evolve991 said:
Could the crew have known what was coming and stayed ahead of the game with Y Not Radio? As for XPN2 no Y Rock then Y bother? If I'm going to stream a station it'll be Y Not and I can't get XPNs HD2 stations anyway.
The Yrock crew did kind of know what was coming and stayed ahead of the game a year ago when XPN let go the paid staff of Yrock (Josh T Landow PD/OM and Joey O. MD) in July 2010. Josh had already had Ynot in his back pocket as a contigency plan, and launched that immediately. A fair amount of the volunteer staff also went with them.
For the past year, XPN continued to use the Yrock brand name on that channel of programming, but just now has decided to rebrand it as XPN2. Nothing has changed really with what they are playing. Just what they are calling it. I'm sure that everyone who is working on that side of the station knew about the rebrand plans, most took over after the rearrangement last year. So you can still stream XPN2's stream and pretend like it's still called Yrock. It should sound the same. You'll still hear like Mike Vasilikos, Robert Drake, and John Vettese
It was probably a combination of reasons.
1) "Y" brand and power is losing connection to an audience that is now aging into indie rock demo. It's been 6 years, an 18 year old would have only been 12 in 2005.
2) XPN wants to bolster its brand and make it's name bigger as the provider of that kind of programming. So change the name to XPN2 and their umbrella gets even bigger as the go to station for even more kinds of music.
3) Also, by removing the Yrock branded format they can also put other types of programming on that channel that might seem out of place under that name, but fine on XPN2.
4) There might still have been a licensing deal in place with Jim McGuinn for use of the Yrock name and now they wouldn't have to pay that, though that might just be a stretch of my imagination.
5) Finally, not that big of a deal, but there was probably confusion between YNot and YRocks, this just eliminates that.
- Al Clay
