In L.A., 91.3FM has started calling itself ‘Jack-FM’, and significantly altered their classic rock format. I stopped listening to classic rock radio (CRR) ages ago, because I was sick of hearing the same limited selection of album ‘hits’, by the same gaggle of 1970s dinosaur bands. I also have an extremely low tolerance for radio commercials, since I mostly listen to subscriber supported radio. But my wife still likes CRR, and she turned to this station while we were driving in the car one day.
There’s still commercials, of course. But in between they are playing some interesting songs! NOT the same old stuff every day. Their jocks say they ‘play what the want’–that’s good, they’re not hewing to a limited playlist. And once or twice I’ve heard them say proudly that we’re not going to know every song they play. In other words, they’re not catering only to the folks who want to hear “I Can’t Get Enough Of Your Love” followed by “Stairway To Heaven” followed by “Double Vision”. Sweet! Someone’s finally dredging up some interesting material from the CR era!
But what’s this “Jack” bit? I googled “Jack FM” and found that the term is being used in many different places, and the music formats seem similar. But I couldn’t find out where this name comes from.
Here in the Detroit area, 93.1 has become “Doug FM”. So far no commercials, other than the voice of Doug telling us that Doug is “like having an I-Pod shuffle; we play everything.”
And, so far, so good. I can’t describe the mix (limited listening time so far), but I do know it’s been mixed enough to keep me pegged (lack of commercials so far helps too).
If they have a formula it seems to be “hide the formula”. I like.
Oh, the other thing about “Jack” in L.A. is that they seemed to have ditched the format of having giggling buffoons telling lame jokes in the morning and playing three songs every hour.
I’m not a radio person, so I’ve just seen the ads – but judging by the ads, it’s a nationwide push – same corporate entity behind it, d’ya think? Are the playlists centrally coordinated? Somehow I don’t think there’s actually some hip loner putting these together station by station.
There are some stations in Canada called “Bob-FM”. Whenever I’m visiting my mom, that’s what I listen to. Lots of 80s music. If you want to hear Gowan or The Spoons, Bob’s your guy! I love it. I didn’t realize that it was a trend here, too. There are none in the Albany, NY area yet. Og knows, we need something better than PYX 106. :rolleyes:
We have “Jack FM” in Calgary and it is definitely a formula radio station. They are targetting people who grew up in the eighties rather than the 60’s or 70’s, and play more music from the 80’s. They also mix in a small amount of new music. These stations have been very succesful.
In Austin it is called Bob and I do like the format. I found it pretty cool to listen to a Parliament song and then have a Clash song follow it up. It is pretty much one of only 3 stations that I will listen to. And boy do I agree with SoP about radio morning shows - thank OG for NPR so that I don’t have to feel like an idiot listening to DJs have heated discussions about American Idol or Survivor.
How do we get Jack/Bob/Ben here in Houston? I’m sick of the morning crews here and I’d like a “deep cut” to be a song that I don’t recognize in 3 notes.
As it happens, I just read an article all about it… and I just found it on the web. Basically, the concept is that it is the i-Pod of a music fan on shuffle. The spectrum is wider than a standard playlist, and deeper, and none of it sucks. It goes cross-genre a bit, too.
It’s named after a DJ named Cadillac Jack.
We have Jack here, too. It’s a station that was previously a best of the 80’s and 90’s type station, and all of their DJs piss me off. So I wasn’t aware until someone mentioned it to me that there’s this shtick going on.
The station is definitely one of the big corporate owned stations in town (jeez, most of them are nowadays) so I’m suspicious of this. How can a station owned by a conglomerate pitch a “we play what we want” type thing? I smell BS around here, and suspect that it’s a gimmick that will soon be revealed.
Rochester, NY just replaced the oldies station that’s been around since the 60s with “Fickle” because “you never know what’s coming up next”. It still seems to have a majority of oldies songs, but it just started playing the Village People’s “In the Navy.” This is a good thing?
But yes, it’s just the latest desperate attempt to lure people back to commercial radio. It won’t work. You may like the Beatles followed by the Village People on your iPod but the odds are that 99% of your neighbors won’t, and will change the station in two seconds.
Just a fad. By this time next year people will be starting "Whatever Happened To… " threads about it.
Here in Atlanta, 92.9 (formerly “Z-93”) has become Dave-FM.
I don’t hate the format, but after years of listening to NPR and Album 88 (Georgia State University’s college station) I find commercial radio pretty much unlistenable.
In Canada, Jack FM is a string of stations across the country owned and operated by Rogers Communications. They start of the way Genghis Bob described, by playing commercial free, and in some cases without DJs, just non-stop music. Gradually, they introduce the regular elements of radio. The focus is hits of the last three decades, with an emphasis on the eighties. So far, they’ve been ridiculosly successful.
To answer the OPs question, it’s a canned format which essentially moves the ‘oldies radio’ idea forward a few decades to appeal to a younger crowd. Generally, I like it. Classic Rock + Eighties tunes + some slightly more obscure or rare tracks. Makes a nice mix.
The slogan for the station in Toronto (not sure if they use it at all their stations) is “We play what we want”. And they do. They do not take requests, they don’t have a weekly top-ten or anything like that. Sometimes they play a song three times in a day, sometimes you hear a song once and never hear it again. It’s kinda neat.
Their news/traffic/weather sucks, though. Still gotta go talk radio for that.
I’m suspicious too. “Yeah, sure, they’ll play what they want for about a month…then we’ll all catch on to their nefarious plot.”
But before we do, I love it. Today on the way to school I heard Losing my Religion followed by La Bamba. That kind of diversity, plus the lack of annoying DJs, makes me very happy. Man, I hate DJs.
We’ve got a Jack-FM here in Jackson, MS, too. I didn’t catch on that it might be a national thing, because I thought it was a play on the lame pseudo-nickname of the metro area, Jacktown ( :rolleyes: ). But yeah, it’s the same formula, down to the same sarcastic guy doing the station ads.
I enjoy the format quite a bit. The Jack-FM here plays a lot of interesting live cuts --one being Bruce Springsteen performing his “Fire” (the Pointer Sisters made it a big hit). Last night they played an extended live version of Journey’s “Wheel in the Sky”.
There are some strange transitions (like going from Neil Young’s “Hey Hey My My” to the Ace of Base’s “All that She Wants”), but in general, I can happily keep that station on for long stretches.
I think that the “Jack FM” stations are run by Infinity Broadcasting (i.e. CBS), at least in the U.S.
The Dallas/Fort Worth one is, if the KLLI talk show host I listen to is to be believed- he used to mock the 100.3 jocks until they switched to Jack, now he pretty much leaves them alone. They’re still in the same building though.
I think we’ve got a Jack FM station in Indianapolis recently. Haven’t had a chance to listen to it yet. When your daily commute is 10 minutes each way and the FM reception in your office sucks, you don’t have much time to listen to anything.
I did notice that it isn’t exactly a variation of classic rock–today while driving to work I heard everything from the Human League to Counting Crows to Billy Joel, which last did make me run for NPR. Still it’s a vast improvement, and I like a lot of the stuff from the 80s and 90s too.
