Monday, April 27, 2009

Rant - 100.5 Max FM now Hot 100.5

I'm going to go on a bit of a rant today as I'm dealing with some unpleasant realities at the moment. First, Local's Lounge, the only real radio outlet for local bands was canceled from Max FM. Then Max FM changed formats – twice. First to Kung Pao 100.5 – all Chinese music and then to Hot 100.5 – R&B/Pop/Hip-Hop.

Now, I don't know if Hot 100.5 is going to be the final format or not, but even if they go back to a rock format, I don't know if I will listen in. The fact that the people running Max FM trust some numbers-cruncher rather than their own listeners bothers me a lot.

They don't care what the listeners want. They are too busy working the angles in hopes of getting better ratings to care what we listeners want. They fail to understand that you don't get more listeners through stunts or marketing ploys, but by building a relationship with your listeners. You become part of their lives.

Once that relationship is broken it can't easily be fixed, even if Max FM decides to rock again.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

I think its totally screwed up that you would even mention our returning troops in this. The reason Max FM switched formats was that there was no money being made and it was not even rated on the neilson ratings (because its amount of listeners were so low). The number crunchers actually polled thousands of people in the area....and this is what they wanted (including our troops). So instead of you leaving a blog saying that we are letting our troops down, why dont you realize that we are just giving them what they want. Oh yeah....and if a station is not making any money, how do you expect it to function? OF course it wont!

Denise said...

Thanks for your comments. I took them under consideration and re-edited my post.

What I'm really upset over is that with the loss of Max FM, local bands lose their only outlet on radio in Hampton Roads. I wonder where these guys will go now for the exposure they found on Max FM.

Does anyone know if there are any other radio stations that feature local rock talent?

Anonymous said...

All we need is another grabage rap staton around here. I have listened to max fm every morning for like the past 5 years. This is total crap!

Anonymous said...

I agree...the best way to LOSE listeners is to pull crap like this. We already have a station like the crap they are playing now. So much for what the local listeners want...do you honestly think a station like Kung Pao is really what hampton roads wanted on the majority scale....What a shame they let a national poll dictate a local station. It's all chalked up to a sign of the times albeit f'd the hell up.

Anonymous said...

FM 99 has Home Grown on Thursdays, but I am still sad to hear Max FM go.

Denise said...

I'll have to check out "Home Grown" but I still miss Max FM. It's a real shame we lost a good rock station.

Anonymous said...

This is absolute crap! The only station that my husband and I could rely on to play what we wanted to hear and now we have nothing! We could always count on MaxFM in the morning when we didn't want to deal with all the morning talk show garbage, just straight up music. We want MaxFM back! Like someone else had said..."Like we need another rap station around here"!