The Infinite Dial

We briefly interrupt Bob & Jack week to reflect on Friday's news that 17 Clear Channel stations in five formats had been taken off the R&R reporting panel as a result of a switch to centralized music programming. (Mediabase, owned by Clear Channel, removed 11 stations a day earlier.)

Of particular interest here are the five medium-market CHRs (in Rochester and Albany, N.Y., Lexington and Louisville, Ky., and Dayton, Ohio) that are leaving the panel. Clear Channel's late '90s/early '00 Rust Belt CHR sign-ons, spurred by the success of WKFS (Kiss FM) Cincinnati, had a profound effect on the Top 40 landscape. Stations like WKFS were fast on Rhythmic product and ultra-conservative on everything else, playing only one or two rock titles (usually teen punk or Nickelballads). And where they didn't devastate their competition, they often created a war of attrition that a rival eventually chose not to participate in.

WKFS had a similarly profound impact on the charts. Rhythmic-leaning stations that played their powers 85 to 100 times a week were naturally going to change the composition of the Mainstream chart, particularly when the pop/rock-leaning stations were playing songs 60-70 times a week. Ultimately, many of the other CHRs became fast on rhythm and slow on rock, too, either because they didn't want to be vulnerable to a station like WKFS or because they were following the charts in the direction they were going.

Of the CHR stations dropped Friday, all but WLKT were developed from the WKFS model. Before modifying their music, those stations were spinning their powers somewhere in the neighborhood of 90-105 times per week. Will losing them change the timbre of the Mainstream CHR chart? That's unlikely as long as the panel change is only five stations. And while other group owners are starting to launch CHR stations again, most of their new stations are similarly "chythmic" (somewhere between CHR and Rhythmic) -- not the least of which is because most programmers were so heavily influenced by stations like Kiss when they were coming up in the business. And even the most pop/rock-friendly programmers have to either work with the available music geared toward a rhythmic-leaning panel or hatch their own hits, something that few are inclined to do these days.

And it's at this point that we should remember fondly Louisville's WZKF, one of the Kiss-FMs dropped from the chart this week. WZKF was one of those stations often cited as evidence that the entire CHR format was not moving in lockstep. In 2007, Kiss was early on both Country and R&B crossovers, the formula that made the market's legacy Top 40 rockers WKLO and WAKY famous 30 years earlier. It's too bad that WZKF isn't unique now. But even before its change, it had become less idiosyncratic. And I'd be hard pressed to name 10 reporting CHRs that show anywhere near that sort of musical creativity right now.

The message for those programmers whose stations aren't among the 17 dropped from their panels is carpe diem. More national programming is clearly on its way, regardless of owner. But for today, you have the opportunity to reflect your market or single-handedly champion the next "Just Dance" or "All Summer Long," two hits that were languishing for a few months before they really got rolling. For those stations that don't program for their market, the distinction between being individually and centrally programmed is a mere technicality anyway.