A few nights ago I was driving and listening to iHeartRadio's "Soft Rock" feed (AC format) and at the top of the hour heard an ID "KSNE-HD2 Las Vegas." Everything else was the standard "I Heart Radio" format. Just the one ID - I thought perhaps it was a rogue mistake that somehow slipped through - that perhaps the feed was being generated by KSNE for iHeart's purposes. But over the course of the weekend, I have heard different single stations with IDs at the top of the hour. Most recently, I heard "Today's Mix" using "WLKO-HD2 Hickory (NC)" and on the Sunny Channel, they actually ran the calls over the short jingle bed that Sunny uses - I believe it was the station in Detroit. I know they weren't running these ID's before and I haven't (as yet) listened to any one station for more than an hour to see if they are using the same ID's every hour or changing them up each hour. I am wondering something - either a) the formats are being produced and generated by these stations for the national feed, which seems a little odd for some of the smaller stations programming the entire national format, OR perhaps by ID'ing one or more stations, they are somehow skirting a royalty issue, where they can say that the format is not aimed at the entire country, just a local area and any extra listening is simply a bonus, just like their hundreds of local market stations.
I also noticed that after a fairly short run, they have retired the local market News, Weather and Traffic channels that they were doing for about 40 markets nationwide - these were similar to the XM Traffic Channels in that they were loops of about two minutes of local news, weather and traffic. They still have the 24/7 National News Feed for now, and on the Custom stations it looks like they may still have some of the local information.
Any thoughts?
I also noticed that after a fairly short run, they have retired the local market News, Weather and Traffic channels that they were doing for about 40 markets nationwide - these were similar to the XM Traffic Channels in that they were loops of about two minutes of local news, weather and traffic. They still have the 24/7 National News Feed for now, and on the Custom stations it looks like they may still have some of the local information.
Any thoughts?