Maybe Buddy’s bankers wanted him to bring in a consultant. Or maybe Great Lakes is now an investor.
Just speculation’ 😜
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"Big WECK"?
- Thread starter DN14224
- Start date
Just speculation’ 😜
"Good Times, Great Oldies" is tired and threadbare, I agree. "Big WECK" reminds me of stations in bygone days that would call themselves the Big Z or the Big D or even the Big A (not OUR TheBigA, lol), depending on what letter in their call they chose to emphasize. Maybe that's the association the rebranding is intended to spark in listeners. Did Buffalo have a "Big" station back in the '60s through '80s -- I know WKBW was simply "KB" but don't know all that much about Buffalo radio history when it comes to other stations.
IIRC, not long ago Buddy mentioned here that the note has been paid off. He owns the joint. No speculatin' about it.
Like "Mighty" and "Super," the word "Big" has been part of a number of radio stations' slogans for years. Most notably, CKLW "The Big 8;" also 700 WLW "The Big One"; and before it became iHeart, Clear Channel used the word "Big" on a number of radio stations with Oldies or Classic Hits formats. WWKB attempted to use "The Big One" at one point, briefly in the 90s, but was thwarted by Clear Channel. That lasted about two weeks before the cease and desist order was issued and put a stop to it.
There's even some history with the word "Big" on the 1230 frequency. Recall that when it was WNIA, "Be big, be a builder" was heard at least once an hour.
Tom Langmyer's group? What is that, a consultancy? I thought Tom started Great Lakes Broadcasting as a company that planned to purchase small market stations and make them better.
The paper says he was just promoted to full-time as production director. He is on every night from 6p on but I am off the road by then. He IS the best DJ they have. I wonder why they buried him on the night shift?
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The press release and Pergament's column says Great Lakes Media is a "media acquisition firm" and they do advising for local media companies too. The company website says they are looking a large and major market acquisitions. Would that rule Buffalo out?
WECK sounds really good now. You can tell somebody who knows what to do is finally there. I'm assuming that's Langmyer because of what was in the paper. He used to work in Buffalo in the 80s and Pergament says he is from here. He was GM at KMOX in St. Louis and WGN in Chicago and also had corporate boss jobs and did programming for a lot of big stations. He is a news and talk expert from his bio and was the VP of news and talk at CBS. He did a lot of formats. He is big wig in radio. It just seems strange that he would be involved in a small station that calls itself "big". I guess good radio is good radio. Whatever.
I like the oldies. It is a big difference from the schizophrenic WECK when they played 1950s and 1980s back to back I stopped listening. The music seemed to have gotten better in the last two months.
I don't know if I like the echo chamber but it seems to grow on me. It guess it's different.
Bobby O is a good DJ. He is full-time as a production manager from the news but I don't hear him on much because I listen in the car. The other DJs are kind of dull and boring.
I hope they don't change the station again. The station voice is pretty entertaining. They joke around. I came back as a listener. Don't change it again.
I thought WECK’s logo was a vinyl record and 104’s had the jukebox. I do remember the “Oldies 104” logo. It was the same generic jukebox logo the company used on all of its oldies stations. The only thing that was the same with these two logos is that they both had so many graphics and words in them that the station name was hard to read on both of them.
The station changed every day. Every day they sounded different. Hey they will probably change it again tomorrow.
WECK played Journey and Genesis on an oldies radio station. Ha ha! It wasn’t at all like the good branding Rusty talks about here. WECK was confusing and they probably had to stop all the confusion and begin again as BIG WECK. WECK has had so many program formats that I don’t think all people really do know that it as an oldies station. They played everything from hip-hop to Frank Sinatra too top 40 and a bunch of different soft music types all under WECK and it was Breeze which was bad. That wasn’t an oldies program format either.
When I was little my grampa listened to WECK when they called it Music of Your Life. That wasn’t oldies. It was too old to be oldies. Ha ha!
None of all the different selling lines WECK used could be believed in. That is because the owner changed the sound every day. They can get better ratings I do think though. Rusty says they can’t get better, but maybe younger people under the age of 75 would listen because the station sounds exciting now and doesn’t sound really tired anymore and just for really old people, but the DJs.
Most of their DJs are really old sounding and boring. 🥱 They aren’t really what they call radio personalities.
I wonder if “Good Times and Great Oldies“ got people confused and they wrote down 104 in Arbitron books instead of WECK. Maybe they changed to BUFFALO’S OLDIES STATION because of that?
They didn’t change the name of the station like Rusty says. They have a new SLOGAN that is not the same as every oldie station in the country and made it a Buffalo slogan, and they added the big.
Maybe that reminds people it is WECK and it is not 104. The old branding wasn’t WECK’s to start with. Everything was just copied off 104. It was not original. It was almost like it was stolen. This new change is good in my eyes.
They had a few bad logos over the years and it is not at all like Coke. Coke changed the formula and taste and people hated the taste. They were always Coke. I like the new WECK logo because it is a professional one and belongs at a big station. Maybe they need to do that because it really is just an AM station with booster channels. Sometimes you have to send a message.
