Real New Yorkers, which includes
folks from New Jersey, know that Bruce Morrow is in fact Cousin
Brucie. He's been so for more than 50 years. They are also well
aware that this past Monday Cousin Brucie abruptly disappeared
from WCBS-FM, and without so much as a so-long.
Instead of Brucie, New Yorkers now have Jack. And while
many are upset--the Brucie backlash is fierce, as one would
expect--listeners better get used to Jack. (Or Bob or Joe.)
It's the latest craze in radio, and it's sweeping the
country like few before, with one station after another switching
over. On the same day that New York's WCBS switched, Chicago's WJMK-FM,
also an Infinity station, made the jump. Though Jack is hardly a
year old in the U.S., some 20 stations have switched over, and the
pace should accelerate.
The Jack format, which in some places is known as Joe
or Bob or Dave, is iPod-like. Rather than the tight playlist of
traditional radio formats, from Country to, say, Hot Adult
Contemporary, Jack and its imitators offer listeners playlists that
can run 1,000 or more songs deep. Further, the playlists can cut
across genres and decades. So one minute a listener is hearing
Eminem and the next Bing Crosby and the next the Doors or Harry
Connick Jr. There are no live announcers.
What gives? There should be an easy answer to
that. There is not.
The Jack phenomenon seems to have been set off by
a number of different forces. There's the rise of the iPod, which
lets users program their own playlists. Promotions for the new-style
format often include iPod references. At Chicago's WKQK-FM (Q-101),
which has deepened its alternative rock playlist to 1,000, listeners
are told the songs are now “on shuffle”--iPod talk for a
random selection of music.
Another force is the rise of satellite radio, which for
a monthly fee offers listeners deep playlists across a variety of
genres.
But the biggest force behind the switch to Jack and
Jack-like formats is the belief among stations owners that they can
build larger audiences that are also more attractive to advertisers.
In these times of rising competition from other media and a sense of
staleness in radio, that's proving a powerful incentive indeed.
In almost all cases, it appears the format being left
behind for Jack is Oldies. It's an aged audience, or has become so
in recent years, spanning 35 to 64 but more and more at the older end.
The Jack listener profile is considerably younger, aiming at
listeners between 35 and 44.
As radio people explain it, station owners are
jumping to the younger format in anticipation of the further aging
of the Oldies listener base and the point when they become an
increasingly harder sell to advertisers.
“It’s not a question of having difficulty today,” says
Tom Taylor, editor and publisher of Inside Radio. “It’s a
question of looking down the road.”
But stations are also converting, and in quick order,
to get a jump on the competition. If Jack is the hot new thing, it
makes sense to be the first Jack station in your market, far less to
be the second or third.
While Jack is too new to offer much
listener data, it's being touted as a means of reaching a young
audience, as well as a larger one. It appears to be working.
A Denver station that converted to Jack is No. 1 in
25-54s, as is one in Kansas City, while a Los Angeles station that
converted debuted at No. 3
in 25-54s, reports Garry Wall, co-owner of Sparknet Communications,
which licenses the Jack format in the U.S. A Dallas station
has quadrupled its ratings among 25-54 listeners since adopting the
format last year.
The worry is that as more stations convert, the format
will clutter the dial, and radio will suffer.
But that's hardly a deterrent. The sense is that this
old medium must rise to the challenge of the iPod.
“Radio has to find ways to step up to the
challenge and remain relevant to its listeners’ lives," says
Mike Stern, vice president of programming for Emmis Radio Chicago.
He allows that Q-101's expanded playlist is in direct response to
the rising popularity of iPods.
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