What is going on at WLGZ Legends 990?

[anoldguy]

I occasionally listen to WLGZ in my car. I can't figure out what they are doing. One minute they are playing kate Smith or Julius LaRosa and the next minute they are playing the Doors! I heard them play Hush by Deep Purple the other day! I gotta say no one else in town is playing Pictures of Matchstick Men so I kinda like it but not mixed in with Dinah Shore.

 

[Desert Pete]

Obviously they've lost their minds.

 

[scooterodell]

You happened to tune in during a new one-hour program the showcases rock from the 60s called "Hope & Dreams." And I highly doubt they were playing any Dinah Shore during that hour! Otherwise, Deep Purple is not on the regular playlist for Legends 990.

 

[Element9]

I occasionally listen to WLGZ in my car. I can't figure out what they are doing. One minute they are playing kate Smith or Julius LaRosa and the next minute they are playing the Doors! I heard them play Hush by Deep Purple the other day! I gotta say no one else in town is playing Pictures of Matchstick Men so I kinda like it but not mixed in with Dinah Shore.

Sounds like an "upper demo Jack," with bigger trainwreck segues.

 

[Element9]

You happened to tune in during a new one-hour program the showcases rock from the 60s called "Hope & Dreams." And I highly doubt they were playing any Dinah Shore during that hour! Otherwise, Deep Purple is not on the regular playlist for Legends 990.

One might resort to asking why a program like this is on the station? It doesn't seem to fit.

 

[Mark_Giardina]

I occasionally listen to WLGZ in my car. I can't figure out what they are doing. One minute they are playing kate Smith or Julius LaRosa and the next minute they are playing the Doors! I heard them play Hush by Deep Purple the other day! I gotta say no one else in town is playing Pictures of Matchstick Men so I kinda like it but not mixed in with Dinah Shore.

Apparently WLGZ’s programmers realize that their core audience is dying off, therefore they are trying to interject music so that people from my generation, and even younger listeners, will tune in.

990-AM has undergone more format changes than Joan Rivers has had face lifts over the past 20 years, so one has to give WLGZ’s owners kudos for at least keeping the same format instead of following the trend of changing formats more than a baby has its diapers changed.

When I started working for 990-AM back in 1981 the call letters were WNYR and the format was personality-country. It did quite well. Then, after a series of owners, some dot.com wiz-kids from Boston came in and created WARM 101.3, which had been WEZO and moved the WEZO call letters to the AM station. WNYR went bye-bye.

WEZO-990AM at first had a similar format as WLGZ does now with the exception that WEZO-AM had morning local news, ABC network news and Paul Harvey. That ended when management decided to turn WEZO into a latchkey operation along with dropping all news and WHAM eventually got Paul Harvey.

At the time, without any outside promotion, WEZO-990 was getting over a 3 share. Not bad, but apparently the station owners wanted instead to concentrate on building numbers for their FM operation so they figured (in their pea brains) by downsizing their AM station, that 3 share would automatically go to their FM operation. Guess what gang, it didn’t work!

So now WNYR’s call letters are located at some station in the Finger Lakes but WARM is doing quite well. Why I have no idea, but at least its making money. It will be interesting to see who ends up buying WRMM as part of the CBS radio sell-off. If it’s a certain company based in the mid-west, all I can say to those folks is, God help you all!