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WMJI's winning ways

I think 106.5 has been doing all-80s weekends since 1996 when it was still WLTF, but was then going by "The New Lite Rock 106.5" on-air. At the time, it was billed as an "80s Superstar Weekend." Then came the "Totally 80s Weekend" on WMVX Mix 106.5.

Now, it's been all over the place with different names for the all-80s weekends on WLHK The Lake.
 
I've said this before and I'll say it again -- the evil radio empires (iHeart, Audacity, etc...) don't care too much about making similar stations (like Majic and The Lake) sound distinctively different from each other, they only care that their 5 local stations' combined ratings are better than their competitor's combined ratings from their 5 local stations.
 
TheBigA said:
We've had this discussion many times. There is song overlap between the formats. There are five formats now playing "A Bar Song (Tipsy.)"
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Right, I often hear the same song on 2 different stations at the same time, but timing is usually off by quite a bit. It is rare when the same song starts at the nearly the same time on 2 different stations.
 
skiwest said:
Right, I often hear the same song on 2 different stations at the same time, but timing is usually off by quite a bit. It is rare when the same song starts at the nearly the same time on 2 different stations.
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The key question a radio researcher will want to know is: Is it a song you like? Because if it's a song you like, the reaction will be different from a song you don't like.
 
When I go to different cities, all the commercial stations pretty much sound the same regardless of the city, with very rare exception. It is like going to a shopping center in Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, St Louis, et etc. and it is Wal-Mart, Home Depot, Target, Loew's with a Starbucks and Chipotle. Same with radio these days.
 
radiofollower said:
It is like going to a shopping center in Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, St Louis, et etc. and it is Wal-Mart, Home Depot, Target, Loew's with a Starbucks and Chipotle. Same with radio these days.
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Good comparison, since the demise of local retail basically killed local media. The fact is that the music radio plays hasn't been local anyway.

National radio programming began with the creation of the networks in the 1920s. The nationalization of radio formats began in the 60s. Top 40 was pretty much the same everywhere. It really picked up steam with the growth of national radio consultants in the 70s and 80s. There was also a fellowship of radio programmers in major markets to talk about music selection. Consolidation of record labels in the late 80s made the music all the same. The publication of Radio & Records made local playlists available to everyone, so small market programmers could see what bigger stations were doing. Today the world wide web gives everyone access to global media. People in their 30s grew up in the global world. That's all they know.
 
TheBigA said:
The publication of Radio & Records made local playlists available to everyone, so small market programmers could see what bigger stations were doing. Today the world wide web gives everyone access to global media. People in their 30s grew up in the global world. That's all they know.
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There was access to local playlists way before R&R. Gavin's "tipsheet" began in the later 1950's. Rudman, Hamilton, Bobby Poe and others preceded R&R and influenced playlists all across the country and internationally to some extent.
 
DavidEduardo said:
There was access to local playlists way before R&R. Gavin's "tipsheet" began in the later 1950's. Rudman, Hamilton, Bobby Poe and others preceded R&R and influenced playlists all across the country and internationally to some extent.
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But nobody covered as many formats in as much detail as R&R.

The point is if you listen to format radio, the goal is for that format to sound the same wherever you are. That's how music has impact. Local hits never had the lasting impact of a big national 4 week #1 song.
 
TheBigA said:
The point is if you listen to format radio, the goal is for that format to sound the same wherever you are. That's how music has impact. Local hits never had the lasting impact of a big national 4 week #1 song.
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For music formats it's the same whether a station is current-based or gold-based. That's why CHRs share 90% of their current/recurrent playlist with every other CHR in the country (same for Country stations); why Classic Rock and Classic Hits tend to have the same core libraries. Why you can drop just about any AC station intact into another market and have it perform reasonably as well.

In an era where air personalities aren't allowed to show much of same, the "sound the same" philosophy is dominant. When applied to talk radio, networked programming is the most effective way to ensure that ... and besides, 99% of the listeners don't want to talk on the radio about local issues anyway (with an exception for stations that air Sports and have one or more local/regional major league teams for the fans to be passionate enough about to call in).

I think Rick Sklar was right about Superadio, only he was a little too ahead of his time, as companies like Transtar and SMN later proved. And that is the evidence of BigA being correct in the above statement.
 
K.M. Richards said:
I think Rick Sklar was right about Superadio, only he was a little too ahead of his time, as companies like Transtar and SMN later proved. And that is the evidence of BigA being correct in the above statement.
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The funny part of that story is that ABC ultimately bought SMN to do exactly what Sklar proposed a few years earlier.

BTW it should be pointed out that the ratings just came out, and WMJI is #1 again.
 
TheBigA said:
The funny part of that story is that ABC ultimately bought SMN to do exactly what Sklar proposed a few years earlier.

BTW it should be pointed out that the ratings just came out, and WMJI is #1 again.
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We will never again see the dominance of a locally programmed station like WMMS circa 1975-1986. Never followed a national playlist. Broke unknown acts. Had a lineup of strong personalities around the clock. Peak was about 1984-85 when they were #1 with 12s, 13s and 14 shares and a cume of over 700,000 people. Today, the #1 station in Cleveland (WMJI) has a cume which vacillates between around 450,000 to 500,000 or so.
 
radiofollower said:
We will never again see the dominance of a locally programmed station like WMMS circa 1975-1986.
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I agree. For a lot of reasons. Kid Leo knew it when he left WMMS to work for Columbia Records. He never again worked in local radio. Today, he's with Sirius. Even Sirius, with its national reach, doesn't have the power in radio that people anticipated. The power isn't in local markets anymore. It hasn't been since the 90s.

But the other thing is that rock & roll doesn't have the level of importance it had at that time. It isn't the format it once was. And Cleveland isn't as big a market as it was then. It's been outpaced by Cincinnati and the sun belt. Local radio isn't important in the music business because music isn't local anymore. The value of local radio has been diluted by the multiplicity of media outlets available today. Huey Lewis ends his song by saying "The heart of rock & roll is still beatin' in Cleveland." Today, people wonder what he's talking about.
 
It's 4th of July weekend both Majic and The Lake are both doing all-80s weekends again.

Neither station appears to be directly using any of the national feeds for the music logs, but there's always a chance they are staggering hours. Both Pop Drive and Rock Drive, the two iHeart national feeds for Variety Hits, are running all-80s weekends, in addition to the iHeart80s and Lost 80s feeds.
 
Noticed as of late that The Lake sounds far less like Majic. Of course, their "we play anything" slogan continues to hold true, as their new playlist consists of songs and artists that are not to my liking and I never heard of.
 


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