About six weeks ago, a new radio station with an
intriguing shtick popped up on the Springfield spectrum. ABE-FM, located at
93.9, where WMHX used to peddle soft adult contemporary, made a couple of
tantalizing promises: to play 10,000 songs in a row, not only
commercial-free but also free from the stylistic shackles that define most
station formats. ABE-FM’s tag line: “Abe plays
anything.”
But if you think ABE, or his owners, Capitol Radio
Group, came up with this concept themselves, well, you don’t know
Jack. Created in Canada in 2002, “Jack” is the hottest trend in
radio formatting. Jack stations emulate an iPod set to shuffle, taking
tunes from a large playlist spanning different eras and genres and playing
them in an apparently random order. Instead of having song after song sound
the same, Jack stations purposely plan “train wrecks,” or
juxtapositions of tunes from wildly different decades and dance beats.
Jack stations have sprung up across North America, in
Denver, Dallas, Los Angeles, Seattle, Nashville, Atlanta, Chicago, and
Washington, D.C. Detroit calls its Jack station Doug, and Phildelphia calls
its Jack station Ben. Indianapolis has a country-fied Jack station called
Hank. Whatever they’re called, they feature playlists of former Top
40 hits presented “jockless,” with few commercials and no
deejay chatter.
Leanne Arndt, general manager of Capitol Radio Group,
says ABE-FM is not the copyrighted Jack format but rather a version
customized for Springfield.
“We brainstormed on this and looked at where
the biggest voids were,” she says. ABE-FM’s playlist averages
1,300 tunes.
The Jack format has proven popular, especially with
young adults, and Springfield is no different. “We’ve gotten a
lot of positive response,” Arndt says.
This article appears in May 19-25, 2005.
