Now just "Chicago's 100.3," though I suppose this is a pretty late adjustment: they had gotten away from the all-'80s format as early as this June while still claiming to rewind...to Katy Perry songs from two summers ago, I suppose. Looks like they're trying to contend with My FM and their blend of thoroughly unobtrusive rock-like music, though if 93.9 is all-Christmas now like it was as the Lite, then I guess it's a savvy move to assert themselves as Replacement-Level Radio right now.

100.3 seems like one of those cursed frequencies. It's been a bunch of things, all vaguely of the soccer-mom variety, but it's never really been able to set themselves apart. Rewind was a good idea but wasn't executed terribly well. The conspiracy-theory side of that is that because it's a sister station of the Mix, they never want it to be too successful for the cluster's own good. They had Robert Murphy doing mornings a while back but fired him because he was cannibalizing Eric and Kathy's market share.

From the delightful-but-never-possibly-exhaustive-enough formatchange.com, here's one of their many flips, from boring adult contemporary to...boring adult contemporary, I guess:
http://formatchange.com/1003-wpnt-becom ... -100-wnnd/

The GM's spiel makes me angry. "Well, we've done the research and the results are in: you want a station that plays songs you like that aren't weird or ethnic. The adult contemporary station you deserve." Like we never had that. Also, I dig the extremely perfunctory nature of this old logo. Teal, purple, Optima. So '90s. "A radio station."

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hey CH, since you're the board's resident radio historian i have a question for you.... in lieu of the new "q" 87.7 i had one of my friends recently tell me "dude, it's the new q101.... they moved from 101.1 to 87.7" and i'm like "uhhh dude, emmis communications sold q101 to a group with that one dude....not metheny but the guy who was kicked out of WGN for throwing debaucherous parties in the colonel's office..... you know, that one jewish guy who changed his name.... randy michaels i wanna say?

yeah so i tried explaining to him that q87.7 had to be someone figuring "hey there has to be some leftover market/share from q101 going away so let's brand this station "Q"and have a contemporary q101-style playlist and we'll achieve brand recognition b4 people even hear the product" but he's like NUH UH [repeats his point] (which if you read my latest adventures on the board here tonight you'll see that i get quite a lot b4 they sod off and go ad hominem cuz [insert samuel L jackson from 187 quote about a pyrrhic victory here].

so yeah in this case i got NUH-UH'd that, indeed, 87.7 is the direct descendant of q101 and in fact it's actually the same damn radio station with the same ownership/staff/etc just moved down the dial.... so can you back me up with my 95% likelihood of being right, or can you join the minority in condeming me as talking out of my ass (and surrprise surprise my family was on an episode of south park once)

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and OOOOH SNAP CH, you done raised the stakes in the avatar game. well played. this is the point where i pretend to know who the chick is and say "well played, CH" but hope that you mention who that is because honestly i'm sure once i know it's going to end up being a clever reference and thus i'm going to have to finally install shoop-da-woop cs3 and go make the avatar that i saw in my head when i finally got around to watching elysium.

yeap there's your only hint..... and since it's gonna be a properly great avatar with a winter-long run that means no homely mspaint slagging off, we're going str8up photoshop, which i haven't used to make a picture/avatar since i made that les-as-rambo picture/avatar that mini ditka nicked from me.

cuz if you didnt know that.... yeah that avatar is 100% me.

so just know that your reign as the #1 avatar guy on the CSFMB will be short lived because i'm going to step up and show you lot how it's done. fuck im actually gonna do it today after i wake up and rub one out to buffy (altho between you and me, the 6-8am FX reruns are on season 3 which means that george michael didn't lie to me when he programmed me to remember that i gotta have faith.... mmmmmyeah early-career pre-surgery duckshoot? bring it. i've got a tru calling to go to the dollhouse and strike back against the show that went there about the urban/legend of MK ultra/beta/kitten/monarch/etc programming.

so yeah, you know that you're a lazy sod who needs to end his approaching-monthlong vacation when your giant plans for tomorrow include making an avatar for the CSFMB and working on that rap song about liverpool FC. after that draw with everton yesterday i'm feeling a bit scousercidal up in this piece!

