I have come to believe radio's biggest enemy is the mindset: "We all have to do the same thing by the same rules".
Face it: With 50+ signals in almost every major market, only 20% of those will be top-10 performers. Not all of them will appeal to national buys.
Just as internet and cable has fragmented into niche product, a station that is not able (or wants to) play in the top-15 "big leagues" has to define a new set of rules for itself. Opportunities might be perspectives or info you can't get anywhere else, music you can't hear anywhere else, breaking the "no chatter" rule and becoming a companion not a music-intensive product, and so forth. Yet every one of those things scares the hell out of programmers, as repeated in the Seattle Weekly piece. So if you refuse to change the rules and you don't have the momentum/heritage/product to be top-15 you'll flail for awhile, corporate will toss you out, bring in the next one to flail -- rinse, lather, repeat.
Of course this means a renegade product has to be sold to advertisers in renegade ways ... and that is no more palatable than programmers telling their regional boss they want to be different. So very few try. But "standing out" was what made a product for Mountain to sell to VERY ATTRACTIVE demo's -- though it took time to cultivate. If a station isn't willing to wait more than a couple PPM cycles to get traction (just as network TV will easily cancel new series 5 episodes in) ... then it doesn't make sense to TRY ANYTHING because it's never going to get traction.
At that point, the best choice is to put the license on e-Bay and have one last staff party where you hand out the Applebee's trade.
