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Could Nash FM be coming to Nashville?

jetfli Yeah said:
Then here's the lesson for the day: The call letters are only heritage on the AM side of the band. On the FM side of the band, they mean far more as a unique soft rock station than as what the station is today.

I could not agree more, Well said Jet
 
Bob - the WKDF calls are still shining brightly on the Stahlman. The building is condos now. The city is getting bigger and brighter every day. You might not even recognize much of it. As for the station itself....well, you know the rest of that story....

Here's a good querstion for everyone....

If you had the chance to pull the plug on one Crums country station and put ONLY back on one of the old formats, would you pick KDF as rock or SM95 as AC?
 
Bob E. Nelson said:
I haven't been to Nashville in a while so this is a stupid question for those of you who live there. Are the WKDF call letters still displayed atop the Stahlman (or whatever it is now) Building? When I worked there, the sign was, of course, WKDA with an alternating flash of AM-FM. You could make out the old WKDA sign on the backside of Bob Dylan's Nashville Skyline album, when the skyline was far more modest than what it was today.

If you watch Nashville on ABC, you will see them on national TV when they do one of panoramic fly-over shots of downtown. And I, too, remember the calls being WKDA-FM. I also remember the L&C letters changing color to denote the temperature being above or below freezing.
 
Tibbs2 said:
If you had the chance to pull the plug on one Crums country station and put ONLY back on one of the old formats, would you pick KDF as rock or SM95 as AC?

Thanks to you and others here for the heads up on the WKDF calls still shining on Second Avenue at Union.

Although I had a number of good acquaintances who worked on the other side of the glass over on 103.3, I'd give the edge to SM95. In the late 70's and early 80's, I had access to the Arbitron books and 95.5 was monster in some very desirable demos. Only with anecdotal evidence to back it up, it seemed SM95 was on everywhere back then, especially in stores and restaurants in the Green Hills area. If nothing else, given the strength of WJXA, a rebirth of SM95 might be able to take some of their massive share in the cells that count.

I'm not sure if they were still at the top of their game when "Thank God I'm a Country Boy" displaced the format but it came as a real surprise. Of course, I was somewhat astonished when the AM flipped to fulltime country a few years before that after a really good run as a hot AC, with Pat Sajak, Ted Johnson, Pat Laux and John Young playing the hits.
 
Bob E. Nelson, I think you accurately described the final four years of SM95. They were strong in the "yuppie" demo, but overall numbers started sliding and hence the format flip. Toward the end I noticed more CHR tunes and fewer AC album cuts. Nick Archer did a good job of keeping SM95 alive via Pandora.

I listened to the station's change to country on none other than my Sony FM Walkman won via an SM95 contest. At the time a Walkman was valued at about $100. How technology has changed.

Post-flip "Kris with Jazz" was briefly picked up by next door 96 KOS, yet Bradley remained for a while as nighttime personality at Nashville 95.
 
Tibbs2 said:
If you had the chance to pull the plug on one Crums country station and put ONLY back on one of the old formats, would you pick KDF as rock or SM95 as AC?
SM95 hands down! They were (apparently) a very cool station, while boring wimpy KDF did nothing but coast on its past glory for the last 20 years or so that it was a so-called "rock" station. If you want to bring back a real rock station, bring back Rock 106. Apparently, it was better than anything KDF ever claimed to be.

I drop in the "apparentlys" because I didn't live here back in those days. So I never got to hear Rock 106 or SM95. But I heard the joke that called itself "KDF" in the '90s and wondered what all the fuss was about. (I got to hear the Live365 re-creation of SM95, and it was cool.)
 
I remember SM 95 playing some cool tunes by Roxy Music, The Korgies, Al Stewart, John Stewart (i swear they played "Lost Her in The Sun" every afternoon while we played pool and pinball at the Golden Rail on Franklin Road in Melrose.) Some of it, IIRC, the music was not always the happening hit, but something cool off the album. They explained the music, too. It was a fairly mellow station, but even for a teenager like me at the time, it was good enough to get caught chilling too.

ROCK 106 was a rockin force. It stung it's way into the market and didn't relent until it died overnight. I seriously don't think it ever played a mellow song and it was huge right off the bat. Guess the demo was wrong and/or Sudbrink or someone bought it and the era of Joy 10sux was ushered in. I didn't realize Rupert would end up being the hardest rock song in that format, or I'd ever come to appreciate Pina Coladas at the level I do now. (some of my facts may be way off, music, ownership, etc., all a result of clean living vs. old age....) Help me here CR. I've obviously fallen....
 
