oh piffle

[helen99]

One of my favorite journals got deleted. It's always my favorite things that go away first. I believe it's the world's fault. Hear that world? Yer not good enough for them.

Oh, and WHFS decided that a Spanish-speaking, salsa-blaring format would make more money than a prog format would. At first I thought it was maybe an hour-long program that HFS had included in its format - nope, the whole thing has gone Spanish.

A student-run station in Baltimore has taken over playing prog where HFS left off (and doing a far better job of it - HFS had deteriorated), but my car radio won't pick it up. This morning they were playing some wonderful music that I hadn't heard in a while. I changed the button setting to that station anyway. I can hear it for about a half a block during the drive to work, if I catch it at just the right time...

I can see it now - I get a satellite dish on my car just to pick up a prog station. Apparently the Spanish station conglomerate (Infiniti?) is Clearchannel's only competition. I wonder if it's really a branch of Clearchannel, pretending to be in competition with itself. I wouldn't be at all surprised.

Dag Frakking Durnit.

So lost a favorite journal and a station all in the same day. Lyra with a satellite dish would be kind of funny...

Comments

[helen99.livejournal.com]

Point of interest - in other cities, the "spanish" conglomerate (which I think is really clearchannel) seems to also be targeting the prog stations. I wonder what's going on...

[vashti.livejournal.com]

I saw someone mentioning this elsewhere. They thought it might be some kind of prank.

[helen99.livejournal.com]

Nope, I thought it was a joke too, but it didn't go away for 2 days, then I heard it on the news. WAHHHH!!!!! :*( :*( :*( :*(

[dogemperor.livejournal.com]

Just be glad:

a) pretty much *every* station other than a few religious broadcasters and one or two other non-public-broadcast stations isn't owned by Clear Channel (this IS the case in Louisville, unfortunately; fortunately, there IS the one small group of non-religious non-Clear Channel stations that are keeping the CC affiliates honest)

b) that you even had a prog station (Louisville, to my knowledge, has *never* had any sort of prog-rock or prog-metal station; the closest we ever came was the late, lamented Rock 102 which got changed to an easy-listening station...the folks who formerly worked at/ran Rock 102 pretty much went with another company (I don't think they're an Infinity affiliate, I don't think we HAVE any Infinity network stations in Louisville) and started it back up, but it's mostly "new rock" type stuff).

As for CC and Spanish stations--Clear Channel *did* recently buy out one of the large Spanish broadcast networks (can't remember if it was Univision or Telemundo, off the top of my head) and they *are* aggressively targeting stations to change to Spanish formats so as to target the Hispanic population. This has included radio buyouts, so it's possible...it's also possible Infinity has started to do the same crap to compete with Clear Channel :P

[helen99.livejournal.com]

Yes, I am very appreciative we had one. This is just really the final nail in the coffin - HFS has been dead for a while, since it got bought out by a large company. It was a very good station as long as its founders owned it and retained its original vision, which was to play local artists who wouldn't get airtime. Many bands would have never sold CDs at all without them.

Well, at least Viacom/infinit doesn't have (overt) religious and political affiliation (I hope). In any case, I'm sure they'll succumb to whoever gives them the best advertising deal, and the marriage of large corporations with religious interests is pretty tight...

There are still good stations about, but it's difficult for me to pick them up without adding power to my antennae...