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HOLY SHIT....I FORGOT ABOUT BERNSTEINQUEST!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! omfg

he's been such a raging Caller Bob lately that there's gotta be a goldmine of samples that i can take from recent podcasts (cuz if it's not totally obvious by daily show-threads that are only 1pg nowadays, dan's become a caricature of the worst aspects of himself over the last year or so. and it's been a rather swift decline that was in part spurned by the ReVolution, which go figure actually worked as a solid chunk of the daily-show-thread crowd migrated to the KSFMB (keeping score fans message board and now my permanent acronym for TOB, aka the other board) soo uhhhhhh did the ReVolution technically work?

i guess it did.... and btw you know what really blew my mind? the revelation that keeping score is prolly johngy. put that in your pipe and smoke it, directional-ikes of the world!

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Hmm, I think we hashed this one out in one of the board-schism megathreads that got nuked, so let me try to piece it back together, because it's kind of wonky.

So yeah, Emmis had owned the Loop and Q101, and then sold them to Merlin Media, which is indeed that Randy Michaels-led investment group. They killed Q101 to start the FM News station that eventually zeroed out, but first they sold the intellectual property of Q101 (the logo, brand, shows, imaging packages) to an outside group that had planned to reinvent Q101 as an internet-only station. I don't think it happened, at least not on the level they had hoped.

As FM News started to resemble the all-time clusterfuck it ultimately turned out to be, the Merlin people realized that perhaps killing off a decent station and hocking the IP assets for a few bucks was a bad idea. However, they couldn't hit ctrl+z on the whole thing because they legally couldn't call it Q101 anymore and also because Randy Michaels is a stubborn genius and wouldn't have done it if he did own the IP.

So they found this low-power TV station that functions as a backdoor FM radio station because audio for TV channel 6 is carried over 87.7 (or was before the analog shutdown, and more on that later) and went into a "local marketing agreement," which is when you start running a radio station you don't own without buying it, either because you're over the market limit or you don't have the money -- the latter in this case. 87.7 had been a smooth jazz station called "The L" filling the void after the old WNUA went Español, and I'm sure shitty smooth jazz was just as low-revenue at 87.7 as it was at 95.5, so the owners were happy to let the Merlin people rent their TV station that pretends to be a radio station. So they called it Q87.7 and changed the callsign to WKQX-LP, with juuuust enough differences in the logo and imaging as to sidestep any legal claims that they were using property they no longer owned, but musically pretty much the same.

So when you said that someone figured "hey let's just bring back Q101 because people seemed to like it," you were right, but it was the same dopes who botched the whole thing in the first place. When your friend said it was a direct descendant of Q101, he's basically right, too, but I don't think there's any staff to speak of. I'm pretty sure it's all automated. The end result is a nobody-wins schism, which makes our tangent about it in the lost Keeping Score thread META AS FUCK: the music associated with Q101 is still on the air at a compromised dial position (and again, more on that later), while the conceptual lineage of Q101 has been relegated to the internet. It kind of reminds me of when the WWF bought ECW and ran the One Night Stand show while at the same some other ECW castoffs ran a similar alumni show at the ECW Arena. Which one was the real one? To paraphrase my dumbass Molly Lambert quote, simultaneously neither and both.

