just for me?

Much like the advent of automation and voice-tracking, which destroyed local radio in the early 2000s, streaming and digital music in general has driven radio even further into the dirt. It will always be around, but it's not the stairway to the stars it once was.
 
MrRadio said:
Much like the advent of automation and voice-tracking, which destroyed local radio in the early 2000s, streaming and digital music in general has driven radio even further into the dirt. It will always be around, but it's not the stairway to the stars it once was.
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You think digital services aren't automated or voicetracked? The internet destroyed local radio because people could get the music they wanted for free. If there was another way to pay for broadcast radio, it would sound very different. But when people can make their own playlists, the way they made their own cassettes or CDs in the 80s, that's what they'll do.
 
I agree 100% with everything BigA has said in rebuttal.

There needs to be a more realistic understanding by those who post here how the business has changed. What might have been feasible even ten years ago is probably not anymore. Stations program to the demographics that are saleable to advertisers, especially in major markets where a huge chunk of the business is agency-based.

Emotional attachment to formats that attract older listeners as their primary audience doesn't change the reality.

What we as an industry have been doing is try to hold on for dear life as the options that have been mentioned "destroyed" the old business model. How can you cite that as your defense and as a reason for us to go back to an unaffordable business model when you were the ones who made those alternatives viable?

Oh, and let me know when the hobbyist streamers fall by the wayside when -- inevitably -- their hosting services start charging them an amount they can't afford. What happens to you then? And will we still be alive to be the free alternative to paid streaming?

There's no such thing as a free lunch. On radio, the commercials are paying for you to be able to receive us free of charge. Some of the streaming services are also starting to commercialize, and make you pay for the privilege of not being subjected to the advertising.

You cannot have it both ways, at least not forever. Sooner or later, you will pay in one form or another. What disgusts me is the insistence that we can go back to the way things were, just because you think so. We are realists. You are dreamers.
 
K.M. Richards said:
There needs to be a more realistic understanding by those who post here how the business has changed.

What disgusts me is the insistence that we can go back to the way things were, just because you think so. We are realists. You are dreamers.
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There doesn't need to be anything by those who post here. You're taking this forum and yourself far too seriously. We knock around ideas and 'what ifs' all the time. We speculate, pass rumors, and so on, all because we love radio. It's fun.

You also have no right to not be disgusted.
 
MrRadio said:
We knock around ideas and 'what ifs' all the time. We speculate, pass rumors, and so on, all because we love radio. It's fun.
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That's great and normally I'd encourage such things for the same reason. But you have to be realistic. WHO in Atlanta would do it?

Certainly not Cox or Radio One. Not Audacy or Cumulus. So you're left with iHeart. If they did it, it would be fully automated on HD like The Breeze.
 
TheBigA said:
That's great and normally I'd encourage such things for the same reason. But you have to be realistic. WHO in Atlanta would do it?

Certainly not Cox or Radio One. Not Audacy or Cumulus. So you're left with iHeart. If they did it, it would be fully automated on HD like The Breeze.
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And you've always been a great one to toss back and forth with. I enjoy your posts.

You're right. It would be on the cheap anyway, and on the REALLY cheap if it was iHeart. Ha
 
TheBigA said:
Sure there's room. The problem is it wouldn't make money. That's why nobody's doing it.



They can do a "better job" because they're mainly hobby stations that don't make money. Same thing with The Breeze. It's on HD.
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Probably more to the point, they have decided that they can make more money doing something else. The question is whether or not they are right, although it's probably a question of splitting hairs over a tenth of a share and the trouble (cost) of making a change at that point.

Some of these narrowcasters do make money, because they have very low overhead. But they're not raking it in, with the possible exception of satellite which can spread its fixed costs over many channels. And satellite has added so many channels to its fixed bandwidth that fidelity suffers. You can listen at full fidelity online, but at that point what is the point of satellite?
 
MrRadio said:
Pop oldies comes to mind. Other markets sustain pop oldies formats (WCBS New York is the prime example), why not Atlanta? Why not TRY IT? If it fails, then you know that Atlanta is still a weird market with a huge population that likes the same three formats repeated ad nauseam.
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Because Atlanta and NYC are two VERY different markets. What works in one may not work in the other.

In addition, there’s likely been some research done that’s shown that Atlanta can’t seem to support it on a full-market stick. (There have also been other threads that have touched on this very subject on this site, including why classic hitters in the South skew towards rock than pop.) To really satisfy that CH audience, the music has been split up onto three stations: River and 99X redux on the rock end, Star on the rhythmic/pop end. Squeezing another one in there likely won’t move the needle.
 
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ksradiogeek said:
Because Atlanta and NYC are two VERY different markets. What works in one may not work in the other.
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Case in point is Philadelphia, where a classic hits format run by the same company as WCBS is not even Top 10 in 6+ numbers, and mainly attracts people over 55. So what works well in NY is a flop in Philly. They've already tried a rebrand and changing the music mix. Nothing seems to help.

However the classic rock station is #2, and doing great in all the important demos.
 


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