The JACK format

[ghost of miles]

What do you think of this radio format? I gotta say that so far it bugs the crap out of me whenever I hear it. Given that I'm just on the creaky side of 40, I think I'm part of the targeted demographic, because it's basically what I'd call "new oldies"--dumping the 1950s and 60s for 1970s-1990s. It's inevitable that such a move would happen, and I could happily live for the rest of my life without hearing another early Beach Boys surfing song. Very little 1950s rock appeals to me these days, either. But gawd, I could happily live for the rest of my life without hearing Journey's "Faithfully" followed by Kenny Loggins' "Danger Zone" as well.

I guess I'm not part of the targeted demographic, in a way. I was a teenager when those songs were tearing up the charts, but I was listening to the Smiths, early R.E.M., Husker Du, the Replacements, etc. So what the hell do I know? At this point I'm programming public, not commercial, radio. Maybe JACK will bust out in the major urban markets, or already has. Maybe I'm still convinced that in terms of Top 40, the early 1960s through the early 1970s were a far, far better time than the times that followed. I'd rather listen to a program like my friend Greg Adams'--Rhythm Ranch, a Monday night show on our community station WFHB that plays country, r & b, pop, and more from the 1940s through the 1970s and studiously AVOIDS the super well-known hits. So much good stuff charted that never made it anywhere near the oldies stations.

Anyways, any thoughts on this? I know that NYC's WCBS (correct?) just went to this new format a few weeks ago.

[Alexander]

Well, I know that JACK doesn't use real DJs. I think it's a pretty horrible format, although I like the idea of mixing genres. If I could, I'd do a show that mixes jazz, rock, funk, punk, country, blues, soul, r&b, classical, etc.

[ghost of miles]

Yeah, I just came across a Businessweek article about the format that mentioned the "robo-DJs"--that explains the stupid voice I heard on the Indpls. station that said, "Ten songs in a row? Better than 10 refrigerators in a row." Scintillating on-air banter, that...

COMMENTARY

By Burt Helm

Invasion of the Robo-DJs

"Jack format" radio stations are betting iPod-style shuffled playlists will keep listeners tuned in. Cool idea, but probably not cool enough

The latest recipe for success in broadcast radio? Dump a thousand or so random songs into a playlist. Hit shuffle. Then, more often than not, kill the live DJ and replace him with a computer. The stations' monikers are common male names, like "Bob," "Ben," "Hank," and most commonly, "Jack." Advertisement

This is the so-called Jack format that's riding radio waves all across the U.S. In the last three weeks alone, the format, or a close variant, has debuted on stations in five major metropolitan areas -- Los Angeles, San Diego, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Indianapolis, adding to the half-dozen or so that had switched since Denver inaugurated the format in the U.S. a little over a year ago.

Will the new format be enough to rescue broadcast radio from its creative doldrums? I have my doubts.

The rules guiding a Jack-formatted station are simple: Unlike a typical radio station, which regularly plays 300 or 400 hits of a particular genre, programmers on Jack stations select 700 to 1,000 songs of completely different genres. Then, they sequence them to create what radio programmers call "train wrecks" -- Billy Idol will follow Bob Marley, Elvis after Guns N' Roses, and so on. And Jack stations often (but not always) use a smart-alecky recorded voice, rather than a live DJ, to make short quips between songs.

REBEL RADIO?  Broadcast radio lately has come under increasing fire from critics and competitors for being bland, repetitive, and overly commercial. While traditional broadcasters still dominate market share, new technologies are growing fast.

Last week, XM Satellite Radio (XMSR ) announced it had added 540,000 subscribers in the first quarter of this year alone, bringing its total base to almost 3.8 million. Meanwhile, consumers are increasingly turning off normal radio and clicking into MP3s and streaming audio feeds over the Internet, according to a recent survey by radio consulting and research firm Jacobs Media.

