Last Thursday night I listened to a bit of a local alt-rock radio station. Turned on the radio Friday morning and they were playing some sort of Elvis retrospective. The format completely changed overnight. Read in the paper that they had a staff meeting that Friday morning where they fired all of the on-air talent, and it sounded like it was a surprise to them too. This isn’t the first time a station I listened to changed like that. Seems to be the norm, actually.
Why do radio stations suddenly change overnight like that? Presumably someone must have known something before that morning. It isn’t like the station manager wakes up one morning and says to himself “You know, I’d like to play oldies instead of rock, I’ll start today!”, is it?
It’s hard to sell advertising for your current format if your advertisers know you think it sucks so much that it’s not worth continuing.
Your on air staff is ON AIR. Talking to thousands of people. How far in advance do you want to tell someone who has the potential to rack you up some massive fines and general ill will that he’s fired?
There’s not really any value in advertising a format change – the people who are already there will just think ‘Oh, I guess I should start looking for a new station to listen to’ and the people who will listen to your new format aren’t listening to your station yet.
Also, most radio stations are run by Clear Channel, and they’re basically evil.
You also don’t want your jocks to rob you blind before they get fired. I have heard that after a lot of format changes the jocks are escorted out by security.
Actually my experience has been different - they’ve done something like play the same strange music for a few days before the format switch. IIRC 104.9 in San Francisco did something like this - they played some 30 second instrumental movie intro type music for 24 hours before switching formats.
Then there was the somewhat famous case of the station in Albuquerque that played “Stairway To Heaven” for 24 hours straight before changing to Classic Rock. IIRC people thought the DJ had a heart attack.
That’s part of my understanding why radio format changes are so sudden. Even if you have as little as a day’s notice, that’s still more than enough time for on-the-air mischief by disgruntled soon-to-be-former DJ’s (e.g., barricading yourself in the studio to protest the format change, bad-mouthing the owners, “accidentally” saying one or all the “forbidden” seven words, continuously playing Elvis Costello’s “Radio, Radio”, etc.).
It happens for two basic reasons. They can’t change immediately to a new format. New jocks need to come in. They usually change a lot of the producers and such also. If they started to do this before the change then the ones about to be fired would know something is up. Like “Why are they mounting steer horns in the studio of a rock station?” The other reason is to create buzz. Someone turns on the radio to their favorite station and hears something weird. They might keep coming back until they find out what the change will be. When Krock in NYC dropped the FreeFm format and went back to rock they stunted for about 6 hours only. They didn’t have jocks in the beginning, it was run by robots so they didn’t need to stunt for days.
The on-air staff generally don’t make programming decisions. They’re made either at the corporate level or by station management, usually in response to ratings and other research, although format changes may happen because of a change of ownership or market conditions. Because such changes can have a significant impact on advertising and other revenue, changes are announced in the trade press before the public is made aware of it. On-air staff may be fired, but not always; occasionally, they’re offered transfers to other stations or other jobs within the station. They do just “disappear,” regardless of what happens to them.
That being said, one of the reasons stations don’t advertise format changes in advance is to avoid potentially negative publicity surrounding the replacement of their DJs. People tend to have strong feelings about their favorite stations, and one of the reasons why is because of DJs. If the public knew that their favorite DJs were about to be fired, the station could receive negative feedback that may result in a boycott of the station and its advertisers, something the station doesn’t want. For example, the local classic-rock station fired its morning show DJs to air “Bob and Tom.” This decision led to a fairly public campaign to bring them back, which the station eventually did. Two of the DJs ended up at a different station, but their arrival was kept secret until the day before the show premiered. Eventually, their original station ended “Bob and Tom” and brought them back, and they’re still there.
On the other hand, some stations do, in fact, do sort of a dry run before making a decision about a format change. My programming professor (yes, there was a whole class about stuff like this, and it was taught by one of the aforementioned DJs.) told us about a station that tested formats during the overnight shift, including potential DJs on the theory that they couldn’t make a good decision without hearing how it would sound in a live environment.
Yes, I’m talking about O-Rock (and FWIW, they’re owned by CBS). I caught a bit of Loveline Thursday night, and they were playing oldies the next morning. It’s actually the loss of Loveline that I’m lamenting. I don’t listen to the radio much during the day since I generally get around by motorcycle and therefore don’t have access to one during my commute.
That’s a different graphic than the one I saw on their site a couple days ago, which had Carrie Underwood and some guy in a cowboy hat that I didn’t recognize since I don’t listen to country. Apparently, they’re stunting a syndicated radio show on the history of rock and roll right now and haven’t actually announced their final format yet.
My favorite story about this was when I worked at the OTB station in Schenectady.
Most of the time, the station showed the race results, and we put a radio signal underneath for music. We had a radio tuner and would just put the feed out on cable. The problem was that we like rock music, but the station director wanted easy listening. He’d switch to the easy listening station. Later, after he left, or sometimes when he was there (for a variety of reasons, no one really feared his authority), we’d switch back to rock.
Finally, he outsmarted us. Got a radio tuner that could not be changed. It was set to the easy listening station and there was nothing that could be done.
And, you guessed it. Within a month, without warning, the station switched to rock.
Yeah, it’s just that people seem to immensely overestimate the number of stations they own. Probably because while they don’t own a numerical majority of stations, they tend to own wildly popular stations that cumulatively attract a plurality of listeners in a market. Which is the very definition of evil.
But they’re only evil if you believe they’re evil. One of my favorite stations is a Clear Channel station (put your pitchforks down) and they play all the music that was on the local college radio stations when I was in high school/college and they even play a lot of stuff that is popular on “alternative radio” like The White Stripes, Snow Patrol, Incubus, The Red Hot Chili Peppers and The Killers. Argue they’re mainstream all you want, but college radio loves those bands too.
Sure if I want to hear Guster or Tegan and Sara or a Ben Folds song that’s not “Brick” or Ben Kweller or They Might Be Giants I have to go elsewhere.
But sometimes I want to listen to Collective Soul or Nirvana or Pearl Jam or Foo Fighters or Smashing Pumpkins or any number of great “90s alternative” bands that make up a big chunk of this Clear Channel station’s playlist.
I remember when the popular Denver FM station KBPI changed frequencies from 105.9 mhz to 106.7. A new station settled in at 105.9 with an adult contemporary format which it dubbed "Alice. " Beginning the day before the switch, they played “Alice’s Restaurant Massacre” by Arlo Guthrie continuously. The entire 18 minute recording. Three times every hour. For 24 hours.