A Guardian piece on the Jack FM radio format that’s been invading America of late.
I had quite a good listen to the Dallas version of this service when I was there a couple of months ago. In the States you see many more posters for local radio stations anyway, and although I’d heard a little about the format before I was intrigued by it.
As the article says, there are basically no DJs, although this can vary by station. There certainly weren’t any on the Dallas version, which, incidentally, you can listen to on the web – a rare thing in American music radio. So it’s back to back hits from a variety of decades.
“Playing what we want” is their strapline and it’s certainly true that the music mix is indeed wide and varied. They have a station voice who could be described as “snarky” who utters various station straplines occassionally, but the whole thing is run off a playout system and beyond an engineer and maybe someone to upload new tracks onto the computer the station is probably just manned by ad sales people. On the Dallas affiliate, even the ads come around relatively infrequently, and the snarky guy almost apologises for them interrupting the non-stop music flow, but explains that they have to pay the bills.
There’s no news, no weather, no travel. Just music.
All in all, an interesting concept, but aside from on DAB, not one that’s likely to see the light of day here very soon. It’s exactly the sort of thing that Ofcom turns its nose up. Where’s the locality in a format like that?