WCBS-FM, which included legendary disc jockeys like Cousin Brucie and had a devoted audience who would tune in to hear the old time rock and roll greats, will once again be able to hear good music instead of the train wreck that was Jack FM. I wasn't a huge fan of the show, but if you listened long enough, you'd get into some of the classics and Cousin Brucie was an institution all to himself.
WCBS, which first switched to an oldies format 35 years ago today, changed to the Jack format on June 3, 2005. At that time, the station dismissed longtime D.J.’s who had been familiar to New York listeners since the early days of rock ’n’ roll, like Cousin Brucie (a k a Bruce Morrow), Dan Ingram and Harry Harrison.The new oldies format will include more songs from the 70s and 80s but it is hoped that some of the WCBS FM talent will again take to the airwaves and guide us through the day.
“There was a lot of resentment when they fired Cousin Brucie,” said Paul Heine of Billboard Radio Monitor. “And they replaced it with something where the appeal is that it essentially doesn’t have a personality. It’s a jukebox with some attitude between the songs.”
The Jack format began five years ago in Canada as a looser, younger variation on the traditional oldies format, with a much wider playlist than is usual in commercial radio. Aiming to recreate the experience of an iPod set to shuffle, the creators of Jack cultivated the sometimes jarring juxtapositions long derided in the radio industry as “train wrecks” — Bon Jovi following Whitney Houston, for example, or Pearl Jam abutting Ricky Martin.
The format spread quickly throughout North America and has been successful in many markets; besides WCBS, CBS Radio has eight Jack stations. But Jack failed to attract much listener attention or advertising revenue in New York.
WCBS had a reliable audience as an oldies station, hovering near the bottom of the Top 10 ranked stations in the New York metropolitan region before the 2005 switch. The Jack format was introduced to attract the younger listeners more prized by advertisers, but WCBS’s ratings dropped precipitously after the format change. It lost more than half its audience share, and its ranking fell as low as 22, according to Arbitron. Recently its ratings have improved slightly, but have remained far behind its pre-Jack level.
The station’s advertising revenues also dropped. Revenue fell almost 30 percent, to $16.1 million for 2006, from 2005, according to estimates by BIA Financial Network.
People like to have someone to relate to on the radio, and putting in generic spots didn't exactly generate the kind of revenues hoped for.
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