That’s…not how that works.
Atlanta has lost 99X twice. If Cumulus wants to have any sort of long term stability with it, they have to be careful and methodical when it comes to newer music.
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99 X Is Back
- Thread starter davideduardo
- Start date
Atlanta has lost 99X twice. If Cumulus wants to have any sort of long term stability with it, they have to be careful and methodical when it comes to newer music.
I wouldn’t. If you’re going to do all-classic alt, you can’t ignore punk and new wave (which, if you’ve heard any early airchecks of 99X, they played plenty of the latter when it first started out…though it seems when the relaunch happened, people derided hearing Blondie (‘they’re not alternative!’ they shouted. Oh they definitely were played on alternative in the 80s.)) Alt music didn’t start in ‘91.
I don’t think you’re quite getting it. Let’s try it from a P1’s POV.
By and large, for the most part, new alternative is not resonating very well. There are VERY few consensus currents that the audience as a whole can agree on. (I should know - there aren’t a lot of currents that I personally actually care for.) Until the music improves and a large-scale audience buys into it and loves it wholeheartedly like they did in the 90s (and if research actually backs it up - can’t forget that), currents will likely be very limited on alt. Sure, you can be like some independent alts like the Planet in the Quad Cities that can do whatever and play whatever new music they can get. That’s fine, but two things:
A. The QC is VERY different from Atlanta.
B. 99X is Cumulus’ baby. They’re going to do research and be methodical as to their long-term future.
Does that make any sense? Or are you going to keep going?
(Also, Barnes and Leslie have other jobs now, Barnes with his production company and Leslie having a prominent position with CMT. The recently re-hired Steve Craig has his bar, pilot and PA duties, and Will Pendarvis still has his 1st Wave gig. Though Steve is now the day-to-day PD, and has stated there will be some new music added, I know he’ll be watching it very closely so as to not alienate audiences - he’s a music lover at heart, and I know he’ll pay attention to the overall product.)
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As a P1 and frequent streamer (as I’m not in the market), I’ve noticed the playlist has become more balanced. I’m hearing more of a 90s focus, but stretching into the 2000s, though playing a few 80s tracks per hour.
Playing music your audience doesn’t want to hear and saying, “Just deal with it,” will result in not having an audience.
Not if they don’t like the new music they spin. If they did that, any trust the audience had in them would be gone quickly. Plus, I think most people have long since realized the jocks don’t pick their own music. We can talk about Cumulus, the Bert Show wanting to be on a stronger signal, or any number of other things that happened, but the reason 99X went away in the first place 15 years ago was because alternative had already begun to fragment and was having a hard time finding new product the audience would enjoy. 99X was already relying more on its gold library, and the writing was on the wall.
While 99X had originally been intended to be a rock 40 station that the PD and MD concluded wouldn’t work at the last minute, the reality is, once corporate realized it was working and got behind it, it gave the local staff the means to research the programming and the intended audience and figure out how to best reach that population. Whether you want to say the programming staff was genius or lucky, 99X also launched at the right time. If it had launched two years earlier, it would almost certainly have mired in the mid 1 share range, and the staff would likely have been fired in the first year.
One could reasonably make the case that alternative isn’t alternative without new product. The audience 99X is trying to reach, however, doesn’t care what it’s really called. Well, OK, it probably wouldn’t work if you called it AIDS, but you get the point. The station launched 31 years ago. Those of us in high school at the time are now having to screen regularly for colon cancer and are now taking multiple prescriptions a day. We don’t care whether it’s really alternative or not. Most people stop regularly listening to new music around 34 years old. We want to listen to music we enjoy, and calling it alternative when it might not really be alternative doesn’t bother us. If you don’t understand that, 99X isn’t trying to reach you.
There's a not-insignificant number of alt fans who don't like any alt from the late 70s through the 80s (aka punk and new wave).
I'm not a fan of 90s alt for the most part, but love the 70s and 80s alt.
And, yes, Blondie was definitely alt when their classic records came out.
The challenge for 99X is, if they want to break new (or newer) music, they need to know their audience, mix it in and sequence it well and avoid train wrecks, and test test test. They also can't be everything to everyone. There's just too much library to potentially cover and nobody can cover it all.
When 99X debuted in 1992, they really only had about a 5-year library of top spins, and another 10 years of gold they could pull in as "oh wow" cuts. Now it's 30 years later, and 30 years more music.
