What would you do with....My 99.5

[CAwasinNJ]

Imagine you're given ownership and complete control of 99.5. You have the resources (money, personnel, etc.) to do whatever you want with the signal without having to worry about higher ups on the corporate ladder, what clustermate stations are doing, etc. You can leave it as is, completely change it, or anything in between, but the ideas should be at least plausible/possible. What do you do?

The station seems to be doing borderline OK in the ratings so I don't think I'd want to dump the format right now, but there are a couple of issues that should be tightened up. One is pretty simple. Make sure the station positioner is consistent! On air they're currently using 'The 80's, 90's and Today' (or something like that.) Their RDS still says "The best of the 90's to today." When you change a station element make sure you change it everywhere.

Now maybe I'm wrong here, but I was listening to AM Drive this morning and it sounded like bad voicetracking. The selling of the songs is minimal and they ran the exact same entertainment report at least twice in a fairly short period of time. To me you either put together something solid or don't do it at all. Don't do it half way. The cough-and-you-miss-it song sells have to go. For the entertainment report, if you're going to run it several times, record it several times. It doesn't take that long.

[amanuensis]

I would take the branding of the station to its logical extreme, and let the listeners do the bulk of the song selection. I would have certain hours be "Jukebox Hours". The entire playlist would be accessible on the station website or via an app. During certain hours, say "the 60s at six" AM and PM, "the seventies at seven", "the eighties at eight", and "the nineties at nine" each song from that particular decade that was in the playlist would be select-able by the listeners. Some kind of random chance algorithm would determine which songs were actually selected for the hour. (The remaining daylight hours would be 21st century playlist voting.) The DJ would announce who had picked each song and give some factoid about the song or the group.

The voting for a particular day's playlist would have to be voted on during the preceding day so that the DJs would have time to work out the timing of the ads, given that some songs are longer than others. And that is why there would be a lot of talk, so that gaps could be filled. The songs that were going to be played would not be known in advance, except by the station staff. Meaning that no one would know in advance whether a song they picked during the previous day would be played or not.

I would also like there to be some way in which the listeners could influence the underlying playlist. Perhaps by up-voting and down-voting all of the songs that ever made the weekly Billboard Hot 100 during each decade. With maybe the playlist being the current top 1000 songs from that voting. There would have to be some way to keep everyone honest and not vote more than once for a particular song.

[CAwasinNJ]

It sounds like you want to keep the name but change pretty much everything else?

[oldiesfunhouse]

My initial thought would be to dump Bloomberg and bring back Easy 99.1 on 99.5 HD 2. But I like the Mellow B concept discussed on the 98.7 thread so ... I guess I'll just leave this one alone.