It’s an increasingly rare thing to find a station that has maintained its format (and call letters) for more than a decade, nevermind 40 years. This week Chicago commercial rock station WXRT begins celebrating its fortieth year on air with something called “40 years in 40 days.” Starting Monday, each day the station is highlighting […]
I’ve written about Chicago “progressive” rock station WXRT-FM before. It’s truly the only commercial music station in the city that I can tolerate listening to for any extended period of time. Sure, its commercial stop sets can be as long and annoying as any other stations, but everything else about the station stands pretty far […]
I spent the better part of this afternoon listening to my new HD Radio receiver, the Sony XDRF1 HD, tuning through the Chicago FM dial. There are 33 FM stations broadcasting HD in Chicago according to iBiquity, which owns the technology. I was able to tune in the HD signal for 19 of them. After […]
The 3rd annual Record Store Day is taking place tomorrow (Saturday, April 17, 2010) in independent record stores all over the world. In honor of the event, stores will be hosting live performances, meet and greets with artists, and will be selling and giving away exclusive releases on both CD and vinyl. It’s a wonderful […]
Did you get fooled today? Radio stations are often one of the last remaining outlets to celebrate April Fool’s with gusto. Morning show DJs read fake news reports, radio shows are replaced, and some stations switch their formats for 24 hours. Howard Stern once pretended that he’d been fired on April 1st over his crude […]
I’ve only lived in Chicago for two years, but I’ve been listening to WXRT in brief spurts for the last sixteen years when visiting the city. Living in the Central Illinois college towns of Champaign-Urbana, I’d often heard about WXRT from friends and acquaintances from the Chicago area. Inevitably it was the one station that […]
As a proud thirty-eight year-old member of Generation X, I have become just a little disturbed by a trend I’ve noticed in the last few years. One might call this trend the “indie-rockification” of public radio. As my fellow grunge-survivors and I, raised on the so-called “first wave” of alternative rock and derided by boomers […]
When it comes to commercial radio, I’d argue that true progressive rock radio died somewhere in the early 80s, as tighter playlisting, more frequent rotations and shorter music sets became required, and DJs by-and-large no longer picked their records. Nevertheless a handfull of stations in the top major markets held onto the progressive moniker by […]
The commercial radio industry’s reaction to last week’s Boston Globe article reporting on the relative dearth of young listeners can be fairly summed up, as “Nuh uhhhh! Not true!” Despite radio’s collective denial, I had this reality reaffirmed for me this past Friday. I had the opportunity to speak with a group of high school […]
