105.3 MHz
I like 80’s music. My highschool years were during the 90’s, and, like seemingly so many others, my musical nostalgia reaches instead into the decade before. I hate music from the 90’s. I’m not going to go into the reasons, since I probably don’t have any, but for whatever cause, likely my age, I think that 80’s new wave is pretty rad.
When I first brought a car to Atlanta and started listening to the radio in 2001, there was a station on 105.3, WMAX, that broadcast 80’s music. I thought that was pretty neat, and several of my friends who grew up in the 90’s also thought it was pretty neat. I think the failure of WMAX was due to a poor understanding of their demographic. The ads, which included things about home mortgages and how freezing your family’s DNA is the only way to be safe, were mostly targetted to people in their 30’s, people who probably hated 80’s music because they had to listen to that crap all through high school. The 80’s station didn’t last very long, and sometime while I was still at Tech it switched to a talk format.
I don’t understand why anyone at Clearchannel thought that starting another talk radio station was a good idea. Morning shows are obnoxious enough, and for people who want more crap like that and less music, there’s already an entire world of AM radio to fill their needs. Talk radio does not benefit from being broadcast in stereo. The talk radio station didn’t stick around very long, and I remember that after a while it started to play 80’s music at night, even using the same promo recording as with the earlier format, but this eventually died away as Clearchannel stopped caring about the station at all and the 80’s gave way to whatever music they could license, mostly 90’s alternative, which slowly took over the talk shows before another format change.
In 2004, 105.3 FM switched to musica Latina, and a little while after that changed their letters to WVWA. It wasn’t the polka-sounding Mexican music that already fills some stations around here, and I remember hearing from dcantrell that his Colombian then-boss was excited that there was finally some non-Mexican Latino music in the area. I had, of course, stopped listening to the station long before then, but I kept the frequency on one my radio’s memory buttons both out of the hope that they’d eventually switch back to being an 80’s station and the entertainment of all the frequent format changes. WVWA didn’t disappoint as far as the latter.
A couple of years ago, WVWA moved to 105.7 MHz, which had previously been occupied by a 60’s and 70’s channel I remember being advertised on the old 80’s channel. 105.3 was taken by WBZY, “The Buzz,” an alternative rock station competing with the Susquehanna-owned WNNX. WBZY was previously broadcast on 96.7 MHz, which I guess was a lower powered station or something. I found the new format pretty uninteresting, so I continued not to follow it.
Recently, 105.3 changed formats yet again. This time it’s Mexican. All tubas and trumpets. I wonder how long it’ll last.