Oh yes, that was the ill-fated decision that CBS did with WODS, close to almost a decade ago now.
CBS had to do something. WROR had come up with the "classic rock lite" approach to oldies/classic hits that retained younger listeners in Boston. If WODS had continued to play Four Seasons and Supremes and Herman's Hermits, it audience would have become unpalatable to most advertisers regardless of raw audience numbers.
Funny thing is, over the past couple of years WROR has gone in the direction of a typical classic hits station like WCBS or WOGL with more non rock titles and has seen their best ratings ever.
But they could've simply just cut all the 1960's music out entirely instead.
there was a time when WODS performed modestly as Amp Radio. I recall the 6+ rating pushing a high 3 share and hearing the station did well with young women. It really only tanked in the final 2 years. the brand, music, and personalities got stale
But still not nearly as well when they were with the previous Oldies format though, yes?
Perhaps the weak numbers in the money demos prompted CBS to flip WODS to Amp.
The station had weak numbers?
It may have performed well on 6+ PPM numbers, but I'm guessing below par ratings within the 25-54, 18-34 demos was one of the reasons they flipped. That, or CBS wanted to see one of their stations be at the top instead of Kiss 108. Or possibly a bit of both.
So, then, had WODS gone in the same direction as WCBS-FM or WOGL, we might still have it around. I suppose even if (then) Entercom wanted to revert WODS to a playlist similar to WCBS-FM or WOGL, it might've been too late, since WROR beat them to it, in effect. ☹️
correct -- but from CBS' perspective, they may have viewed Oldies as a dead format 5-10 years down the line, and 65+ is a tough demo to sell to. Strategically, the move made sense: Kiss was dominating the entire female audience. Introducing WODS as Amp Radio would hyper target young women, and Mix104.1 with W35+. In that situation, Kiss would've needed to pick a lane to fight in: W18-35 or W35+, and either way, CBS has a female-oriented station with no competitor to pitch to advertisers.
They did! They were playing more 80s at the time just like OGL and CBS.
I had read that CBS's original approach with the entire AMP format, was to play at least 3 more new wow type songs to gather attention away from competitors! I guess in the long run, they simply did not have a retention strategy at all.
And the station seemed to hurt WJMN more than anybody else.
yeah -- bold concept that just failed to deliver. it sounded great for the first couple years, then got boring real fast. pop cycle trended toward downer songs in the late 2010s and that was a killer
Yes, the general consensus is that CHR, etc. is not been all that appealing during the past few years or so.
There's a difference between playing Cyndi Lauper and playing the Supremes.
Country and urban formats peeled off a lot of CHR listeners when the current product lost its mojo.
I think it was proven to be a format that fit well on one station. Personally, I can only hope to see a day when the same happens to Country. The "Jack-esque" station was a hole left when Mike was flipped to make room for WEEI on FM. Not counting to short lived format on 101.7 when iHeart assumed ownership from Phoenix Media.
