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Rock 99 Birmingham now Top 40 99.5 The Vibe

jal41

jal41

WZRR 99.5 is now a Top 40 station as "99.5 The Vibe". The changeover apparently occured at the stroke of midnight on New Year's Eve with no stunting. First song approprately enough from reports was LMFAO's "Party Rock Anthem".

Expect it to sound exactly like Q100 Atlanta...the flagship of the Cumulus empire.
 
Couple of obvservations about The Vibe 13 hours in...

Presentation-wise, I like the fact that this station has an actual voice-over talent and jingle package. Song segues are more polished than The Q, which uses Ace & TJ, a Clear Channel CHR-generic female voice and a ton of remixed listener drops in their sweepers. I always thought The Q's presentation went down a little bit when they stopped using Dave Kampel's voice. Vibe's top-of-the-hour jingle is nice and builds momentum similar to Q100.

It appears that they're getting either their music database or their programming from i106 in Nashville. Earlier, the chorus of Lady Gaga's "You and I" said "my cool Nashville guy." Taking a look at WNFN on Mediabase, their playlist very closely mirrors what's being played on The Vibe right now. i106 is fairly rhythmic/dance-focused with a remarkably different sound than WZYP or Y102 (not much early 2000s gold/Rob Thomas/Maroon 5/etc.) The Vibe's logo is essentially the same as i106, so I think we should expect more of a Nashville Cumulus sound to this than what they're getting on Q100 or the other Cumulus CHRs in Alabama.

It also appears that i106 regularly goes commercial-free for the entire 5 p.m. hour, playing as many as 20 songs in a row between spot breaks, which could be very interesting at p.m. drive time in Birmingham (considering that The Q is running Ryan ZZZcrest breaks between every song weekday afternoons).

The processing sounds as if it's still set up for Rock 99 with less vocal presence overall than The Q. I wonder if The Vibe will try to start a loudness war with The Q in the coming weeks. It got pretty ugly for a while in Atlanta when Q100 and Star 94 were going head-to-head.

The big question is, who will be their morning show and daytime talent? Billy Bush at night is assumed. I saw a funny tweet last night from former Q evening jock Brandon Merhout, better known as Nick Nice: "Rumor Control: Nick Nice doesn't currently have plans to return to Birmingham radio on the new 99.5 The Vibe in order to destroy 1037 The Q."
 
can't say i miss rock 99. i loved the station from about 92? through my college years - about 97 or so. that's all i played. loved flashback at night. now i'm more of an "AAA" type guy, but the music playlist isn't as vast as i'd like it to be.

just moved my home stereo over to mix 102.9 - it's a good mix.
 
I'm curious about two things: how a company like Cumulus picks which other market to emulate (Nashville vs. Atlanta, for example) and what ol' Nick Nice is up to nowadays.

I also hope that Cumulus ditched whatever legacy equipment that caused Rock 99's music to sound so over-compressed (digitally, not aurally). Everything sounded like it was recorded in low bitrate Musicam or some other old lossy format before mp3s or lossless and cheap hard drives became the norm in radio.
 
This will mean bigger and better ratings for the Eagle, even if they move to 97.3.
 
maybe this means 106.9 could tweak and go more classic rock now.

I loved Rock 99 from when i first heard it up here on the TN line back around 94, up until about the "Buzzard" era.
 
Interesting. Probably a smart move on Cumulus' part, albeit not altogether surprising giving their recent history.

Taking down a heritage CHR - even a heavily voicetracked one like The Q - is rarely an easy task, especially when the challenger will probably only feature one or two local talents itself (I'm guessing Nick Nice). WQEN has become a little generic in the last few years, but it's still a good CHR and one could argue that The Vibe sounds somewhat generic too. I do like Vibe's voiceover guy. The music's safe-ish but not laughably conservative like WZYP or Q100 circa 2009.

With a 100,000 watt signal, WZRR might have a better shot of dethroning or at least competing with the incumbent CHR than Cumulus' relatively recent launches in Nashville, Dallas or Indy. But programming too close to the belt won't do them any favors.
 
So now ALL radio markets surrounding us have two top-40s....Chattanooga to the East, Nashville to the North, Birmingham to the South, even tiny (by comparison) Florence to the West.

Which begs the question.......WHY NOT HUNTSVILLE??? :-[
 
It is sad to see (or hear :D) a heritage rocker in Birmingham leave after 20+ years of broadcasting-at least 99.5 isn't another one of those "Journey" stations... yuck. It was depressing to go from Motley Crue to three or four minutes of "bell tolling" just to hear LMFAO's "Party Rock Anthem" (great song, but just seem's odd hearing it on 99.5).

However, I feel that Rock 99 broke it's final straw when they began to play more active rock with the classic rock, and when they dropped John Boy and Billy for Mojo.

I also wonder if 106.9 The Eagle will be the new "classic rock" station rather than just classic hits. I've noticed 106.9 tends to play more pop-sounding 80's hits than 99.5 did, and 99.5 played more AC/DC and harder-sounding classic rock than 106.9 did/does.
 
I know I mentioned it before in another thread somewhere, but it was the more active-leaning rock (and G-n-R) that drove me and some older listeners away from that to other stations. Maybe I'm a minority (I'm sure of it, in fact) but I like my classic rock segregated into "traditional" (pre-1979, mostly) and "newer" (1980 onwards, plus harder rock from the 70s like Sabbath). Or good and bad, from my personal standpoint.

Both eras are 'rock' in the same way that The Kinks and Foo Fighters are 'rock' but that doesn't mean I want to hear Lola segue into Learning To Fly! That was a balancing act that WZRR tried to manage but it drove me away.

