Independent & Alternative = Extinct?

    Virtually Alternative - July 2000

            You know how the story is supposed to go: first, a proud, locally-owned station carves out a healthy niche for itself, playing interesting, genre-melding music. Next, a huge radio corporation signs on a standard “Alternative” station (with a grander signal and a bigger budget) in the very same market. After that, the original independent sees their cume evaporate and their numbers erode. Finally, the huge radio corporation unceremoniously sucks them up, knocks them out, and life goes on.

            This sad tale has played itself out over and over again since the Telecommunications Bill passes in early 1996. One by one, the fiercely independent radio owners have given in to the standardized Death Stars of the major radio chains. It has happened almost everywhere…

            …but not in Columbus, baby!

            Nope. Last month, CD101 (WWCD) accomplished the unthinkable, right in the capital of Ohio, when their corporate-owned nemesis threw in the proverbial towel. Yep. After a four-year battle, their cross-town rivals became the new home of Jethro Tull and their classis rock cronies, leaving CD 101 as the market’s lone “Alternative” choice once again.

            How could such a thing happen? Well, the answer to that question can be traced all the way back to the beginning of CD101. The station signed on in August of 1990, and one year later, a self-described “audiophile” named Roger Vaughan decided to buy it. Mr. Vaughan, it seems, had spent some time in Washington, DC, where he was exposed to the mighty WHFS. Soon after that he resided in Boulder, where he fell head-over-heels in love with the also-mighty KBCO. When he got back home to Columbus, however, he found that no one was taking the musical risks that he had grown accustomed to. As a result, he bought the fledging WWCD, a local free form station with no ratings and no clue.

            “Roger saw a possibility of folding in the original, harder-edged CD101 with the sounds of the more adult KBCO,” Terry Mowery, CD101’s longtime General Manager, explains. “We discovered, however, that diversity can only get you so far. In fact, we sounded terrible at first. We were blowing off our core, and we floundered for about a year and a half.”

            Vaughan, however, refused to give up on his dream, and the discussion about switching to a hit-oriented format “lasted about 30 seconds,” according to Mowery. “That wasn’t the reason Roger got involved with radio. It might have been the easier thing to do, but there was a lot of music that we thought should be on the air in Columbus. Bands like The Replacements needed a place to be heard, and that was going to be CD101.”

            Instead, the station chose to focus on Adults 30-35 and, in the process, became a true hybrid of the Alternative and Adult Alternative formats. “That’s when we came up with the idea of Adult Rock Alternative,” explains Mowery, “which basically meant lopping off the hardest edge from the free form side and getting rid f the mellowest stuff on the Adult side. We became focused, figured out who we wanted to be, and by 1993, we started to take off.”

            By 1993, CD101 had reached its goal of playing interesting music and getting ratings, rather than settling for one at the expense of the other. “ We were the first Adult Alternative,” contends Mr. Mowery, “we were! We invented it. At that point there was either Triple-A or Alternative, and we merged the two together. We were playing Nirvana, and we certainly weren’t playing the Eagles. We started getting a sellable audience- it was a quality audience, but it also had bulk- we started to make money, we started to make some noise and doggone it, our dream had come true!”

            Things were just ducky for CD101 until 1996, when Congress changed the radio rules. Suddenly, major companies were swapping stations like a bunch of hyperactive kids in a crazed game of Go Fish.

            In early ’97, our heroes found themselves sharing their listeners with a hit-driven station boasting a much better signal. As the new competitor overtook CD101 in the ratings race, the pundits wrote the little guys off. CD101’s reaction? Denial. “We thought, ‘They’re not going to affect us, they’re only playing ’90’s music, they have no personality.’” Mowery says now, shaking his head. “Plus, they weren’t talking about what was going on in Columbus. But within a few months, they were beating us badly. We had Accuratings and we saw our cume conversion rate go from over .400 down to .200. Our core listeners were going to them, our ship was keeling and we had to make some moves.”

            First and foremost, Mowery and Vaughan bumped MD Andy “Andyman” Davis into the Program Director’s chair. Rather than obsess over his station’s gaping ratings holes, however, the new PD chose to direct his attention internally. “People felt a little worn and weary, and we had to address that,” Davis explains. “We had to have a revival, you know? The shine just wasn’t there anymore, and we needed to rub things a different way and try and bring about a rebirth. People were unhappy because things had been so screwy, so we worked on adjusting a few shifts and made an effort to build the morale. We had to stop worrying about what was going on and get back to a teamwork situation.”

            Andyman also made an immediate mark on the station’s musical content. “We thought that, instead of messing around with this female-friendly hybrid of modern rock and Triple-A, we should just probably focus on our strengths. We decided to focus on the average 28-year-old male in Columbus. We also made the decision to really embrace our positioning tagline, which had been and still is ‘Stuff You Don’t Hear Every Day.’ We had to decide exactly what that entailed- and we came up with a pretty good definition, while also keeping the station cume-friendly. We decided to superserve the core, but only in a cume-friendly way.”

            “We basically had the same kind of conversations that we had back in 1991,” Mowery interjects. “We weren’t unique anymore. Suddenly you could get everything we had somewhere else. We knew that we had always stood for uniqueness and that, because of our signal limitations, we couldn’t survive just being another radio station. As a result, we refocused on being different; we did ‘Double Exposures’ on the biggest new albums, we introduced ‘No Repeat Thursdays’ to show off our depth, and we just did a better job of packaging and selling our product. We said exactly what we were, and then we delivered on that consistently. It still meant we were walking the fence. While we’re an Alternative station, we still have a foot in the Adult Alternative world- because that’s who we are and that’s where our difference lies.”

            “It may not have worked right away, ratings-wise,” Andyman points out, “but it certainly worked immediately in this house! We started to let the music do a lot of the talking, and everyone felt there was a revitalization going on. It still took 18 months to see the ratings results, where we felt healthy again, where we got ourselves above that 100,000 cume mark again.”

            That’s when the unthinkable started to happen.

            As CD101 got its act back together again, their corporate rivals were forced to divest some signals. As a result, they moved their Alternative station to a different frequency with a suburban signal- just like CD101’s- and the playing field was suddenly equalized. “Once things were even, we knew we could win,” Mowery says, “and we could do it without giving up our guns. It all came down to who had the better product, so we cut down on the clutter and shined up the bells and whistles. Throughout all of this we kept the same mission statement in mind that we had come up with in 1991: to be both interesting and successful.”

            By late 1998, CD101 was beating their competition in Adults 12+. Their rivals still had a bigger audience, but CD101 was doing a kick-ass job at making their core as happy as clams. First their TSL rose, then a swarm of lost listeners came back. Finally, in June this year, the competition went away as quickly as them came.

            Terry Mowery’s reaction? “Euphoria,” he says, still feeling the magic of the moment. “I felt like an 800-pound gorilla had just climbed off my shoulders. When you think about it, it would have been easy to throw in the towel, or for Roger to sell out- all those things that so many stations have done. Roger said it best, though, when se said, ‘Why would I want to leave this when I’m having so much fun?’ And we all feel that way. We had a passion and a love for this station, and we all had many sleepless nights, but we were able to keep the important people in place and see this thing through.”

            “It was a night of joyous celebration,” agrees Andyman. “David had slain Goliath. The fact is, this huge company signed on an Alternative station in Columbus, OH, their sales people were on the street telling everyone that within six months CD101 would be gone and…well, here we are, man. Here we are."

- Kevin Stapleford

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