Programmers hope the looser Jack format will show just how edgy and fresh they can be. "We're not going to be constricted by radio rules," says Peter Smyth, CEO of Greater Media, which owns 19 radio stations and debuted its first Jack station, Ben-FM, on Mar. 22 in Philadelphia. "[We're doing] all the things satellite companies say we'll never do."

Listening to Jack is a bit like listening to an iPod set on shuffle. Sandy Sanderson of Canadian media company Rogers Communications (RG ), who first developed the format for a Rogers station in Vancouver in late 2002, says he didn't initially have an iPod in mind, but admits there are similarities. And many think this is one of the keys to the Jack format's appeal, especially as broadcast stations compete with MP3s, Internet feeds, and satellite radio for consumers' ears.

HIT PARADE.  "It's part of a real shift in how people consume media" says Mike Stern, programming director for alternative rock station Q101 in Chicago. On Apr. 1, Q101 "jacked up," its format. While it still plays solely alternative rock, it tripled the size of its playlist to include selections from the last 20 years, not just the latest hits. "It used to be if you wanted to rent a movie, for example, you went to the Blockbuster (BBI ) and there were 3,000 titles. Now you can go to Netflix (NFLX )" and choose from 40,000, says Stern. "Now, instead of having a 6-CD changer in your car, you get an iPod."

But if the Jack format is an iPod, it's everyman's iPod. The playlist at a Jack station is generated by computer, but sometimes tweaked by human hands for maximum effect. The one rule of Jack is that while songs can be from any genre and line up in any order, all must have been Top 40 hits at some point in the last 30 years. So, paradoxically, while the mix is eclectic, the songs themselves are pretty predictable.

A couple of weeks ago, when I was in Los Angeles, without a familiar radio station to turn to, I tuned into 93.1 Jack-FM, an Infinity Broadcasting-owned station that switched to the format on Mar. 19. My reaction? Jack-FM beats most normal radio stations. With less talk and more music it feels like there are fewer ads.

The format does keep you listening -- if sometimes only out of faith that the next song will be completely different. And if you've heard some of the songs a million times, there's consolation in the probability that the million times came years ago. In that way, it's just short of genius how the format kept me patiently sitting through several songs I've never really liked.

CAR CRASH.  But the "train wrecks" between songs aren't as surprising and refreshing as promised. Listening online to the Denver station, most often a vaguely familiar '80s pop song would collide with a sort-of-familiar '70s rock ballad. Somewhere, surely, a standard-format programming executive was going into a cataleptic fit.

To my ears it was neither that jarring nor interesting. Because many of these stations previously carried the '70s rock format, the playlist seems to be anchored in that genre. It often felt like I was listening to the soundtracks of several car commercials in a row.

While Jack stations are generating a lot of buzz right now, it's still too early to tell how well they'll do in the long-run. For many of the newest stations to employ the format, ratings aren't even available. The format's veterans have seen good, if not phenomenal, results.

The U.S.'s oldest Jack station, NRC Broadcasting-owned KJAC 105.5 in Denver, has moved up from 23rd place to 16th in its market in just over a year, according to Arbitron ratings. It maintains a 2.4% share of the Denver market (Denver's No. 1 station, newsradio KOA, has a 6.9% share). Infinity's Dallas station, which has been on the Jack beat since July, 2004, ranks 12th overall but is first with the 25- to 54-year-old demographic, says a company representative.

Will these and the other stations continue to climb, or will the novelty wear off for others, as it did for me? We still don't know, Jack.

Helm is a reporter for BusinessWeek Online in New York

[mgraham333]

My car has 40k miles on it. So does its CD player.

I occassionally listen to the university's classical station.

The JACK format does sound interesting, but probably not enough for me to turn control of the music over to someone else. I think I do a pretty good job.

[Alexander]

See, my iPod reflects my musical tastes, so when it's set on shuffle I get a real mix. I'll have Stan Getz followed by Rage Against the Machine followed by Mahalia Jackson followed by OutKast followed by Glenn Gould followed by a Monty Python skit followed by Bob Marley or Black Uhuru followed by the Who. This, to me, is a truly eclectic mix. Sticking a bunch of top 40 songs from the 70s, 80s, 90s, etc isn't exactly mixing it up except to those who have led a very sheltered existence. "What?! The Police next to BTO? Have they gone mad?"