The only way that sort of decades-spanning stuff works is on lighter music or pop music. Hence the reason WBPT stayed on my radio more often that not.

As for Journey — I was one of the loudest critics of Cumulus switching Pensacola's i100 CHR to Journey a while back but you know what? It's the station I land on most often when I have the radio on. Seriously. WBPT is more like a Jack FM with a rock-lean and Journey is totally pop-leaning. It really does work better than it should. Ever since they shut the HD off on Jack FM down here (it sounded really, really, as does Journey) I find myself gravitating away from Jack. Every time I land on it, it's some gratingly annoying rock song that falls on the wrong side of obscure for a reason.

Now, if someone at Cumulus could just fix "The Vibe"'s streaming. My two choices are 48 kbps mp3 which sounds like warmed over death or a 48 kbps AAC stream which is mono and has less fidelity than an AM radio. How did a music format wind up with that while WAPI-FM is talk but it sounds like I'm in the room with the hosts when listening online? ???
 
According to someone "in the building", Mojo asked to be let out of his contract last May so he could go back to Huntsville, and the PD wanted to get rid of him due to Mojo's poor ratings, but the "higher-ups" didn't want to change anything before the buyout. Maybe if they made the changes Rock 99 would still be on the air today.
 
Zach said:
Now, if someone at Cumulus could just fix "The Vibe"'s streaming. My two choices are 48 kbps mp3 which sounds like warmed over death or a 48 kbps AAC stream which is mono and has less fidelity than an AM radio. How did a music format wind up with that while WAPI-FM is talk but it sounds like I'm in the room with the hosts when listening online? ???
Click to expand...

I think their FM broadcast isn't helping the stream either. Vibe overall sounds just fine so far -- good presentation, good music, tight transitions from song to song -- but the processing really needs some attention. I've always been a bit of a processing geek, and not everybody agrees with me on this but I'm telling you, when comparing two stations playing the same music, there are more listeners than you think who will say that one station "just sounds better" than the other.

Anyone have any more thoughts on their daytime talent? My guess is that they'll syndicate the Bert Show mornings.
 
Looks as though the Rock 99 listeners are starting a protest to bring the station back. So far, they have 24 members, even after posting links to the Facebook site on both the Fox6 and ABC33/40 sites.

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Bring-the-Rock-back-to-Rock-995/299152983455360?sk=info


When are these people ever going to learn these types of protests never work? The ex-Live 100.5 listeners had much more traction (around 20,000 members) and all sorts of media attention but they got nowhere. You'd think, though, by reading Bob Carlton's story on al.com about the format change that there is this massive uprising against the Rock 99 format change. There are very few posts in favor of the change. I can't say for sure, but I'm guessing some of the pro-Vibe comments are being ignored and not allowed to post (since posts must be approved by the moderator first)... in order to make the outrage about the format change seem greater than it really is. I don't doubt there is some discontent with it all, given Rock 99's longevity here, but I don't believe it's to the extent the Birmingham News/al.com story makes it out to be. I am not really for or against the drop of the classic rock progrming, but I did make a comment in regards to the story and listeners' reactions to it...discussing the dismal ratings, how the station tried to unsuccessfully revamp the format, and how radio is a business and it's not out there just for our "personal listening" pleasure....when ratings are low and the station could very well be losing money, why should Cumulus keep the format and let their investment waste away, just because Rock 99 is a heritage station here. My comment never posted, even though almost 24 hrs has elapsed, and numerous other comments have posted since that time. I also emailed the moderator regarding as to why my comments never posted- I'm still waiting for a reply.

Personally, I dislike most top 40 music, but the new format might just get 99.5 out of its slump. I thought moving WAPI-FM's talk format to 99.5 would have been more advantageous, since doing so would give WAPI a much better signal to compete against WERC.
 
Given Cumulus’s love for the “i” name (eg i106, ect) why didn’t they just bring back I-95… or as they would call it now i-95. Course I guess the WAPI-FM calls are all tied up now.
 
discussing the dismal ratings, how the station tried to unsuccessfully revamp the format, and how radio is a business and it's not out there just for our "personal listening" pleasure....when ratings are low and the station could very well be losing money, why should Cumulus keep the format and let their investment waste away, just because Rock 99 is a heritage station here. [/quote]

Sad part is that if they had a morning show pulling in numbers that equalled their middays or afternoons they would have been beating 3 or 4 more stations including The Eagle. When the morning show gets less than a 1 share it pulls the whole station down. I'm not a fan of John Boy and Billy, but they should have brought them back to get the numbers up. It will be interesting to see the ratings this week to see if their music only mornings beat Mojo's last book.
 
RonM said:
So now ALL radio markets surrounding us have two top-40s....Chattanooga to the East, Nashville to the North, Birmingham to the South, even tiny (by comparison) Florence to the West.

Which begs the question.......WHY NOT HUNTSVILLE??? :-[
Click to expand...

You took the words right out of my mouth! This is so incredibly frustrating for Huntsville residence that now there is another flip to CHR in a neighboring market, and we can't even get one real CHR station here! It adds insult to injury that WZRR is a cumulus station just like WZYP, which only proves that WZYP doesn't have to be the way they are. Adding even more frustration, I can't try to pick up 99.5 here because of the Way-fm translator! Come on Star 99.1!! You can do it!!! FLIP TO A REAL CHR!!!

On the topic of The Vibe. I've been listening online. They sound very good so far. The music is spot on and the segues, imagine and jingles sound excellent! Are you listening WZYP?? Take notes and learn how to do CHR the right way from one of your own sister corporate owned stations!!!
 
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