3 posts tagged “music”

"As Dustin Hoffman said in the movie Rain Man, "97X--Bam!--The Future of Rock & Roll"...launched our Alternative (Modern Rock) format in September, 1983. Entrepreneurs Doug and Linda Balogh had bought Oxford, Ohio's WOXY 97.7 FM for $375,000 with hopes to try something completely different from the station's struggling Top 40 format. That "something different" was Alternative and Modern Rock, and our archivist's best record-keeping indicates we were the sixth commercial Modern Rock station in the country. On Labor Day weekend in 1983, we kicked off our new format with U2's "Sunday Bloody Sunday."

Over the years, we've accumulated quite a bit of praise from the popular music press including Rolling Stone, Spin, Alternative Press, Esquire, USA Today, Cincinnati Enquirer, Cincinnati CityBeat, Dayton Daily News and countless radio industry publications. But the most important praise to us comes from our listeners, both our best cheerleaders and sometimes harshest critics and without whom none of this would be possible.

September of 1998 marked a new era for 97X, when we starting simulcasting our FM broadcast on the Internet. Listening to Internet radio in 1998 over a 33.6k dial-up connection (56k if you were lucky) was a less than excellent experience, but we had people listening around the country and as far away as the United Kingdom. Every year, our online listenership has doubled and today, we use the Internet to broadcast to tens of thousands of people from around the world. Loyal 97X listeners have reported in from Melbourne to London, Tokyo to Edmonton, Sweden to Nepal, and Anchorage to the South Pole. Thanks to an article in São Paulo's Folha de S. Paulo by Álvaro Pereira Júunior, we have quite the following in Brazil.

In January 2004, after 23 years, the Baloghs announced the sale of the broadcast license and assets of WOXY-FM to First Broadcasting Investment Partners of Dallas. All rights and ownership of the intellectual property of 97X The Future of Rock and Roll, woxy.com and the music library were retained with plans of taking 97X Internet-only. With the deteriorating state of commercial broadcast radio and the growth of broadband Internet access, it seemed like the perfect plan. The search for funding for the project began immediately while a sign-off date of May 13th loomed on the horizon. When Thursday, May 13th came but no funding had been secured, 97X signed off shortly after midnight, thought never to be heard from again.

The following morning can only be described as a Frank Capra moment. In the parking lot while packing our cars with the contents of our emptied desks, we were approached by an acquaintance of our two, anonymous angel investors. On July 16th, after a few months of sorting out paperwork and buying new equipment, 97X signed on once again and began a new life as possibly the first terrestrial radio station to make the move to an Internet-only entity."