• Get involved.
    We want your input!
    Apply for Membership and join the conversations about everything related to broadcasting.

    After we receive your registration, a moderator will review it. After your registration is approved, you will be permitted to post.
    If you use a disposable or false email address, your registration will be rejected.

    After your membership is approved, please take a minute to tell us a little bit about yourself.
    https://www.radiodiscussions.com/forums/introduce-yourself.1088/

    Thanks in advance and have fun!
    RadioDiscussions Administrators

99 X Is Back

The station hits one of my musical sweet spots, and I love the fact they play songs many FM stations have long since forgotten.

KROQ's playlist does nothing for me. Most of the newer artists they play are bland, and their variety of gold is underwhelming. Their ROQ of the 90s weekends, which seems to happen about once every 60 or 90 days, are decent. I'm also not a fan of the morning show. I listened twice and found it to be boring.
 
The station hits one of my musical sweet spots, and I love the fact they play songs many FM stations have long since forgotten.

The easiest thing for a station to do is just play more gold. They have a built in audience that wants to hear old stuff. It's much harder to work in new stuff, because the audience is fragmented.
 
The easiest thing for a station to do is just play more gold. They have a built in audience that wants to hear old stuff. It's much harder to work in new stuff, because the audience is fragmented.
my apologies for asking this on the Atlanta board. But, what does alt 98.7 do (other iHeart media alternatives) that kroq doesn’t?
 
I had high hopes for a KROQ rebirth and for Gen Z and Millennials in LA (and elsewhere) to seek out FM Radio (and the app) because of it.

Slogging along and being copycat is not how KROQ became KROQ in the first place. (Constructive criticism). I fail to comprehend the extremely conservative approach.

Be daring! Be unique! Be original! Be edgy! Overall, be (the old) KROQ! The world is thirsting for this kind of approach from a once legendary IP.
 
I had high hopes for a KROQ rebirth and for Gen Z and Millennials in LA (and elsewhere) to seek out FM Radio (and the app) because of it.

About 60% of the Millennials and Gen Z in LA are Hispanic. Another large percentage are Black and Asian, also highly unlikely groups to populate the cume of any kind of alternative station. It is, in fact, amazing that the two alternative variations in LA do as well as they do now.
Slogging along and being copycat is not how KROQ became KROQ in the first place. (Constructive criticism). I fail to comprehend the extremely conservative approach.
Current alt music listeners are divided into multiple subsets, where what one group loves another hates and still another just tolerates.
Be daring! Be unique! Be original! Be edgy! Overall, be (the old) KROQ! The world is thirsting for this kind of approach from a once legendary IP.
Not in LA where about 80% of the market is not even in an ethnic or immigrant group that has any chance of contributing more than a few listeners to an alternative station.
 
I believe he left at the end of March, which would mean he left four or five months after the flip.

He has said he has another position but can't start until his noncompete runs out.
Radio job? I assumed he got out of radio entirely while he could.
 
KROQ's air talent leaves something to be desired, and the station is not nearly as interactive with the audience as it was a couple decades ago. The music is bleh. It sounds like a station just "going thru the motions" most of the time.

Kevin Weatherly is definitely not the visionary programmer he once was so many years ago.

Nonetheless, he's doing a much better job than Kaplan! At least the station is listenable these days. It was unbearably bad when Kaplan was at the reins.
 
99X needs to start introducing new music to rebound their ratings.

The trendlines are not favorable and they will need to do more than add a DJ here or there to enhance them. The novelty of the umpteenth return of 99X is wearing off according to the ratings.
 
Last edited:
99X needs to start introducing new music to rebound their ratings.
Most alternative programmers are concerned if not frightened about new music. This is because the alternative audience today is fragmented into multiple partisan groups which don't share a liking for the same songs. There are very few that are broad appeal, while most are segmented.
 
Most alternative programmers are concerned if not frightened about new music. This is because the alternative audience today is fragmented into multiple partisan groups which don't share a liking for the same songs. There are very few that are broad appeal, while most are segmented.
well the audience is just gonna have to deal with it.
 
okay, allow me to clarify better:

So, the audience tends to have a love for the past djs that helped grow the station they loved back in the 90s and 00s @99X, correct? I heard djs like Leslie Fram and Steve Barnes are beloved in Atlanta due to the music they helped their city discover and love for many years, would they not give those SAME djs trust for spinning new music they do enjoy again? If they only liked the old stuff they discovered from them, then they clearly do not give a crap about the station or the djs that help craft it, and shouldn't be a concern or priority because it's on the audience, and not the djs for being stuck in the past.

Alternative being stuck in the past is what's killing it more than new music ever will.
 
okay, allow me to clarify better:

So, the audience tends to have a love for the past djs that helped grow the station they loved back in the 90s and 00s @99X, correct? I heard djs like Leslie Fram and Steve Barnes are beloved in Atlanta due to the music they helped their city discover and love for many years,
Whoever played the songs in the past is irrelevant. Either a listener likes a song or they don't.
would they not give those SAME djs trust for spinning new music they do enjoy again?
No, because most of the new music is polarized into groups. When a test of current alternative rock is done (and this had been true for the last 12 to 15 years) we find that alternative "fans" divide into subsets... for example, one song may have a third of listeners liking it, a third hating it and a third indifferent to it.

So stations can't play those songs, and there are very few current releases that appeal positively to everyone in a station's potential audience.
If they only liked the old stuff they discovered from them, then they clearly do not give a crap about the station or the djs that help craft it, and shouldn't be a concern or priority because it's on the audience, and not the djs for being stuck in the past.
This has nothing to do with the DJs. It is about individual songs. A radio station is one-to-many, and can't play songs where two-thirds of the listeners either dislike them or don't care for them.
Alternative being stuck in the past is what's killing it more than new music ever will.
There is not enough mass appeal alternative rock to fill a playlist.
 
well the audience is just gonna have to deal with it.
You obviously don't understand the point: very few new alt songs are liked by everyone. There are subsets or groups that like each song, but they don't overlap to make most songs truly mass appeal.
 
The station doesn't need to play much if any brand new music.

What it *can* do, though, is play some mass appeal cuts from the 00s and 10s as part of the overall music mix. Believe it or not, some (not many) such songs do exist within the alternative genre.

I'd also steer the station just a little more in a guitar oriented alternative rock direction. I'd scale back the pre-grunge music.
 
I feel like they are close to perfection right now. I am not really sure what more they could do at this point. There are very few new alternative songs that appeal to me. I am enjoying the extremely large playlist of classic alternative songs and the original DJs. Hopefully, adding Steve will be a big part of what the station needs to increase its ratings.
 
Status
This thread has been closed due to inactivity. You can create a new thread to discuss this topic.


Back
Top Bottom