[Rooster_Ties]

There's a JACK-FM here in Kansas City, and my wife said she saw in the paper yesterday that it was suddenly the #1 station in the area -- after only having been on the air with that format for less than 6 months.

It's not the worst thing I've ever heard (not by a long shot), but nothin' I'd spend much time with either. No DJ's is a bit of a plus (at least over stupid ones), but the station has absolutely no soul, whatsoever.

Fortunately there's a GREAT alternative Modern Rock station here in Kansas City, and when I've got the radio on - that's pretty much the only thing I listen to. Their DJ's are down-to-earth but hip, and they're always talkin' current events, including plenty of political and social stuff.

I never dreamed I'd find a commercial radio station I could stand, let alone love -- but 96.5 The Buzz has proven me wrong.

Here's what they're playing these days...

CLICK HERE to see current play-list.

[Guest]

Read this not too long ago. Thought it wasa somewhat interesting take on this whole phenomenon.

"The Jack You Know, And The Jack You Don't"

[Jazz Kat]

I must of missed this thread, but all I have to say is, it's more like Jack Shit! I used to love that station. My dad would always listen to it, and it was cool to see on Wed, nights what year they would play the hits from. Past memories I guess..

[sal]

Thanks for starting this thread....I was wondering what this new JACK FM radio station that just showed up in Chicago was all about.

I'm not much of a fan.

[Kalo]

I don't know Jack.

Wait, that came out wrong.

I wasn't aware of this format until reading about it here, but it strikes me as a pretty predictable step in radio evolution. It sounds like it'd be more interesting to listen to than many "oldies" or "classic rock" formats, what with the expanded playlist and genres rubbing against each other, but still not something I'd search out.

[Jazz Kat]

Standard radio has turned to shit! I'm all for XM...

[Brad]

I hadn't heard of this until now but sounds pretty dumb. I mostly listen to jazz. Why would I want to hear jazz, then rap, then rock, etc. Boring!

[Jazz Kat]

Well you won't hear that on Jack. It's mostly just pop and rock from the 70's-90's. It's nothing revolutionary.

[Brad]

There's an article about Jack Radio in tomorrow's NYT. As soon as I can get it, I will post it.

[7/4]

July 17, 2005

Jack and Bob and Hank and Ben: Meet Radio's Hottest Nonentities

By BEN SISARIO, NYT

HOWARD COGAN is "Jack," the voice of a new radio format that has sprouted all over the country in the last year with an iPod-like shuffle of songs, the occasional snarky voice-over and not much else.

Mr. Cogan has also been "Bob," Jack's biggest competitor.

In short, he is the real person behind some of the nonpersonalities that have replaced real personalities to address radio's personality crisis.

Got it?

Suddenly radio is awash in monosyllabic new personae - not just Jack and Bob, but also Dave, Hank, Ben and Max, most of whom are heard in a cycle of prerecorded snippets all day and night between blocks of music.

Created in Canada and exported to the United States only 15 months ago, Jack is by far the most widespread new nonperson in the bunch, heard on 18 stations here. But competitors and imitators are proliferating. Right behind with about 10 stations is Bob, followed by a ragtag bunch of Dougs, Mikes, Simons and Hanks. (There is a woman, Alice, but that's the name of a more standard alternative format.)

The pseudopersonalities may vary, but they're all part of an effort to introduce variety, boost ratings and cut costs. The stations that use these formats play hit songs from the last three decades, sometimes four or five times as many songs as on most commercial stations. The formats also give stations an identity when real radio personalities are given the ax - as happened most prominently to Cousin Brucie, a k a Bruce Morrow, of the oldies station WCBS-FM in New York, which got Jacked just last month.

