Sean Ross

On April 18-19, 230 stations will take part in the annual Vinylthon fundraiser for radio-student scholarships. This year, there’s one more, WVYL (Vinyl Radio), the official station of Vinylthon, launching at Midnight, April 13 on Live 365.

There’s always hope for new music in mid-April, when new offerings queue up as Song of Summer contenders. Last week, we had new Lady Gaga and uptempo Teddy Swims songs. On Friday, there’s a new Olivia Rodrigo song on the way. Two years ago, we hit Memorial Day with our best field of potential hits in years. Last year, the summer had practically been written off by late May. For now, anyway, it’s hard to create excitement around “new music,” at least for 2Day FM Sydney. Last March, the Australian CHR began promising “hits before they hit” and declared itself in […]

When Triple-A WXRT began its transition in 2020 from one of Chicago’s most-admired stations to one of its most successful, it was still necessary to point out that a lot of unlikely things had happened during COVID. There were success stories in niche/long-listening-span formats from Classical to Classic Country, each of them defying the wisdom that all listeners wanted from radio anymore was “Circles” and “Blinding Lights” every hour.

Can human curation be a difference-maker for music radio? That was the suggestion made earlier this month by Strategic Solutions Research’s Hal Rood, prompted by revelations in the tech publication Wired about a market agency charged with hyping DSP streaming activity. “Radio just got handed an opportunity it hasn’t fully claimed yet,” Rood wrote.

Who can listeners trust to curate new music for them?

Earworms can require a day or two to take hold with me. It might be a song I heard a few days earlier. It might even be a song I merely thought about — maybe I scheduled it while editing a radio-station log. But the earworm waking up this morning was pretty much unavoidable. It was the theme song from WKRP in Cincinnati.

By June 26, 2009, the day after he died, listeners had decided they liked Michael Jackson’s music again.

Olivia Rodrigo wants to have the Song of Summer 2026. She launched her new project with an uptempo single, rather than the epic ballads that had led her last two albums. She released “Drop Dead” just over a month ago, timed so that any initial buzz would carry the song through Memorial Day, although even mid-April can be a dicey proposition for any song if the initial streams disappoint.

When Radioinsight and Ross on Radio reported last month that a half-dozen iHeart Media stations, including WAXQ (Q104.3) New York, were downplaying the word “Classic Rock” in varying ways, it was one of the most-read ROR columns in recent months. It was also one of the most commented-on — both in the column itself and on Radioinsight’s Facebook page, where readers responded both to this article and to their reportage.

The first “why isn’t CHR playing ‘Choosin’ Texas’” article was written by Liveline host Mason Kelter last January, when that song was about three months old, but already phenomenal. Programmer Phil Becker weighed in six weeks ago, asking how the Top 40 PDs who had rejected that song as “not their sound” could so enthusiastically get behind Freya Skye’s “Silent Treatment,” which went top 10 as a song that CHR could own, but with a fraction of the streams.