I believe KMEL played "Suga Suga", which is Baby Bash's biggest single to date. Beyond that, nothing else from him.
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Can Wild 94-9 Be Saved?
- Thread starter HenryOchs
- Start date
Here in L.A., Power 106, KIIS FM, Latino 96.3, and 99.1 KGGI stayed playing NB Ridaz in the mid-2000s. Remember Lil Rob, Paula DeAnda, Brown Boy, and Mr. Capone-E?
"Suga Suga" peaked at no. 10 on the Hot Rap Songs chart, so that probably had to be why KMEL couldn't avoid playing it then. But Baby Bash never cracked the top 50 on the R&B/Hip Hop combined chart that KMEL is formatted around.
I did find KMEL's playlist from the week of May 21, 2005, the same week that Bash's "Baby I'm Back" collab with Akon was no. 9 on the Rap Songs chart (and one of my last weeks of middle school). "Baby I'm Back" was nowhere to be found - confirming what I remember from listening to 94.9 and 106.1 at the time.
KMEL in 2004/05 was proactively rotating Bay Area music that couldn't really be found nationally (such as Keak or Mac Dre). R&B, of course, is part of KMEL's station identity. Baby Bash fits both categories (Bay Area native, R&B influence) - so why would KMEL exclude him?
Or...KMEL wanting to target a black audience and thus emphasizing black artists? Point: When Eminem's Encore came out, I could hear "Just Lose It" on 94.9 (and online on top-40 CHR stations I found browsing Windows Media Player) - but not KMEL (confirmed by their 12/17/04 playlist). Counterpoint: I distinctly remember from 2001-05 another Latino rapper from NEW YORK named Fat Joe was a mainstay on KMEL.
Perhaps it's because a lot of Baby Bash singles are too soft for hip hop but not soulful enough for R&B, thus not fitting in with the rest of KMEL's playlist that usually was either gritty/street (50 Cent, E-40) or mellow (Anthony Hamilton, Alicia Keys).
This is really good stuff. Definitely gonna bookmark.
Well, they are both owned by the same company so they couldn't share all the same music. Back then they both were pretty much the same, only KMEL played some R&B. It is different from now when both stations sound different.
True because Power 106 played “Runaway”(2001), “So Fly”(2004), “Pretty Girl”(2004) and “Notice Me”(2005) in moderate to heavy rotation from from what I can remember.
Street Novelist
Banned
Did they play any Jay Tee aka Jaime Trago?
99.7 is better and I have been listening to them for years. Every once in a while, I turn on 94.9 to see if it has changed. Unfortunately no. The 94.9 DJs are bad and the station has lots of commercials.
I agree they’re too vanilla for my taste but I’ve seen their playlists from the 90’s and early 2000’s and a mixture hip hop/R&B, freestyle music and house and had the tag line The Bay Area’s Party Station. I started streaming the station in the 2010’s and they were already going too far into the pop realm by then.
what is with the
" can be saved " being posted in 2024,
for nearly everyonece great station
" can be saved " being posted in 2024,
for nearly everyonece great station
Seems fairly straightforward. The posters are asking if there's a future for those stations, in those formats, with those call letters, or if it's time for them to morph into something else.
It's a crossroads pretty much every station, great or otherwise, comes to at some point.
No I meant _ that's the trend,
can this station be saved, as in nothing else seems to be the only thing worthwhile discussing in 2024.
have we run out of topics ??
Maybe.
We're mostly past the eras of long-tenured big personalities everyone knows making news, of stations doing unique promotions or of big local or regional differences in music and approach.
This has been coming a long time. About 30 years ago, Charlie Van Dyke (KLIF, CKLW, KFRC, KGB, KHJ, WLS, WRKO, KRTH and others) and I were both in Phoenix. I was writing for David Ferrell Jackson ( @BossRadioDJ )'s Radio-Info-dot-com and Charlie was the radio columnist for the Arizona Republic.