Classic album rock has learned how to do this with 90s rock they previously shunned, so classic alt can do it too.
An important thing to note that we learned from the constant measurement of the same people in the PPM is that many people have two or even three stations that they alternate in their personal P1 status. This week they listen a bit more to one, less to the others. Next week or so they may listen more to a different one. Mood may be part of it, but also things like your preferred morning show getting into a rut or having its main host on vacation will change the P1-P2 and P3 status of a person's preferred stations.
We see some evidence of this in the weekly wobbles in stations in the PPM weeklies, although some of the wobbles come from panel changes and sample size variants.
A very nice and precise way of expressing the fragmentation of the genre in the area of currents and the lack of plentiful good mass-appeal currents.
I'd probably scale that back by at least one-half and backfill those open slots with music from the 00s and 10s.
because the audience who don't like the new stuff have nostalgia bias, bias of what THEY believe alternative or rock was, and are picky.
When 99X @ 100.5 launched, I figured it would settle around a 2.0-2.5 ratings level. Slightly above the performance of the Rock 100.5 disaster, but the novelty would wear off and it would come down to reality which is happening. A lot of those initial numbers were due to nostalgia and people checking it out.
My prediction still stands they’ll settle in the 2.0-2.5 range, maybe a little lower and maybe a little higher in some months. This just isn’t a format that’s going to get great numbers, especially with the market it’s in and the somewhat lower powered signal. Things change a lot in 30 years.
My prediction still stands they’ll settle in the 2.0-2.5 range, maybe a little lower and maybe a little higher in some months. This just isn’t a format that’s going to get great numbers, especially with the market it’s in and the somewhat lower powered signal. Things change a lot in 30 years.
And? For a radio station playing most new songs will drive away a portion of the audience. So the only place where there are wide, consensus songs is in library material as nearly none of the newer releases can be played as they are so polarized.
It's very likely they have researched this, title by title, and not found it attractive or positive to the largest potential audience group. Alt rock started fragmenting into dissimilar and polarized groups 15 to 18 years ago.
That could be true, but what you’re missing is that Cumulus is going after an older audience with 99X. It’s going after the people who liked 99X during its original run. You don’t get that audience by playing music it doesn’t want to hear.
One of the first rules of Marketing 101 is that you always segment the market. Far as Cumulus is concerned, someone else can go after the people who want what you want. Cumulus would seem to be okay with what it's doing.
I normally stay out of programming discussions, as the art and science of programming is mostly outside my reckoning. That said, I'm reading this thread as I'm listening to the revived Soundcheck on San Francisco's KITS/Live 105. Thus it occurs to me that we've come full circle, from the Sunday-night modern-rock alternative shows on AOR or CHR stations, depending on the market, in the early 1990s when most of that genre of music was new. And now, if you want to hear new music in the alternative genre, you have to seek out the Sunday-night new-music show. I will say that what Aaron Axelsen is playing on the show doesn't sound much different from what you'd hear 20 years ago on an alternative station, at least to my ears. So I don't get what would be different. The genre seems to be pretty settled at this point. It could be that 99X and others are going after familiarity and pleasant memories of younger days among their audience.
| 3.8 | 3.6 | 3.0 | 2.8 | 2.5 | WNNX-FM | 99X |
lol ^
Alternative needs to stop being lame and out of touch and be daring again, there's artists out there to do it, it's worth taking the risk to appeal to a newer/younger audience or people who used to listen but listen to newer artists that are beloved thanks to the internet (like, King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, or hundreds of other bands that have a good audience and sell out places that I see zero radio stations even TRY to play because they're playing the more corporate stuff people hate, which got us into this mess in the first place).
Well that portion of the audience just wants radio to stay in it's comfort zone and be the status quo that's killing it in the first place, dying out in lame fashion reliving it's glory days, thus repeating the cycle of the boring corporate AOR stations stations that caused new wave stations like KROQ and 91X to birth in the first place.
Alternative needs to stop being lame and out of touch and be daring again, there's artists out there to do it, it's worth taking the risk to appeal to a newer/younger audience or people who used to listen but listen to newer artists that are beloved thanks to the internet (like, King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, or hundreds of other bands that have a good audience and sell out places that I see zero radio stations even TRY to play because they're playing the more corporate stuff people hate, which got us into this mess in the first place).
You are failing to understand that current alternative rock is not a single format... it is at least 3 formats that don't overlap. The problem there is that none of the three (or more) varieties of current based music is big enough to sustain a station.
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