5 Weeks, 3 Days, and 2 Hours In The Life Of…
The Weird Life of a Wisp of a Radio Station
The world of commercial radio ain’t what it used to be: as I detailed in my first Medium post, Columbus, Ohio’s WWCD Radio, a thirty-year-plus locally beloved radio institution, was staring at a contentious and unwanted end of its run on traditional radio.
As I wrote then, the glory of terrestrial radio had long past and had evolved into a far less personal and less appealing entity. The loss of the entire WWCD package, from the radio personalities and their expertise, their experiences, and their love of local music was even more of a loss than their self-fashioned alternative-music-leaning format itself.
What would be replacing it at the time was 93X, a concept that was touted to be “Authentic Alternative” or in some promos, “A Better Alternative.” As someone who once held a disc-jockey slot on a college radio station, I am generally in favor of getting more local and independent alternative music on the airwaves. The new program director Ian Graham emphasized this early on, stating in a WCMH-TV interview “What’s going to be a little bit different is that we’re really going to be local-focused, as well as not really pandering to what’s top 40 on the alternative charts but who is going to be playing at Dirty Dungarees (a combo laundromat, bar, and local/alternative music performance space in Columbus, Ohio, for the those unfamiliar) tonight.”
However, my college radio stint also gave me insight into the corporate nature of commercial radio, no matter the genre. I sympathized with the tightrope that WWCD needed to slink upon, balancing the financial concerns to stay afloat with the desire to feature less-commercial musical content. Generally speaking, community sentiment resided more firmly with the folks at WWCD versus the usurpers.
Well, fast-forward roughly the amount of time in the article title (a riff on the smash debut album by Atlanta-based outfit Arrested Development) from when 93X started broadcasting on February 1, 2024. “Authentic Alternative” 93X has morphed into “My 92.9”, a well-worn but hardly ambitious oldies format. Meanwhile, the original WWCD forges on for now in a streaming format.
For the most part, the reaction on places like Reddit mirrored the reaction when WWCD’s demise was finalized: the pro-WWCD crowd outnumbered those who looked forward to/enjoyed the 93X foray:
What Went Wrong?
Obviously, this attempt at “Authentic Alternative” did not work. While one side of me has no sympathy for the failure, I do have the ability to push biases aside and provide an objective view on matter. For curiosity purposes, I did listen to random snippets of the station during that brief time they operated to evaluate what they were doing, and I developed serious doubts about their long-term viability as summarized below:
- Authentic To A Fault: Here, 93X basically delivered on the “Authentic Alternative” music promise, but I noticed an immediate problem right a few minutes into listening. The only familiar (to the masses) alternative song I heard during my first sampling was The Waitresses 1982 release “I Know What Boys Like.” I also personally recognized “Nag Nag Nag” from Cabaret Voltaire and Pere Ubu’s “The Modern Dance.” But to the average listener, those and the other songs are complete mysteries, as well as the deeper cuts I heard from bands like Wet Leg, Essential Logic, and Magazine.
- Shuffle Kerfluffle: “Play Anything We Want” stations (JACK and BOB are two of the well known brands of this format) have grown over the past few years, mimicking the shuffle function popularized on iPod Music Players and people have grown to appreciate. However, the music on anyone’s iPod or similar device is what the listener has put on there (unless a hotshot band decides they’ll just do it without permission.) During its short run, 93X was essentially like finding an iPod Music Player with a substantial alternative music collection permanently stuck on shuffle mode. Unlike that iPod, however, there was no real convenient way to figure out that the songs you listened to without that disc jockey while driving in your car.
- The SoundHound Test: Tangential to the previous point, the only way I identified most of the 93X songs I heard was through the app SoundHound. While the app generally does a great job with identifying music, not every song has been fed into its database, which led to one frustrating session when half of the songs played by 93X brought up no results. If the station isn’t providing a deejay to identify songs that are generally unknown by the audience, then what’s the point of playing them?
- Local Yokels — Granted, 93X was theoretically still gearing up during its brief run, but the stated emphasis on local wasn’t blatantly evident during my brief listens. A few local bands snuck through (Caamp, Phantods, and Times New Viking) and I did hear a few promos later on advertising some upcoming local live shows and soliciting music from such local bands. But CD 92.9 staff were doing a fine job of featuring local acts in my humble opinion, and for me, 93X wasn’t going to improve on this aspect significantly, if at all.
- Show Me The Money: for a select few folks out there, I could see 93X being a bit of heaven. But emphasis on the word “few” should be noted here — are businesses in a tight economy going to be dropping serious coin into a radio station that did a three-song set of Nikki & The Corvettes, Mission of Burma, and Bear Hands (a random threesome I heard) to draw those very few who liked it to buy their products? Or will they drop it into a station that regularly three-peats “everyone knows them” bands like Bon Jovi, Led Zeppelin, or The Rolling Stones? The overwhelming proof leans to the latter.