It always looked like an intern made all the oldies logos even when it was the breeze. That station had always been amateur looking all the way back to when it was WNIA. Maybe that’s just my opinion.
A lot of pretty young people like 60’s and 70’s oldies because they know the songs. The station sounds more fun and not like an old people station anymore. Maybe now they want to get the younger people under the age of 75 years old by being fun and not only talking to just old people. It’s too bad the DJs don’t know to how to do that. 🥱😴
I like the BIG WECK name because it does say WECK and it reminds me of The BIG 8 CKLW that we could pick up from Canada.
The new logo is more noticeable than the last one and it makes it look like WECK is a big and fun radio station.
Whatever the relationship is with Great Lakes Radio it must be good for the station, bacause it is definitely way better the last two months or so.
Does anyone really know if the station is paid off or do they just say it is? Can that be confirmed? They still do all those announcements as if Bank on Buffalo still owns it. I bet the bank still owns it and got somebody to go in for the bank to run it professionally. That would be my theory about Great Lakes.
The station also now has an advertising agency so they also have to pay for that. The money can’t be a good as they say it is. Everybody lies about that stuff. They run some many commercials that are probably for free. Nobody buys radio commercials to play in the middle of the night. It’s all commercials.
I wonder if Great Lakes Radio is waiting to buy radio and TV stations now because of Covid. The radio business is down the tubes. I definitely would not buy into a business that is almost dead. Nobody seems to be buying them but just shutting them down.
Like I said, I wonder if the investors brought in Great Lakes to run it right. Who knows. That happens a lot.
Now for the bad.
If I owned WECK I would get decent DJs. Almost all of them are really dull and boring. They aren’t even oldies DJs except for Tom Donohue. None of them were big DJ stars of Buffalo radio. They are just people that were on the radio for a long time reading announcements and lines about the stations. None of them are funny or are known for anything but just being a voice on radio. They just say their names a lot.
The DJs sound like they are asleep but the music and everything else is high energy fun.
Maybe it is just me but that is what is missing. They don’t need any more DJs from the boring trash heap. Or just don’t let them talk. They are easy listening type announcers. They have no real personalities except Donohue has somewhat. I don’t remember him except for he did an oldies show on 1520. That was a good show. He wasn’t a regular daily disc jockey though. Or maybe so.
I also turn away when Sandy Beach and Buddy Shula do commercials. They are all the same ones. Sandy Beach sounds like he has a frog in his throat to clear out. I always hear the name of Buddy Shula and I know he owns that radio station, but I don’t know anything more about him. Who is he? It was better when they had Danny Nevearth and other people doing commercials.
I probably couldn’t do better than what they do, but as a listener, the music and other parts of the sound really are way better than ever, but they have to dump the old people on there that don’t sound like they care to be there and have nothing to say. They run too many commercials and it is all the same ones with just two people trying to sell things with their names.
All in all I guess it’s just OK.
PS: What happened to the echo chamber? I finally started to like it and they turned it off. Ha ha!
The Oldies 104 logo was created custom for us by Buffalo graphic artist Jim Bittan. WHTT was the only Oldies station in the Pyramid chain at the time.
The bank doesn't own the station. It never did. It held/holds the note or mortgage. Like a house, this is considered collateral. Collateral can be exchanged for cash if the bank recalled or canceled the note/mortgage. I could parse the Buddy's previous posts here, but it's quite certain he mentioned that he paid off the mortgage, which is to say, he owns the land, the tower, the equipment and the value of the good will created by the format. There is no longer any debt, nor debt service. The license is essentially granted to him by the FCC as a good faith lessee, and he too owns the "grant" for the term of the license, which is renewable in 2022. So yeah, "he owns the joint."
Note to Tower590 (CKEY, perhaps) ... never was it stated or inferred that WECK "can't do better." Clearly it can, and it may be that Great Lakes' influence will give the format the definition and clarity it needs to break a 4 share. WECK will very likely be Top 3, if not #1, Persons 65+; it will be top 3 Persons 35+; top 3 Persons 55+ and very likely top 5 Persons 35-64. That's bank.
As to the Oldies 104 "jukebox" logo, it was one of the most recognizable (and colorful) logos in Buffalo radio; the Good Times, Great Oldies slogan was equally identifiable.
As to "writing down 104" in diaries rather than WECK, 1230, or any one of the translator frequencies... that's unlikely. First, as noted here numerous times by David Eduardo, listeners most often recall and write down the frequency of the station to which they listen. Second, Buddy in previous posts, noted that a substantial number of mentions credit the AM, that is 1230, for their listening. As such, listeners, even the most obtuse among them, know that 104 is no longer the Oldies station because 104 has done an admirable job re-positioning (re-branding) as Classic Hits.
As to the criticism of the DJs/air personalities. Every jock on the station has Buffalo history. Sounding like "an Oldies jock" isn't the key to being a successful air personality in an Oldies format. Sounding relatable, topical and contemporary are more important attributes. The music may be from the 50s, 60s and 70s... the jocks, topics and style should personify 2021. With proper coaching and guidance, the air personalities will refine their already well-established chops.
