Company News · November 25, 2008

First Listen: New York’s Holiday Radio Battle

By Edison Research

Seeing WCBS-FM New York go into Christmas music on Friday night and not come out wasn’t entirely a surprise. WCBS-FM has been doing a holiday song-of-the-day-type promotion for several weeks now and dropping other hints that they planned to engage WLTW (Lite FM) directly, giving New York a holiday radio battle before Thanksgiving. (WCBS-FM’s Oldies/Classic Hits programming has moved to its HD-2 channel, replacing the Adult Hits format that had been there for the last 18 months.) And sister station WODS in Boston has been successful with Christmas for several years now.
And yet, Oldies has been one of the things that most effectively compete with Christmas in the past, particularly when there’s some excitement about a station being new, as CBS-FM was last year. Until recently, you could also have said that WODS notwithstanding, Oldies listeners tend not to view Christmas as an upgrade from regular programming in the way that AC listeners have; (and there’s increasing evidence that not every AC listener feels that way). On the New York Radio Message Boards, there’s a multiply repeated suggestion that the change was driven by sales, not ratings considerations.
Christmas on CBS-FM is a little different than Christmas in most places. Clear Channel’s Oldies-turned-Christmas stations tend to look and sound pretty similar to their ACs. So does Christmas on WODS. To be sure, there’s a reason for that, after a decade of give-and-take with holiday fomats, there’s now a clear sense of what the hits are. But it’s still nice to think a second successful model could be developed. Listening to CBS-FM this morning, there weren’t a lot of the Christmas novelties that have also become scarce in recent years, but there are enough spikes and alternate versions of the standards from Oldies acts to at least make it a discernable choice from WLTW.
The best thing about CBS-FM as a Christmas station is that it reclaims a lot of the titles that had been effectively selected out of the format over the past decade. As the Soft AC list becomes the national holiday music list, I’d pretty much given up on hearing the O’Jays anywhere besides an Urban AC station. I’ve also seen the Temptations’ “Silent Night” – the ultimate dividing line record between AC and Urban AC – on CBS-FM, although so far just in overnights.
That said, having both Lite FM and CBS-FM in Christmas music would seem to limit an upper-demo listener’s choices. Clear Channel won’t be unhappy if those listeners end up at WKTU or Classic Rock WAXQ (Q104). If WRKS (Kiss FM) repeats its R&B Oldies “12 Days of Kissmas” this year, you can also see that station picking up some listeners who might have otherwise defaulted to CBS-FM.
There’s also the question of how, in a PPM world, listening will be affected by two stations playing “The Little Drummer Boy” by Bob Seger within minutes of each other. Or “Have A Holly Jolly Christmas.” Or one version of “Sleigh Ride” into the stopset and another coming out, as WLTW did this morning. The holiday wisdom for the last few years has been that the hits are the hits and a three-hour turmover on Leroy Anderson doesn’t matter. But as anybody who has seen CHR or Urban research will tell you, things look a little different when there are suddenly two stations with mega-spins involved.
Here’s WCBS-FM at 8 a.m. this morning:
Beach Boys, “Little St. Nick”
Wham, “Last Christmas”
Cadillacs, “Rudolph, The Red-Nosed Reindeer”
Bob Seger, “The Little Drummer Boy”
Burl Ives, “Have A Holly Jolly Christmas”
Fab Four, “Joy To The World”
Elvis Presley, “Winter Wonderland”
Band Aid, “Do They Know It’s Christmas”
Jackson 5, “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus”
Dan Taylor (Morning Show Parody), “Leftovers No. 5”
Brenda Lee, “Rockin’ Around The Christmas Tree”
Harry Connick, Jr., “Winter Wonderland”
O’Jays, “Christmas Ain’t Christmas (Without The One You Love)”
Carpenters, “Home For The Holiday”
And here’s WLTW, also at 8 a.m.
Bob Seger, “The Little Drummer Boy”
Leroy Anderson, “Sleigh Ride”
Carpenters, “Sleigh Ride”
Dan Fogelberg, “Same Old Lang Syne”
Daryl Hall & John Oates, “Jingle Bell Rock”
David Foster, “Carol of the Bells”
Bing Crosby, “It’s Beginning to Look A Lot like Christmas”
Stevie Wonder, “Silver Bells”
Amy Grant, “Winter Wonderland”
Vince Vance & Valiants, “All I Want For Christmas Is You”
Burl Ives, “Have A Holly Jolly Christmas”
John Lennon, “Happy Xmas/War Is Over”
Ronettes, “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus”

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