7 or so years ago, I worked for a company that had an office in Syracuse NY. I went out to do some work on the computer/network systems in the office, and on the long drive approaching Syracuse, I started scanning the radio channels. I found one that had an endless loop of Eminem’s “Look who’s back” song. Apparently they had turned on the transmitters, reviving the station, but hadn’t finished all the other details, and begun to bring in the DJs, and actual programming.
I asked a friend about it, and he said it was a station that had gone off the air, but was in the process of returning… and it was driving folks nuts as they scanned through the dial during their daily drives. I thought it was fun, and listened to a few runs through the song over the couple of days that I was there. I didn’t need to hear the song again for a few weeks.
Along the same line of broadcasting something just to keep the channel occupied, I heard once of a cable TV channel that was vacant pending the launch of a new network (I think it was Sci-Fi), and rather than having a dead channel, the cable company just pointed a camera at a fish tank. When the Sci-Fi channel finally did launch, they had so many customers write in asking for the Fish Channel back that they had to put it back on on a different channel.
This didn’t seem to take the first time I posted it so I’ll try again. Each year Clear Channel Communications will take one of their stations in their city clusters Christmas music solid. And it may be well before Thanksgiving. Identify the CCC cluster in your town.