Anyway, where this whole adventure becomes tragically doomed is that 87.7 is most likely going to die. Like I said, channel 6 audio is at 87.7, but that's only for analog signals. Full-power analog TV signals have been shut down and converted to digital. Low-power TV stations are the next to go. Because Q87.7 is still legally a low-power TV station (you'll notice that Comcast carries it with some perfunctory weather graphics on screen), it's going to have to make that switch. When it does, radios won't pick up 87.7 audio. The FCC only licenses FM to go from 88 to 108. Some radio manufacturers allow tuners to dip into the 87s for things like iPod transmitters, but some radios stop at 88.1. I don't think the old manual dials ever went below 88. So when the loophole closes on Q87, you'd like for the happy ending to be some benevolent chap buying back the IP from the streaming people and the frequency from Merlin (which is in its death throes), but it's a near-foregone conclusion that 101.1 is destined to become the over-the-air WGN-FM. Maybe they'll even give Father Of The Year a six-hour show on there just to spite you.

I hope this answered your question!


viewtopic.php?p=1872522#p1872522

enjoy.

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can you guys just exchange numbers for that issue

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"That's what the internet is for. Slandering others anonymously." Banky
“Been that way since one monkey looked at the sun and told the other monkey ‘He said for you to give me your fuckin’ share.’”

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Will be interesting to see if Tribune Company buys BOTH 101.1 and 97.9 from Merlin and what they do with each (presumably re-selling one, or simulcasting 720 programming, and then WGN.fm).

With Brandmeier and Harry already on board — and maybe Matthews, Dahl, and Meier joining the FM lineup — it has to be intriguing for Tribune Co to put WGN.fm on 97.9.

Why not put them on the failing 101.1 and leave the successful 97.9 alone? True classic rock stations like the Loop have been known to bill rather poorly, but the Loop has always had a solid market share. It would suck to lose Q101 and The Loop to FM talk.

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Cumulus bought the Merlin stations. 101.1 is going alternative again, but they still don't own those pesky rights to "Q101." Here's hoping they do alternative right and don't just play meathead WIIL-Rock shit.

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If they're smart, they'll make it another Top 40-ish station like B96 or Kiss FM.

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I'm sure the people who bought the Q101 name would dump the rights back to the right buyer. They botched that online launch about as best as they possibly could.

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That's what the frequency is right now and it's in the fucking tank.

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http://www.allaccess.com/net-news/archi ... o-stations



That's a relief about the Nash thing. That thing sounds like bad news.

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I think he was kidding. Or @ least I hope he was.

Oh, maybe. I don't know. My sarcasm meter goes loopy sometimes.

It's weird, though, I was watching a video about the old 92.7 Kiss FM and how it was such a big deal that they were bringing top 40 radio back to the Chicago market. It seems so strange that not only would you celebrate such an achievement, but that you'd achieve it in the first place. It'd be like an ice cream parlor hanging a banner outside the door to announce they now carry vanilla. But I suppose if you go back to late 1998, B96 was still a dance-R&B station first and foremost, 100.3 was adult contemporary, and the Mix must have had older stuff in the rotation or been dabbling with alternative, so I guess yeah, 92.7 was the only station to do plain old top 40 at the time. Weird.

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"Bye Bye Bye" and "Closing Time" into "the new alternative station at 101.1." Still working on getting that IP deal signed, I see.

They tried to do a big montage about Q101, but it just went "in 1992..." and then there was dead silence for like 45 seconds, then stupid jokes about Vampire Weekend and Arctic Monkeys. I wish this thing luck.

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What time did they make the switch? I'm at home today, and my alarm has still been set to 101.1 after all these years, and I woke up to some Mackelmore shit around 8:00 AM.

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Top of this hour! They still legally identified as WIQI just before, but they'll be WKQX if not today, then soon.

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So is this just a simulcast of 87.7?

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I guess it is for now, but I was under the impression that it would be a "new station" and not just a simulcast. Maybe they should have waited to pull the trigger on this until they could launch it in earnest.

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Sounds like a Bourbon morning to me.

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Power is always in the hands of the masses of men. What oppresses the masses is their own ignorance, their own short-sighted selfishness.
- Henry George

Just heard a bumper with "put a smile on your face like ultra brite" and I was like "aw shit are they gonna play something off Endtroducing?!?!?!?!" and then they played Lorde.