Note to Tower590 (CKEY, perhaps) ... never was it stated or inferred that WECK "can't do better." Clearly it can, and it may be that Great Lakes' influence will give the format the definition and clarity it needs to break a 4 share. WECK will very likely be Top 3, if not #1, Persons 65+; it will be top 3 Persons 35+; top 3 Persons 55+ and very likely top 5 Persons 35-64. That's bank.
As to the Oldies 104 "jukebox" logo, it was one of the most recognizable (and colorful) logos in Buffalo radio; the Good Times, Great Oldies slogan was equally identifiable.
As to "writing down 104" in diaries rather than WECK, 1230, or any one of the translator frequencies... that's unlikely. First, as noted here numerous times by David Eduardo, listeners most often recall and write down the frequency of the station to which they listen. Second, Buddy in previous posts, noted that a substantial number of mentions credit the AM, that is 1230, for their listening. As such, listeners, even the most obtuse among them, know that 104 is no longer the Oldies station because 104 has done an admirable job re-positioning (re-branding) as Classic Hits.
As to the criticism of the DJs/air personalities. Every jock on the station has Buffalo history. Sounding like "an Oldies jock" isn't the key to being a successful air personality in an Oldies format. Sounding relatable, topical and contemporary are more important attributes. The music may be from the 50s, 60s and 70s... the jocks, topics and style should personify 2021. With proper coaching and guidance, the air personalities will refine their already well-established chops.
Fybush.com latest weekly update says "is part of a new partnership between Shula and Tom Langmyer’s Great Lakes Media Corp., which is adding consultancy services to its originally-announced plans to acquire station" so it sounds like Langmyer is buying the place. Is that true? Hadn't seen the previous announcement but I don't necessarily see everything that comes out anyway.
...or maybe building their corporate bona fides and resume. Stations hire programming and sales consultants all the time.
True but Fybush says Great Lakes previously announced plans to acquire the station. That sounds pretty ironclad but maybe that is wrong or I'm reading it wrong.
Is that what it sounds like? Because from this perspective it appears that Great Lakes is acting as a program consultant. Nothing more. And yes... I could be wayyy off the mark.
Buddy knows sales. He's proved that. And he's admitted here that he doesn't know programming. So he's relying on the expertise of Great Lakes to improve the on-air product.
But if Great Lakes were to purchase WECK, they'd be getting a good facility that has shown potential competing against more powerful signals. And if the format modifications lead to more listeners (cume), higher AQH Persons and subsequently, revenue, it's a win-win for both the consultant and the present owner.
The consultants will have proven their programming recommendations worked in a competitive environment, which in turn can be used to solicit new program consulting business for Great Lakes. The client, WECK, can increase rate and units... and if the station is to be sold, the asking price goes up because the billing and cash flow went up.
That stated, this doesn't appear to be a pre-purchase maneuver by Great Lakes. They're providing program consultation, and building a resume. One might even speculate that the goal of Great Lakes' primary principal is to keep his chops fresh and active, and more importantly, prove to investors that his programming expertise is real, marketable and of value.
"We took a kilwatt AM and three metro signals from a three share to a six share. Improved billing. Now let us do the same for your station."
You're reading it wrong.
No they didnt.. youre reading way too much into this.
Hold on, there Buckeroo. Was the quote "is part of a new partnership between Shula and Tom Langmyer’s Great Lakes Media Corp., which is adding consultancy services to its originally-announced plans to acquire station", or "is part of a new partnership between Shula and Tom Langmyer’s Great Lakes Media Corp., which is adding consultancy services to its originally-announced plans to acquire stations"?
Great Lakes Media Corp. has been interested in acquiring stations. Now they're expanding into the business of consulting stations. Interpreting the statement on Fybush.com as saying that Great Lakes Media was in talks to acquire WECK is a huge leap - and likely incorrect. Buddy has never expressed interest in selling, and Tom Langmyer has generally been looking at stations in small markets, not small stations in larger market. The missing "the" as in "acquire the station" speaks volumes.
There's an awful lot of speculation going on here from people who have no idea what's true and what's not true and are making stuff up.
Great Lakes Media Corp. has been interested in acquiring stations. Now they're expanding into the business of consulting stations. Interpreting the statement on Fybush.com as saying that Great Lakes Media was in talks to acquire WECK is a huge leap - and likely incorrect. Buddy has never expressed interest in selling, and Tom Langmyer has generally been looking at stations in small markets, not small stations in larger market. The missing "the" as in "acquire the station" speaks volumes.
There's an awful lot of speculation going on here from people who have no idea what's true and what's not true and are making stuff up.
And then we have the matter with WEDG and CFNY; back in 1995, 103.3 flipped from AOR "The Fox" to alternative "The Edge". Now back then, CFNY was using the positioner 102.1 the Edge...and since WEDG's signal still has a lot of overlap with CFNY's, there was a bit of a cross-border legal tussle over the matter. CFNY put an ad together which made fun of the matter(and which aired on WUTV). It ended with CFNY's logo with a big CENSORED sign over the word Edge and the voiceover at the end saying "102.1 the (BLEEP)." Even thinking of it today STILL makes me laugh.
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