Mr. Cogan and others like him are skilled voice-over actors who, while a nearly constant presence on the stations, have no connection to the music: the songs are chosen by the station's program directors, with some help from outside consultants, as has been the usual practice for decades. Thanks to corporate consolidation and shortened playlists, the influence of disc jockeys on what songs get played on the radio was weak even before the advent of Jack and his brothers.

But program directors and analysts say the voice-over identities are better than D.J.'s at making stations memorable to listeners when they fill out quarterly audience surveys.

And though the Jack figures may not be real people, they do have personalities - sort of. "If we do our jobs well," said Rob Barnett, the president of programming for Infinity Broadcasting, which has nine Jack stations, "then Jack is a persona that is dedicated to having fun, both at the sometimes uptight nature of radio programming, and having fun with popular culture."

At WCBS, Jack is a voice of sarcasm and ennui, mostly untouched by current events; he does not identify songs, read news or give traffic or weather reports. In a self-deprecating shrug of a tone, he plugs the station constantly ("It's like an iPod, only the batteries never run out") and now and then spouts a politically incorrect remark ("Maybe if you stopped saying 'I don't speak English,' you'd understand me").

Bob, whose stations favor more current music, is even milder, seeming almost polite as he refers to himself, as Jack does, in the third person. ("If you think there's something he should play, send us a note. If he likes it, Bob'll play it.")

When a new Jack or Bob or Mike station enters a market, there tends to be a spike in ratings. But according to a new study by the ratings service Arbitron and Edison Media Research, Jack and Bob face two problematic trends. At many such stations the audience size has diminished as the novelty of the format wears off, and the time each person spends listening to the station - an important statistic for advertisers - is fairly low, suggesting that people tune in for the fun of the songs but tune out in a short time for what other stations offer: on-air personalities and local news, perhaps.

"What you end up with is a lifeless station," said Robert Unmacht, a consultant at iN3 Partners in Nashville.

The D.J. firings have drawn criticism from the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, which represents announcers. And at WCBS in New York, the abrupt format switch brought street protests and appeals from Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Senator Charles E. Schumer. Many Jack and Bob stations that began broadcasting without D.J.'s have gradually phased them back in after several months, and Mr. Barnett, the Infinity programmer, said he might introduce "some form of personality" to Jack stations as they mature.

Still, the almost-anything-goes eclecticism of the format, sometimes called adult hits, seems to appeal to listeners accustomed to scanning through thousands of MP3's at a time. "Variety has now become a niche," said Howard Kroeger, a programmer in Winnipeg, Manitoba, who helped create the Bob format in 2002 after he went to a 40th-birthday party and found that his crowd had tired of the narrower classic-rock format. They wanted newer songs - late-70's one-hit-wonders, stars from the early MTV era - and they wanted a broad selection of them.

Radical juxtapositions of sounds, like Twisted Sister following Barry White and Van Halen going straight into the O'Jays - segues once abhorred in the radio business as "train wrecks" - are now deliberately cultivated by programmers drawing from decades of Top 40 lists.

Mr. Cogan, 40, the voice of Jack, is based in Toronto and has been with the Jack franchise since it was begun in Vancouver in 2002. A voice-over actor for Canadian television and radio ads, he developed the Jack manner using the "undersell" approach of TV commercials, the opposite of the usual stentorian bombast of radio. "I said, maybe we should try this on radio," he said, "as opposed to where everybody is doing the oversell, dramatic 'voice of God' all the time."

Mr. Cogan described Jack's attitude as "a little indifferent and even." He added: "He doesn't get too excited. He's unaffected by life."

Jack and Bob's imitators include Ben, in Philadelphia (WBEN-FM), which aims to attract women by playing plenty of Cyndi Lauper and Matchbox 20; Hank, in Indianapolis (WENS-FM), which applies the Bob format to country (C. W. McCall to Mary Chapin Carpenter); and others whose personalities are more difficult to discern, like Max in San Francisco, Mike in Boston and Simon in Greensboro, N.C.

