Word: jacks
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...that passion is being aroused, oddly, by possibly the catchiest, most democratic radio format yet invented. Jack mixes up a lot of '80s music--some classic rock, a slew of one-hit wonders, a few oldies, a touch of Top 40 and a tiny bit of rap. It has surgically removed everything that is annoying about radio. In most markets, Jack is just music--no weather, no traffic, no song IDs--and is completely automated, so there aren't even any wrongheaded DJs to endure. At 1,200 songs, the playlists are three times bigger than average, so it doesn...
...does Jack inspire all the bile? It's not as if it were one of those seemingly hipster products that was actually created after much consumer testing by a conglomerate. Jack has a lovable indie backstory, starting out as one guy's website. In 2000, Bob Perry, a former DJ and station manager who had moved to Connecticut to be near his wife's aging parents, started fooling around with Internet radio. He got some cheap software that allowed him to randomize song order, causing "train wrecks"--ballads followed by headbangers. He put it up as jack.fm and slid...
Instead in 2002 he sold it to an FM station in Vancouver, where it got so huge, it quickly was bought by five other Canadian stations; in April of last year, a station in Denver bought in, and Jack metastasized. Former Vancouver DJ Howie (the Hitman) Cogan, who voices most of Jack's taped promos, is now repped by William Morris, while Perry has become a sought-after station consultant. "My involvement with Jack now is, 'Oh, look, the check just came in,'" he says...
Some of the reasons for Jack's surge are self-evident. Listeners like shorter commercial breaks and more songs. And Jack is centered on the '80s, which is still fascinating kids in high school and college. But the programming is shrewd in the way it affirms the identity of its listeners. At its heart, Jack is a nostalgia station for Generation X, but it disguises that fact with carefully selected obscure tunes (Walking Away by Information Society, Pop Goes the Weasel by 3rd Bass) that make listeners feel erudite and hip. Then there are the laconic, faux-rebellious promos...
Perry brags that unlike previous '80s-based stations that only played rock, Jack mixes the broad array of metal, R&B and synth that truly represented the era. In high school cafeterias, the differences between those genres once defined which lunch table you sat at, but now any song from the era brings back muted, whitewashed memories of youth...