EDIT: but at least when they play "Home" by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes, they don't cut it off before the "Jade, Alexander" section like XRT does, so they have that going for them, which is nice

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i'll eat my fucking hat the day i can hear a proper lyrical version of "midnight in a perfect world" on major chicago radio. maybe on tannehill's radio show, but that's on a college station. not to mention it's a 5min song and you have to wait an excruciatingly long time for gift of gab to show up and do anything worthwhile.

i'll give you that i could picture something uptempo like organ donor being worthy of play on a radio station.... but then again how much of their target demographic hears that distorted guitar-sounding thing at the beginning and goes "oh my god TURN IT UP THIS IS MY SHIT RIGHT HERE!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

anyways in the spirit of you wishing for endtroducing here's a wholly superior dj shadow / gift of gab collaboration called "count and estimate"

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oh and CH the best-ever dj shadow beat in the history of the world is lateef (latyrx) - the quickening. i remember hating myself for years cuz i didn't jump on this 12"/instrumental for $23 on e-bay circa 99-02, but then later i'd go on to find it randomly sitting there for <$10 at a record store during one of my patrols. b00m. almost as nice as the time i had to lol because i found the wreckoning 12" for $0.99 at the reckless records on milwaukee ave, tho in terms of reckless records stories that's not as fun as the time i found squarepusher's vic acid 12" mistakenly labeled in the "drum and bass" section and walked out of the store stupefied that i had just got the vic acid 12" literally muttering to myself "i got vic acid.... i got vic acid... i got vic acid!!!!" which led to an undercover cop (i presume) cornering me in the convenience store across the street and demanding i repay him for the acid that i ripped him off on the other day (even showing him the vic acid 12" i had in my hand didn't deter him) and he was outside with a couple'a other shady-looking (undercover?) types pointing at my direction and gathering #s so i had to time it perfectly to jump in a passing cab and GTFO.

tl;dr = if you dig dj shadow that song i link up there is an excellent excellent beat that i'd conjecture to guess you might not have heard b4.

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I heard a DJ on 101.1 today introduce a song by the Wombats by saying, "You've probably never heard this shit..."

But the Score guys shy away from saying "douchebag".

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Don't take it personally.

welp i was having one of those existential moments on facebook where i actually go down ~3-4hrs in the "latest news" feed and what do i see but none other than robert feder posting that 87.7 is going to WGN, now with the business of "THE Q" going back to 101.1FM or whatever the intellectual property works out to being.

so yeah, i guess the cumulative airwaves around us needed more Garry and Kap and HAWKS and whatever else is on there other than everyone's darling Nick Digilio(sp) so hey now, here's tipping the cap to the progress that is Chicago ultimately having less choice in the radio airwaves and more simulcasts of AM giants who need to spread the word / cheaply-get-more-advertising-$$$ by flooding our airwaves with the same crap that we know deep down in the pit of our souls that we don't wanna avoid.

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Nick celebrated his 100th show last night SINCE going FT. Dude was on WGN for 25 years until being awarded his own show....sad.

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favrefan said:"Chris Coghlan isn't gonna pay your rent, Jimmy."

It's a short-term solution. The 87.7 end-run won't work after September 2015, unless the FCC then opens up the 87s for FM broadcasting. They should, along with the 85s and 86s, for that matter. Time for more community radio.

It'll probably only be a simulcast of WGN-AM for Cubs and Blackhawks, or Blackhawks when the Cubs play so they don't have to sublease 97.9 or 560. The rest of the time, it'll be WGN-FM with Brandmeier and Tiny and whoever else is on that flop. As for less choice on the air, yeah, I'd prefer that a frequency be used for something better than old Loop retreads, but 87.7 before Q87 was, what, smooth jazz? Fuck smooth jazz! I'd rather have Harry than smooth jazz.

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Sounds like the branding for 101.1 is just going to be "101WKQX," which is kind of a mouthful and isn't even memorable.

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