2000513After undergoing several programming and airstaff change-ups which included personnel, musical direction, uncharted territory in the morning drive paradigm, and a whole new approach to branding and marketing a radio station, Q101 is finally on track to move Alternative radio forward in the 21st Century. Playing a large role in the station’s progression are APD Spike and newly-promoted Brand Manager Tisa LaSorte. Together the two look to push the boundaries of what Alternative radio means in the country’s third-largest radio market with aggressive branding tactics, innovative air talent and great content.
We recently checked in with Spike for an update on how he entered the picture, the players involved with the Q101 overhaul, and an update on the evolution of one of Modern Rock radio’s benchmark outlets.

eQB presents excerpts from the FMQB July Magazine Modern Rock Up Close featuring WKQX “Q101″/Chicago APD Spike

On what drew him to Chicago… Probably the challenge of getting to do more, also.  Mike Sternprovided me the opportunity to do more… It was a bigger market.  It was a station that probably suited my music tastes a little bit better, and was an opportunity for me to work more with air talent than I had… And Emmis is just an awesome company.  I feel the way about Emmis now that I felt about CBS when I first started, that you were at the best place for radio.  They’re very supportive in everything we do, and definitely forward thinkers. I have great support from everyone above me to program this radio station. Tisa LaSorte [Q101 and Loop Brand Mgr.], GM Marv Nyren, [EmmisNational VP/Programming] Jimmy Steal and [Emmis Radio President] Rick Cummings have all been incredibly supportive in everything we’ve done.

On the initial challenges he faced at Q101… The station was, I guess, in a transition period.  They had started the “On Shuffle” thing, I want to say, somewhere between nine months and a year before I got here in an effort to make the station wider to include not just young men but everybody, men and women, and just more listenable…Even up until four to six months ago, we were a little lost musically.  When you’re as wide as we are, it’s hard to feel what’s right and what’s wrong. It’s been a process of finding out what sounds right and what doesn’t; what works for the audience.  When are you pushing them too far in a hard music direction?  When are you pushing too far in the Pop direction?  When are you pushing them too far in the indie direction?  All of those were things that we needed to find out, and find out what the sweet spot of the music was.

On Q101’s musical “sweet spot”… Somehow in Alternative radio, we’ve decided that when too many people like things, they aren’t cool anymore. So bands like All American Rejects and Fall Out Boy and The Killers and even to a certain extent The Fray, once they hit a certain level of popularity we stop playing them and we wonder why our ratings go down. When we decide that we are not going to play bands that are selling millions of records and selling thousands of concert tickets to play bands that are selling thousands of records and hundreds of concert tickets, your audience is going to go down. It’s just going to happen, you are playing to fewer people and because we have out-cooled ourselves, we’ve forgotten how to get ratings…What we are doing badly in Alternative radio and what I am trying to change here at least, is following where the audience is. When Fall Out Boy can come here and do three sold out shows at 7500 a night, there seems to be a lot of audience there. When The Fray can do three sold out shows, there seems to be a lot of audience there. When you take away their other exposure, if you just look at The Fray – they look like a band that would fit here fine. If you just listen to the music, it sounds fine. Just because it went and got popular doesn’t mean we shouldn’t play it…So the sweet spot for us seems to be finding the very biggest of all of the elements of all the different kinds of musical styles that we consist of. Our sweet spot is big artists that a lot of people like.

On Q101’s focus on branding… The Q101 brand needs to mean more than just the air signal.  It’s three things: our online presence – our Web site, which is ridiculous; our on-site presence, and the on air presence. In the future, if you make them all work for each other toward one demographic and sociographic target, when you figure out what that target is, and make sure that these are all pointing to the same image, you’re going to be much more successful in selling your radio station to a client, rather than just selling commercials or a banner ad. Make everything work together, and include texting in that too, especially for 18- to 34-year-old people, whose attentions are so scattered.  If you can hit them from every different angle — you’re kind of surrounding them with both our message and the messages of the companies who advertise with us. 

** QB Content by Mike Bacon **

Also in the July Issue:
Up Close with Queens Of The Stone Age Frontman Josh Homme
The desert songsters have returned with a new record and new/slightly old robotic and refreshing sounding record, Era Vulgaris. Like all great records, it reveals itself to you after repeated listens, and contains more than a few tracks that hit you like anvil in a Wile E Coyote cartoon. Tracks such as the album’s first single, “Sick, Sick, Sick,” “Into The Hollow,” “3’s & 7’s” and the sultry stylings of “Make It Wit Chu” demand immediate respect. “Misfit Love,” “I’m Designer” and “Turning On The Screw” infect slowly and eventually engulf you with an unshakable aural fixation.
We caught up with Queens’ grand maestro, Josh Homme as he and his band of studio sorcerers were set to embark on a round of dates in the U.S. and probed his brain about his band, the new record, recipes and swivel hips.