The Oldies are Back in New York City!

Not that this has a major impact on me since I’m a happy Sirius Satellite radio subscriber, but WCBS-FM in New York City is back to playing the oldies! This is really a great story of the people “voting with their feet” as the station changed its format over 2 years ago to a new “hip” style. The people voted by walking away from the station in droves – and they took the lucrative advertising revenue with them.

The new format was called Jack-FM and their slogan was, “Playing what we want.” Well, it seems that absolutely no one gave a shit about what music they were playing as they went from 8th in the New York market to 16th. This just shows you, again, how out of touch the powers-that-be at CBS are with the contemporary marketplace. Idiots.

I distinctly remember family members telling me how upset they were when 101.1 switched from oldies with Cousin Brucie (who can be heard on Sirius XM, by the way) to playing whatever some idiot marketing genius thought Generation X wanted to hear. This was just a horrible, dumb, stupid business move and whoever thought of it and put the “ok” on it should be fired immediately. Not only was the oldies format in 8th place in New York, it was the #1 rated oldies station in America. Why would anyone want to change that?!?

But stupidity with radio decisions isn’t anything new in New York. Let’s not forget that K-Rock switched from the #1 rock channel in the city while it had Howard Stern to some bullshit called FREE-FM after they lost him. Since the ratings for that style went straight to the shitter, in May CBS Radio brought K-Rock back and dumped their sub-par at best talk show format. Again, if I was at CBS Radio at a higher level and I knew who originated the idea to switch to an all-talk format in the wake of Howard Stern’s departure, I’d fire the person on the spot. How do you take the #1 rock station in both New York City and Northern New Jersey and just change it to an all-talk format? Idiots! But then again, this is the station that is keeping Opie and Anthony on the air when they routinely score 0.0 in the ratings for the New York market. Actually, their ratings may have gone up, but they’ve been a dismal failure since they entered New York.

I digress…

It’s good to have the oldies back on in New York City. The fans of 101.1 didn’t deserve to have their station snatched away from them and I’m glad that the stupid, iPod format of Jack-FM was a miserable failure.