Today from Michelle over at ASV and Scott Fybush’s fine NorthEast Radio Watch, WCBS-FM has dropped it’s oldies format, in favor of the format called among other things, “Jack”, which is being dropped into stations all over the country in various forms, including Rochester’s legendary Oldies stalwart, WBBF.
Fybush and I are very much on the same page:
It's a moment of reckoning for those of us who believe passionately in the value of personality radio, exemplified by Vin Scelsa's "Idiot's Delight" on WFUV (90.7) Saturday night, which Scelsa turned into a passionate rant about what WCBS-FM meant to him. It's that kind of radio - intimate, creative and exciting - that no MP3 player can duplicate.
Can the same be said about "Jack" - even if you can overlook what died to make room for the format in New York?
Correct, Scott. Of course the answer is “no”.
Look, I understand buiness choices are what’s driving this, but I think radio owners and programmers are cutting off their own feet, here, and have been for years, now.
Radio got going and was at it’s most popular, when driven by a good personality. A good voice, a tight board and a jock who both knew how to, and was allowed to, connect with his listener… both with music and words. Michelle does a very good job in her post of examining that relationship.
This kind of radio became a lost art as the technology allowed more and more poeple to have reasonably good systems in their homes and cars.. and then with the walkman, on their belts. Radio owners responded to the threat by making their stations sound more and more like the tape player in your car, and less like the freind Americans had known for generations. Thing is, Radio owners still found they’d come up short in many areas because they still had to sell airtime to stay on the air. How to respond? By removing still more personality, until such time is we’re running strictly by machine.
No wonder people are leaving to listen to their MP3 players, tape players, and CD’s, XM’s and so on… Why listen to radio at all, when, once they’ve cut out all personality, all they’re offering the MP3 player doesn’t have, is commercials, and static?
Look, in fairness, I do have to mention once again, that I come from a fairly heavy radio background. I grew up on personality radio, cut my teeth on it, and it’s the only kind of radio I was ever interested in doing. (And FWIW, I would include talk radio in that mold as well, given it’s more intensely driven by the personality than even most music radio is.)
But here it is; Personality radio is the only thing that music radio as we know it, has going for it, that’s going to save it’s butt. Trying to compete with personal audio players is a dead end road… Radio simply cannot compete with them… not on their own level. The kind of move being pulled by WCBS on Friday, is killing radio… not only as we know it, but killing it, period.
The good part about this is that some bright owner, somewhere, is going to figure this stuff out, and let the airstaff be personalities, again, and break this self-destructive cycle. The question now, of course is… WHEN?
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