Lessons to be Learned
As badly as the 93X experiment went, I do believe there is some wisdom to be gained from this brief experience.
- (Preferably Local) Disc Jockeys…Please! Columbus does have another traditional radio station playing the music you hear typically on WWCD in the form of Columbus Alternative 105.7. But this station is part of the IHeartRadio corporate collective, consisting of over 860 stations in the United States. Unlike WWCD, whose disc jockeys are most definitely part of the community, your chances of getting a locally-based disc jockey on a corporate entity vary greatly (this Reddit thread from a few years ago gives a good primer on what you can expect.) From my thinking, a new radio entity launching a format that admittedly has more obscure songs and even LESS human presence than a corporate station along the line of what is found on IHeartRadio (not to mention a built-up level of enmity already in place) is doomed to failure.
- Why Not More 1980s and Before? While 93X did attempt to attempt to cover the gamut of alternative music in its brief run, I really did appreciate hearing anything from the mid-to-late 1980s and before being the older fart that I am. While WWCD does play songs from back then during their “Stash” segments and other random times, the station’s era of operation does tend to make their focus post-1990, from my own experience. So why not more pre-1990s music? Traditional oldies format stations have started including 1980s and even 1990s pop hits in some cases. And new generations are willing to discover older music, if Kate Bush’s phenomenonal “Running Up That Hill” is any indication. Sparked by its appearance in the Netflix series “Stranger Things”; the song returned back to the charts even stronger than ever, easily besting the song’s initial chart performance in 1985. Even Ms. Bush was shocked at her song’s climb to the top the charts in 2022, exclaiming on a BBC interview that the whole thing was “just extraordinary … quite shocking really, isn’t it? I mean, the whole world’s gone mad.” I’m sure some have already done their own self-exploration of Bush’s catalog after finding this song, but why not have some of her deeper cuts from the same “Hounds of Love” album like “Cloudbusting” or “The Big Sky” on the airwaves? Or a number of cuts from her even better (in my humble opinion) albums like “The Dreaming” and “The Kick Inside”? And there’s plenty more fertile ground outside of Ms. Bush in that era to mine: why not a little A Certain Ratio or The Durutti Column instead of the usual Joy Division/New Order tunes? Or maybe some fellow 4AD record label stalwarts like Wolfgang Press or This Mortal Coil cuts instead of The Pixies? The options are endless.
- Old Habits Are Hard To Break: If you’re going replace a well-established and appreciated entity for somethung you are claiming as better, your time frame for proving that point is generally short-lived. On my first food and travel related blog The 614ortyNiner, I went into detail on that phenomenon for the former Midwest locations of Caribou Coffee that were rebranded into their corporate owner’s other major coffee chain holding (California-based Peet’s) in the mid-2010s. I actually like Peet’s Coffee, but many people I knew thought Peet’s was basically another Starbucks (ironically, the idea for Starbucks was birthed in Peet’s flagship store in Berkeley.) Sales did not improve for many of the rebranded stores, leading to more Caribou/Peet’s closures, including all ten Ohio locations. Suffice it to say, 93X did not knock it out of the park right away either, though I do admit (lack of) time might be a factor on this point.
In closing, I’ll be fascinated to see how long WWCD can keep its unique brand of personalities and music going via the streaming route, considering the presence of format competitor 105.7 as well as Radio 614, a volunteer streaming service that covers similar ground to the now defunct 93X.
Interestingly, the eventual fate of WWCD may mirror that of the Canadian station 89X out of Windsor, Ontario. Founded in 1991, the station decided to meet its Canadian musical content requirement initially by focusing on local and/or indie Canadian outfits versus major label fare. This, as well as a willingness to play deeper album cuts, ended up gaining many of those bands an American following across the river in Detroit, Michigan.
Eventually, that unique nature retreated back to something closer to the alternative mainstream, and 89X ended its nearly 30-year-run as an alternative music station in November, 2020 with a format change to country music. Ironically, this is the same month when the then WWCD 102.5 faced its second possible demise, before a last-minute agreement kept the station going via a move to the 92.9 frequency.
But, to riff on a quote by the old man in the Monty Python movie “Monty Python and the Holy Grail”, they are not dead yet.
Thank you for reading – this “Side Dishes” platform expands beyond my food-, travel-, and tourism-focused Critical Rice Theory blog, which has documented my experiences in those worlds around Central Ohio and beyond since 2014.