Tibbs2 said:
If you had the chance to pull the plug on one Crums country station and put ONLY back on one of the old formats, would you pick KDF as rock or SM95 as AC?

Do you think the Dark Cloud Dickey even knows how close "Nash 95.5" comes to the old "Nashville 95"? Would he care?

The question remains: Is Nash FM coming to Nashville? The answer is clearly "yes". After all, one size fits all, right?
 
I remember getting an AM/FM/8 track payer for Christmas. Installed the stereo, hooked up the speakers, turned to Rock 106, cranked it up (per earlier orders of General Buzz Cranklin') and blasted the raw power of...Perry Como. What the h--l? Joy? That had to be the most opposite format change in Nashville radio.
 
courier37027 said:
I remember getting an AM/FM/8 track payer for Christmas. Installed the stereo, hooked up the speakers, turned to Rock 106, cranked it up (per earlier orders of General Buzz Cranklin') and blasted the raw power of...Perry Como. What the h--l? Joy? That had to be the most opposite format change in Nashville radio.

That same thing happened to a friend of mine. I was still bouncing between 105 and KDF. I had been a listener of KDF's since they were WKDA-FM in 1970. They played the "singles" from the albums as well as some other cuts from the current hit albums, as well as older album cuts. They were "deep cuts" before we knew what that was. But I think it was around the mid 70s 103 seemed to play nothing but Eagles and Fogelberg tracks. I never could accept 95 playing anything that wasn't country back then.

I wonder what Blake Shelton thinks of Nash-FM?
 
I don't follow that Cumulus licenses the use of "WSM-FM" from Gaylord. The Commission has long permitted different owners to keep the same call letters across different services (AM, FM, TV). See stations like WMC in Memphis where the AM & FM are Entercom and the TV is Raycom. What sort of sales agreement with Gaylord would consist of paying to use call letters that Gaylord doesn't own? The FCC "owns" the call letters; they are just associated with a given license in a city.
I don't care about the country format, although I like to have a well-formatted country station in America's Music City, I have never found country to my liking and wouldn't likely listen to any country station, regardless of format differences (Nash vs. whatever country du jour).
 
Whatever the FCC might have to say, I'm betting if Cromwell changed 102.5's call letters to WLAC-FM without Clear Channel's permission, somebody would end up in court...
 
Whatever the FCC might have to say, I'm betting if Cromwell changed 102.5's call letters to WLAC-FM without Clear Channel's permission, somebody would end up in court...

I'm not sure anyone has those calls anymore. Not sure why CC would need to provide permission. They use WLAC calls on the AM band, not the FM. WLAC-FM no longer exists in town. Now, it's WNRQ. I could be wrong. Maybe an engineer can clarify.
 
No, there's no WLAC-FM. I am an engineer -- they would not be duplicate calls.

From FCC regulation 73.3550(m): ( http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CFR-2009-title47-vol4/xml/CFR-2009-title47-vol4-sec73-3550.xml)
(m) Where a requested call sign, without the “-FM,' “-TV,” “-CA” or “LP” suffix, would conform to the call sign of any other non-commonly owned station(s) operating in a different service, an applicant utilizing the on-line reservation and authorization system will be required to certify that consent to use the secondary call sign has been obtained from the holder of the primary call sign.

In other words, the FCC will not assign WLAC-FM to any station not co-owned with WLAC 1510, unless that station has the consent of WLAC's owners. MM Docket 98-98 says if a request for the WLAC-FM calls were to be filed by anyone other than Clear Channel, a postcard would be mailed to Clear Channel notifying them of that request & giving them a chance to object.

If 73.3550 didn't exist... I highly doubt Clear Channel would allow any other Nashville station to use the WLAC-FM call letters without some kind of intellectual property suit being filed.

Can't provide any citations but I've heard of such suits being filed elsewhere when *similar* call letters are assigned to different owners in the same market. Obviously you can't prevent a station from using its FCC-assigned calls but what I seem to recall is the offending station being ordered to file a request that the FCC change its calls to something non-offending, and in the interim being ordered to only use its calls once an hour when required by the regulations.
 
Thanks for the info. Based on that, you're probably correct about Cromwell ending up in court if they tried changing their calls to WLAC-FM without permission. Don't see that happening.
 
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