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Christmas Music/Format Change Watch 2022

MegaBlue

MegaBlue

Greetings!

I know that the radio scene here in town has gotten stale - nothing's drastically changed formats lately, and the biggest 'event' in recent years was the (failed?) launch of jenY 107.3 and its subsequent rebranding into "Alternative Cleveland"... oh, and Majic 105.7 got a new logo - but does anyone suspect that things might be changing in the coming year?

Also, we know that 102.1 will flip to Christmas music in mid-November around when the Christmas Connection comes to town, but when do you think others will follow suit and make the switch this year? (Yes, I realize "it's only September 30," but it's never too early to start speculating!)
 
I seem to recall WMJI was rather early last year with the Christmas Music. Early November maybe??? It kind of makes one wonder if "Martha Quinn" get's pre-empted or her show just goes as scheduled.

"Be careful what we wish for?" In 2010, then WMVX 106.5 did the "Christmas Thing" and came back afterwards, "Disc Jockey Less", before subsequently throwing us into "The Lake".

I honestly can't foresee any changes. However, Cleveland radio has become so bad...I don't pay enough attention to see who might be priming themselves to do a change. Our biggest hope would be if a local owner came around, but that is highly unlikely. Also, which station would even be for sale? The "corporate grab", destroyed everything good about having stations branded to your cityscape.
 
I don't really see any changes coming either. I think The Fish, Star and Majic will be the all or mostly Christmas stations this year and then back to normal afterwards.
 
Lowes already has their Christmas crap up [at least in the store in my area] and it hadn't even turned to October yet! I suppose they'll have 4th of July junk going on sale around Valentine's Day.
 
For oldies, WIXY 1260 Online is great and has more variety than Magic ever had:

wixy1260online.com

WIXY1260Online | Listen

The WIXY1260Online Listen Page has options and instructions for listening anywhere. WIXY1260Online is the rebirth of Cleveland's WIXY 1260! Streaming online 24/7/365, playing the best variety of the WIXY era hits from the 60's and 70's (and some others).
wixy1260online.com wixy1260online.com

There's even an app for those with smartphones and with newer cars having bluetooth connections, it's pretty easy to listen that way or get a cheap FM bluetooth adapter for older cars.
 
In addition to WIXY1260online.com, another oldies music-streaming service that is "local" to the area is www.Big8radio.com, which is pretty much a re-creation of the old 800/CKLW station that boomed across the lake from Windsor, ON.

While WIXY has some live jocks throughout the week, Big8radio is mostly jockless, but has voicetracking for their special features. However, they regularly include old airchecks into their daily programming, plus random vintage weather reports ("Cleveland has 65, Toledo 64, and Detroit 68 -- that's 20 Celcius at CKLW"), old commercial breaks and clips from the old 20/20 News.

I listen to both. Just like pizza, I choose one over the other based on what I have a taste for that day.
 
thenetwork said:
In addition to WIXY1260online.com, another oldies music-streaming service that is "local" to the area is www.Big8radio.com, which is pretty much a re-creation of the old 800/CKLW station that boomed across the lake from Windsor, ON.

While WIXY has some live jocks throughout the week, Big8radio is mostly jockless, but has voicetracking for their special features. However, they regularly include old airchecks into their daily programming, plus random vintage weather reports ("Cleveland has 65, Toledo 64, and Detroit 68 -- that's 20 Celcius at CKLW"), old commercial breaks and clips from the old 20/20 News.

I listen to both. Just like pizza, I choose one over the other based on what I have a taste for that day.
Click to expand...
CKWW 580 AM which is an iHeart station does something similar but does have commercials:

www.iheartradio.ca

AM580 | iHeart

Made in Windsor
www.iheartradio.ca www.iheartradio.ca
 
johnbasalla said:
Some years ago, I was able to pick up CKWW pretty well on my car radio while driving around Northeast Ohio. All of a sudden, it disappeared. They had (have?) an exciting selection of music.
Click to expand...
They have a different mix than WIXY 1260 Online or the Big 8 but I switch around like theNetwork mentioned. You can listen using a computer or smartphone but they're not on the US iHeart app only the Canadian one.
 
Some years ago, I was able to pick up CKWW pretty well on my car radio while driving around Northeast Ohio. All of a sudden, it disappeared. They had (have?) an exciting selection of music.

Apparently, from what I heard is that the CRTC [Canada's version of the FCC] was upset that they appeared to be targeting Detroit (Heck, their station tag line is "Detroitsoldie station") more than Canadian population, they knew their signal was a little "wonky" and ordered them to "fix" it so they were serving more of the Canadian population that they're supposed to be serving. I used to be able to pick them up at night in the Akron area sometime and pretty much all the time if I was north of 271. Now if you look at their contour map, NE Ohio is well past the "distant" fringes of their signal, both day and nighttime patterns. Plus, they only put out 500 watts. Not sure, but I thought they had more wattage than that at one point. Good, old CKLW still at 50,000 watts but who wants to listen to Canadian news?
 
