Thursday Rocks: Houston Radio Stations and 2 Songs of Awesome

Posted by bethany on October 8, 2009 · Leave a Comment

Houston radio stations take forever to play new music. I’m calling you out, 104.1 KRBE, because you’ve always been guilty of delaying new music, for whatever reason I can’t find. Then, once you get a song into rotation, you play it for-freaking-ever. It’s like you want to play songs in an intense, unrelenting concentration so that we begin to loathe them. And don’t get me started on the amount of commercials you play. Or on Roula. Roula is a complete blog topic in her own right. I like her at times, but at others, she’s just annoying. Ryan Chase? He’s a bit of a prick, and truth be told the only redeeming personality on the morning show is Special K. If you gave him the morning show? Oh, you’d have at least two new faithful listeners. Special K is the only thing that makes that radio show great. As for the other DJs, one of them, whose name I can’t even BOTHER to learn is just an annoying prick to your listeners. Every time someone calls in, he treats them with such a lack of disrespect and rudely makes fun of them – EVERY TIME. His holier than thou attitude is enough to induce eye-rolling.

Hot 95.7, you may be the new kid on the block, but I can’t figure out your programming. Are you dance hits? Are you top 40? Are you seriously schizophrenic with dissociative identity disorder? Don’t know what you want to be, but know you may sort of, kind of, maybe possibly, want to be Houston’s answer to 104.1 KRBE? I hear you, or, rather I want to hear you, if you would just get a clear format together and avoid OVERLY annoying DJs – the regular annoying DJs are just fine.

The point is, Houston is the fourth largest city in the country. I recognize that I’ve always snapped to things about a split second quicker than most people (excepting recent trends in heels, which I just.refuse.to.except as horrifically overpriced ugly shoes that were beaten with the ugly stick before being slapped by some overpriced sole and given a “label” name). I recognize that I go looking for things before they’re popular, and I’m often discouraged because I’m told to come back “tomorrow” or I have to hunt and dig around for it. This is why online shopping became a huge bonus – no more “tomorrows”. However, I think if you run a radio station in the fourth largest city in the nation, you have a responsibility to those people that listen to you, particularly when they’ve been listening to you for over 25 years. I’m continually flabbergasted that the Internet has only confirmed what I knew for years: radio stations in Houston take forever to play new music. Furthermore, if THEY don’t like it, they won’t play it, regardless of what the people want to hear or call in to request. (Yet they wonder why people are dissatisfied with the product they are producing?)

Does anyone else have this problem with their local radio station – or, if you live in Houston, do you feel the same way?

2 Songs of Awesome (I won’t be hearing on radio soon):

Glee’s Version of Alone (Kristen Chenoweth and Matthew Morrison):