Two months ago SparkNet, which licenses Jack to stations in the United States and Canada, filed a lawsuit against Bonneville, a station owner, alleging trademark infringement: SparkNet says Jack's slogan, "Playing what we want," was cannibalized into "Whatever we want" and similar phrases on four of Bonneville's stations. A hearing is scheduled for next week in Chicago.

Mr. Barnett and other Jack proponents say the format is a malleable enough to be adapted to the tastes of any city, leading to regional variations: New York's Jack fits in more hip-hop, for example, playing songs like Digital Underground's "Humpty Dance" that don't turn up often on other Jacks.

Each station writes many of its own Jackisms, which led to an odd political showdown last month between Jack and Mayor Bloomberg after The New York Post reported that the mayor, a fan of WCBS and Cousin Brucie, said, with an expletive, that he would never listen to the station again. By noon that day, Jack had responded: "Hey, Mayor Bloomberg. I heard you took a shot at us in The Post. What's with all the swearin' like a sailor? Fleet week is over. It's just music."

So far, the mayor has declined to reply.

[ghost of miles]

Ugh. No soul in that machine.

[Brad]

7/4, how do you get those articles before the publication date. I've tried before to no avail.

[7/4]

7/4, how do you get those articles before the publication date.  I've tried before to no avail.

←

There was a link on the main page, now I can't even find it.

Maybe someone put up the link too early?

[ghost of miles]

7/4, how do you get those articles before the publication date.  I've tried before to no avail.

←

There was a link on the main page, now I can't even find it.

Maybe someone put up the link too early?

←

A Jack-attack?

Edited July 16, 2005 by ghost of miles

[7/4]

7/4, how do you get those articles before the publication date.  I've tried before to no avail.

←

There was a link on the main page, now I can't even find it.

Maybe someone put up the link too early?

←

A Jack-attack?

←

Another Karl Rove trick.

[Michael Fitzgerald]

OK, I think I have experienced this thing now. Did a lot of distance driving in the past week and heard stations called "The River" and "The Bay" and something else I think. Format seemed to be the same. The repetition was striking - Jackson Browne's "Doctor My Eyes" is something I hadn't heard on rock radio in probably 10 years or more. I heard it twice in two hours, switching between stations. Same for "Stairway To Heaven". Both those used to be HEAVY favorites on FM but the NYC classic rock programming doesn't favor them apparently.

No announcements of artists, tunes, anything. Just occasional "100.3 The River" or whatever it was and some hype about "more music".

I think it's a bad thing.

Mike

[Brad]

OK, I think I have experienced this thing now. Did a lot of distance driving in the past week and heard stations called "The River" and "The Bay" and something else I think. Format seemed to be the same. The repetition was striking - Jackson Browne's "Doctor My Eyes" is something I hadn't heard on rock radio in probably 10 years or more. I heard it twice in two hours, switching between stations. Same for "Stairway To Heaven". Both those used to be HEAVY favorites on FM but the NYC classic rock programming doesn't favor them apparently.

No announcements of artists, tunes, anything. Just occasional "100.3 The River" or whatever it was and some hype about "more music".

I think it's a bad thing.

Mike

←

It indeed is a bad thing but look at the state of our culture where pap like Desperate Housewives attracts audiences or all these reality shows. What does that tell you. I'm not trying to be arrogant but sometime I feel that people like us are the last respository of culture in this country.

[Adam]

There's a JACk station in Los Angeles now, and every time I check it out it's playing a boring MOR tune from the 70s or 80s. Never listen to it.

The good radio station with that idea is Indie 103.1 here in LA, but they aren't following the "jack" idea, just the "eclectic mix" part of it, but with a better song selection. A real eclectic alternative mix, with healthy amounts of good punk. And Steve Jones, formerly of the Sex Pistols, has a show on which he plays just about anything, from absurd pop to scathing metal, one-off jokes, and plenty of modern stuff as well. Not a perfect station, but good enough to shake up KROQ.