And we were discussing then, as stations were consolidating under one roof, highly-paid high-profile talent was being shown the door and once-competing stations were shaped into stations that complemented each other demographically for sales, that there was becoming less and less worth writing about.
I cringe every time I see one of those subject lines. I find myself wanting to say "only if they accept Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior" but I would never be that sarcastic. But, seriously, what I really feel like saying is: screw the ratings, I want to see the revenues. I understand that there would be some focus on the ratings numbers that are available, while individual station revenue numbers are not usually disclosed. But, in essence, reading these threads is like trying to sit on a one-legged stool. First, because either there's an assumption that there's a direct, linear relationship between ratings and revenues or there's absolutely no insight into the business considerations at all and, second, because there's no consideration of a station as a component of a portfolio of stations. This is the one thing that has become new about radio in the last 30-ish years. (It certainly hasn't been programming.) Stations no longer stand or fall on their own, except in rare circumstances. KYLD is part of a portfolio that includes a bunch of other stations that, in many cases, are sold as a package. Thus considerations of a station's viability are no longer as transparent as they were in the days when there was an AM and an FM and that was it.
Even before that, the more offbeat stations were the ones likely to get attention and, particularly, news coverage. Two examples from my own time in radio:
In a community somewhat oversaturated with media, the local open-access radio station (KOPN) got the most media coverage usually because of some specialty show or another...though there was the day in 1981 when what we would now call a derecho mangled its antenna and led to all sorts of other issues. That really was news.
Then there was KTRH in Houston, where management stirred up a lot of drama toward the end of my time there, continuing afterwards, giving a Houston Post columnist fodder for numerous columns in the aftermath of yet another resignation or dismissal. (Fortunately, my name never ever got into those columns, which I consider to be a minor miracle.) Also around that time, the Houston Chronicle suddenly rediscovered radio when classical KLEF changed format to automated oldies, which really infuriated the River Oaks crowd.
Station management probably was becoming less open as well - and now, it's all very corporate and every public utterance is probably reviewed and double-reviewed before release. That's something that struck me when I was going through the Kansas City newspapers yesterday tracing the origins of KBIL for the chicken-rock thread. In the feature article on that station's start, the station manager was very open about what it was doing and the objectives it intended to accomplish, and even mentioned it was already breaking even financially. I also came across articles on another station that started in Kansas City around that time, KAYQ (later KJLA, now KDMR), where the station manager was just as forthcoming about the type of programming the station had selected, why those options were chosen, and the station's economic prospects. Then there was the interview with Mark Wodlinger, who had just bought KBEY and had replaced its "underground" programming with the "Super Q" format, though the present-day KBEQ call letters were still to come. He went into great detail about the format, what it consisted of, and the success it had had in various markets, including St. Louis. This didn't reflect any naïveté on Wodlinger's part; he had been the general manager of KMBC radio and TV before coming to KBEY, and he very clearly knew what he was doing.
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When I started building my first same-market cluster in 1966, I quickly learned that the combination of two highly rated stations sold more than just "double" that of my first station.
Station #1 in 1964 was Top 40. The second station was the equivalent of Country. Then the third was Beautiful music, followed by a fourth that was "ethnic", a fifth that was a classical FM and then a news/talk/drama station. At one point, with agencies able to cover the market with just one buy, there were accounts that only bought on my group.
It did not matter if the ratings for one or another went up or down a bit, as the combo was so solid that at least three or four stations were on every buy. And the agencies got one rate for every possible combo, and one invoice.
I saw this same phenomenon in my internship in Mexico as well as in other countries like Colombia, Costa Rica, Honduras and El Salvador as well.
Not that I know of.
What would the point of that be? To get Wild 800 kHz closer to KMVQ?
So more people in San Jose can get 80's plus. You gotta remember the time 94.5 Bay FM was #1 in San Jose with the same format.
If you're referring to the time when KBAY was simulcast in San Francisco, that simulcast was on 93.3, not 94.9.
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