MediaLover said:
I don't really see any changes coming either. I think The Fish, Star and Majic will be the all or mostly Christmas stations this year and then back to normal afterwards.
Click to expand...
Was it last year, and maybe even two years ago, as well, when 95.5 FM "The Fish", ditched their "all Christmas - all the time" during the Christmas season due to what they were hearing from their audience. So, they peppered Christmas music in with their normal music fair. They even mentioned, on-the-air, why they weren't playing non-stop Christmas tunes.
 
johnbasalla said:
Was it last year, and maybe even two years ago, as well, when 95.5 FM "The Fish", ditched their "all Christmas - all the time" during the Christmas season due to what they were hearing from their audience. So, they peppered Christmas music in with their normal music fair. They even mentioned, on-the-air, why they weren't playing non-stop Christmas tunes.
Click to expand...
That is what all stations should do. Going to all-Christmas music in mid-November is ridiculous.
 
The one station in Youngstown, Z104 (103.9) goes all-Christmas early every year. I just hope they don't do it early before Halloween.
 
vw86 said:
Until you see how much they bill. Flipping in early November gives them two months worth of soaring ratings. Why would you not take advantage of a money maker?
Click to expand...
Do rating mean anything any more? Stations with low ratings don't seem to be worried.
 
skiwest said:
Do rating mean anything any more? Stations with low ratings don't seem to be worried.
Click to expand...

Not around here, it seems. I've read articles about format changes in other parts of the country, and there are stations that draw in three times the audience of some stations in town that the corporate bigwigs there flip to new formats. Maybe Cleveland's not a big enough market - despite having the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and all of the music history that we have here in town - for iHeart and Audacy to be tinkering around with their stations too much. The money's still coming in, so why mess with what works?

vw86 said:
What would a local owner be able to do, and do successfully, that iHeart and Audacy aren't currently doing?
Click to expand...

Rubber City's doing well with their Akron-based cluster - I'm not sure how 107.3 is ranking across town from the rest of the company, though - and BAS is doing nicely with their Sandusky-based cluster (Mix 102.7 is still a go-to when I listen to regular radio), so it's not just the Big Two that can be successful with radio stations. I doubt either of them are going to offload a major money printer to a local owner unless one of them completely goes under and nobody wants what either of them has. Even then, I'm sure the local iHeart team will probably found their own company and purchase the licenses basically from themselves to keep the stations going.

As far as flipping to Christmas goes, it's definitely an easy way to get listeners on your station without doing much. I say this every year, but I wish the stations would change up their offerings and update the song libraries once in a while, but I know that - especially nowadays with everyone having "curated playlist streams" through their apps - it's basically the big wigs saying "we're going to pipe our (insert Christmas playlist name here) list into your station for the rest of the year, deal with it." That's probably why the iHeart stations have adopted "Toxic" by Britney Spears into their Halloween rotation. (Seriously, check out iHeart's Halloween Radio and tell me that some of the songs on there aren't stretching the definition of 'Halloween.')
 
MegaBlue said:
Rubber City's doing well with their Akron-based cluster - I'm not sure how 107.3 is ranking across town from the rest of the company, though.
Click to expand...

WONE 6.9. WQMX 6.7 as of August. Of course that's just the 12+ numbers which only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades.
I don't think they subscribe to the ratings for WNWV in the Cleveland market. My problem is they treat WAKR as the red-headed stepchild of the bunch. They went and got an FM frequency and changed the format back to music so you'd think they'd pay more attention to it. Who's minding the automation? CBS news, top of the hour or a couple of minutes after. Listening one day and it pops up 10 minutes till. Song playing, right in the middle it switches off to another song which began right in the middle. It's like the computer said "If I have to listen to this any longer, I'm gonna throw up a gigabyte. I'm outta this tune!" Mybe they're using a Commodore 64. Commercials or PSAs playing for stuff that ended a day or two before. Voice tracking, saying "XXXX DJ will get you through the day/night" even though they have retired/left/been let go. Seeing as how it's all a computer file doesn't seem that har to mark it as "end this date". Dead air, although it usually doesn't last too long. And now they're back to the old trick of playing an instrumental towards the top of the hour so if CBS news comes on, it just cuts off the instrumental. Seems if you're using a computer, it'd be easy to backtime. I guess they just don't care, I think they see the ratings and think "Why bother?" 1.0 with the highest being a 1.5 in May.
 
MegaBlue said:
BAS is doing nicely with their Sandusky-based cluster (Mix 102.7 is still a go-to when I listen to regular radio),
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Ok. But if you look at those stations, what are they doing that iHeart isn't? They seem to have live, local morning shows and then tracked/syndicated jocks in the remaining dayparts.
 
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