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Monday, November 2, 2009

The Christmas format begins to roll out on radio

While there were a handful of holiday flips in October (including some HD2 channels and several holiday stunting flips), many more “All Holiday” music format-flips across the country began this past weekend. Among those, KKSR “Star 95.7” in Washington State’s Tri-Cities-area; Oldies KQLL “Cool 106.1” in Tulsa, OK; Appleton’s AC “Bridge” WROE (94.3); Green Bay’s AC “Breeze” WECB (104.3); Atlantic City Urban AC simulcast WTTH (96.1)/WEZW (93.1); and Central New York’s WZUN-FM (102.1) in Syracuse & Utica’s WUMX-FM (102.5). Terrestrial radio has even more competition than ever in the Holiday music realm: Going all-Christmas on the non-terrestrial radio side is cable-delivered Music Choice’s soft rock channel, and Chicago’s smooth Jazz Internet radio station ChiTownSmoothJazz.com. There’s also AOL Music, programmed by CBS Radio, which offers more than a dozen all-Christmas channels. This morning’s Taylor On Radio-Info reports there are several reasons why stations choose to go with the holiday format: “#1 reason is to capture the feel-good holiday music position before anybody becomes identified as the local ‘Christmas station’ … The #2 reason for going all-Christmas is more strategic than tactical – a format change is coming.” That’s apparently the case in St. Louis with former urban KATZ-FM (100.3).

Tags: KKSR, KQLL, WROE, WTTH, WEZW, WECB, WZUN, WUMX

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