"The Breeze" goes mainstream AC?

[bigtom101]

All these sales people showed up in Manahawkin including John Kazuba who was a salesmen at the time to see what McAllan bought them.

What I am baffled about is why did they change "The Breeze". With the 2 frequencies the whole was working? Wasn't it? The ratings were really good, right? Is this just someone hired that feels he needs to make his mark or prove a point with Press?

Press is a different company from a decade ago....John Dizuba is gone as GM, they have gone thru a few sales GM's since, and Bob Mcallen is not as involved as he used to be from what I understand. The Breeze had great 12+, but it was all older demos. Fine for local, not so good for national as EasyBakeOven said.

National money is dictating programming directions at the moment...right, wrong, or indifferent, that's just the way it is right now. Hopefully the economy gets better, both locally and nationally, so everyone has a bit of breathing room and the pink slips stop flowing.

 

[satech]

Turnpike Turner already answered this question and they are correct. It comes down to what the agencies want. Even though the 12+ numbers looked good, when you broke it down further, a large percent of The Breeze audience was skewing much older than desired.

But how is replacing Captain & Tennille with Katy Perry going to magically fix that? The younger people listening to The Point will see no reason to switch to The Breeze. This will only serve to alienate the station's established audience, just like when WLTW tried to dump their "Lite FM" name and started playing Shakira, Outkast, and the Black Eyed Peas. The 25-year-olds they were trying to attract saw no reason to switch away from Z-100, and ratings suffered. Now if you listen to WLTW today, they're back to playing lots of '70s and '80s music, and actually sound quite close to what The Breeze was like before the recent changes.

 

[bigtom101]

Turnpike Turner already answered this question and they are correct. It comes down to what the agencies want. Even though the 12+ numbers looked good, when you broke it down further, a large percent of The Breeze audience was skewing much older than desired.

But how is replacing Captain & Tennille with Katy Perry going to magically fix that? The younger people listening to The Point will see no reason to switch to The Breeze. This will only serve to alienate the station's established audience, just like when WLTW tried to dump their "Lite FM" name and started playing Shakira, Outkast, and the Black Eyed Peas. The 25-year-olds they were trying to attract saw no reason to switch away from Z-100, and ratings suffered. Now if you listen to WLTW today, they're back to playing lots of '70s and '80s music, and actually sound quite close to what The Breeze was like before the recent changes.

Because younger people tend to like younger music - and you are right...Breeze listeners will listen to the point, but not vice versa.

As far as WLTW sounding older, I pulled up Mediabase - of the top 30 songs played over the last week, only 6 were from pre 2000, and only 2 of those were from the 80's. The rest were from the 00's/10's. The way the music is scheduled is giving the appearance of variety, but still hitting the new music pretty hard.

 

[satech]

As far as WLTW sounding older, I pulled up Mediabase - of the top 30 songs played over the last week, only 6 were from pre 2000, and only 2 of those were from the 80's. The rest were from the 00's/10's. The way the music is scheduled is giving the appearance of variety, but still hitting the new music pretty hard.

WLTW is playing a lot of older music, just not in high rotation for each particular song -- which is good, unlike stations like WMGQ which tend to pick a small group of '70s and '80s songs, like Peter Gabriel's "In Your Eyes" or the Bangles' "Manic Monday", and then play them every few hours in tight rotation, as if they were current hits. Even The Breeze is picking some '90s songs and playing them way too much -- as if constantly playing the Backstreet Boys and 'NSYNC is going to help them shed their unwanted image of being an "old people music" station.

Anyway, WLTW is running liners literally saying "We love '80s music!". I think they're really trying to go after CBS-FM and retain their slice of the 35+ audience, which is really the "money demo" these days, because the under-35 crowd is too broke from trying to pay off student loans and not having luck at finding good jobs to have any disposable income to spend on advertiser's products!

 

[observer2]

Is the app to switch 99.7 and 99.3 dead?