Shot In The Dark: Jacked

June 07, 2005

Jacked

The "Jack" format - in which an FM station acts like an iPod on shuffle - is getting installed on a whole lot of stations, including 104FM in the Twin Cities. It occurs to me that a list of 104s format changes over the last twenty years would be a sort of "Museum of Radio Programming Fads".

Radio stations have for the past 25-30 years been about as spontaneous and unpredictable as assembly lines; no corporate Marketing Communications department scrutinizes material as closely as a typical large-market FM station goes over its music. When I first started in radio, the model for the "Top Forty" station was to play, literally, those forty records (and really mainly the top thirty of them) exclusively - and the top ten even more frequently.

When I worked at KDWB in the early nineties, the format involved playing playing one or two "recurrents" - top forty songs of the last year or two - an hour, and songs from the top ten three times an hour (so yes, New Kids On The Block did come up every three hours), usually an "Add" (a new song moving up the charts) or two per hour, and the top thirty the rest of the hour.

It bored me stiff - but if I'd known how boring radio was to become, I'd have treasured every moment.

I have extremely ecumenical tastes in music, so I was interested in seeing what "Jack" would program.

It is, indeed, like an iPod on "Shuffle".

Unfortunately, it's an iPod owned by a guy who's spent most of the last thirty years collecting crap.

Posted by Mitch at June 7, 2005 08:09 AM | TrackBack

Comments

For what it's worth, I have a post on the whole dubious Jack format over on my LJ with links to similar posts by Ann Althouse, Michele of A Small Victory, and now you. You're in good company, Mitch. :)

Posted by: Kevin at June 7, 2005 08:55 AM

"Unfortunately, it's an iPod owned by a guy who's spent most of the last thirty years collecting crap."

Which may not be such a bad thing. That's how Lileks came up with The Gallery of Regrettable Food.

Posted by: Dave in Pgh. at June 7, 2005 09:31 AM

I have a theory that if one could somehow fuse 89.3 with 104.1, there might be a decent station in there somewhere.

Unfortunately, the two remain separate. So much the pity.

(And apropos another post: I can't agree enough about Mark Wheat).

Posted by: Jeff Fecke at June 7, 2005 11:31 AM

I remember having to play those "Top 20" lists. Ugg. Had to play a third of them every hour, all of them in three. Saving grace was that we were non-commercial and had time to play other things as well.

I've always thought that a great format would be to take the Billboard weekly list for the last 50 years, and play numbers 11-20, (or maybe 21 to 30) scrambled up in both order and year, over that week. Next week, another fifty lists.

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