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98.7 Kiss FM to merge with long-time rival WBLS in move that shakes up NYC radio landscape
The two will become one station and broadcast with WBLS call letters at 107.5

By David Hinckley / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Thursday, April 26, 2012, 11:49 AM

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After 30 years as spirited and often ferocious rivals, WBLS (107.5 FM) and WRKS (98.7 FM, Kiss-FM) will become one.

In a turn as sudden and stunning as the Yankees merging with the Mets, the city's two adult urban radio stations announced in a joint press release Thursday that they will become "One Family, One Station."

Kiss and WBLS began simulcasting at 10 a.m. Thursday, starting with a tribute to the 30-year legacy of Kiss.

As of 12 a.m. Monday they will become a single station at 107.5 FM, under the WBLS call letters.

It is likely this news will not please all listeners, many of whom feel there are already too few black media voices in the city.

The merger is part of a major reshuffling triggered when Disney agreed to acquire 98.7 FM from Emmis.

The complicated $96 million deal essentially lets Disney lease 98.7 FM as of Monday morning, when it will start simulcasting ESPN radio there. ESPN radio is now heard on the weaker 1050 AM signal.

Disney had been thirsting for an FM signal so it can better challenge CBS Radio's all-sports WFAN (660 AM).

A key factor in this new deal is that WRKS and WBLS have both had financial problems, at the stations themselves and with their parent companies.

Emmis last year also sold its 101.9 FM frequency in New York.

WBLS was recently acquired by YMF Partners after its parent company Inner City Broadcasting went into bankruptcy. This had led to considerable speculation whether YMF would sell WBLS or change its format.

It was expected that any move to change the WBLS format to something other than urban, which launched in 1971, would have met strong community resistance.

In several ways Thursday's move is a classic case of two companies in a shaky financial position deciding they would be stronger if they worked together as one.

Still, the merger changes the landscape of urban radio dramatically, since adult urban listeners now have one station instead of two.

Both WBLS and WRKS have been the top-rated station in the city at various times, and even in low periods they have routinely averaged well over a million listeners apiece per week.

As for hosts, the merger will integrate them starting Monday.

Steve Harvey's syndicated show, now heard on WBLS, will continue in the morning.

Shaila from Kiss will do middays, 10 a.m.-3 p.m., Jeff Foxx from WBLS will do 3-7 p.m., and Lenny Green from Kiss will do 7 p.m.-midnight.

That means Tom Joyner and Michael Baisden of WRKS, among other hosts, will be gone.

Since the WRKS name is also disappearing, the two stations are jointly holding a "celebration of the legacy of Kiss-FM" all weekend.

Over the years Kiss has often emphasized the heritage of black music, and has hired hosts like Isaac Hayes. In the 1990s it launched a "classic soul" format that shot it to the top of the ratings for several years.

In recent years it has slumped, however, and Emmis Chairman Jeff Smulyan Thursday blamed some of that on Arbitron's switch to a new ratings system, the Personal People Meter (PPM).

PPM replaced the old "diary" system, where participants wrote down their listening, with an electronic recording device.

Almost all black and ethnic stations saw a dramatic drop in their ratings under the PPM system. A stream of protests and litigation have led to recent agreements that Arbitron would increase its efforts to reflect all listening fairly.

Meanwhile, however, many black and ethnic stations have warned that the lower ratings plus the general economic recession have decimated their ad revenue and put them in serious financial trouble.

Smulyan echoed that caution Thursday, saying in a release that "recent changes in the way radio ratings are measured made it very difficult for us to find success with Kiss FM."

Whatever the reasons, New York will wake up Monday morning with one fewer radio station serving urban listeners.



Read more: [www.nydailynews.com]

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Mr. Magic, Disc Jockey for Early Hip-Hop, Dies at 53

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Mr. Magic, right, with Grandmaster Caz on WHBI in 1981.


Mr. Magic, whose panache and persistence in bringing once-reviled rap to mainstream radio in the 1980s helped pave the way for the breakout of hip-hop culture, died on Friday in Brooklyn. He was 53.

The cause was a heart attack, said Tyrone Williams, his manager and producer.

Mr. Magic, born John Rivas, was the first host on commercial radio to devote a program exclusively to rap when his “Rap Attack” began broadcasting on WBLS-FM in New York in April 1983. Disco and funk were then fading, and rap was emerging as a rebellious new art form in the streets, housing projects and parks of New York City.

But many radio stations and music executives were wary of the frank explosiveness of the new music. Mr. Magic played a role similar to that of Alan Freed in popularizing rock ’n’ roll in the 1950s.

“Magic was the guy who carried a flag for the music on the radio, exactly as Freed had done for rock ’n’ roll,” said Bill Adler, a former director of publicity for Def Jam Recordings.

Mr. Magic looked the part of a rap impresario, wearing rings on every finger and gold rope chains. He favored a sharkskin suit.

In the 1970s Mr. Magic was an itinerant disk jockey in Brooklyn, and a few small labels were starting to release rap records. He bought some late-night time on a New York public-access radio station, WHBI (now WNWK), to broadcast the new music. A few others were doing the same thing on that and other noncommercial stations.

Mr. Williams said it was a lucrative concept: the station charged $75 an hour, and he and Mr. Magic charged advertisers $100 a minute. But their larger motive was to demonstrate a growing appetite for the music that created the culture of hip-hop, manifested in fashion, advertising, dance and other fields. A following grew.

“In no time at all a star was born,” went “Magic’s Wand,” a 1982 song by the rap group Whodini.

Mr. Magic’s big breakthrough came when WBLS-FM, a larger, mainstream New York station, decided to take a chance on rap, starting in April 1983. Soon Mr. Magic was engaged in spirited competition with a rap show on the station KISS-FM hosted by a D.J. who called himself Kool DJ Red Alert.

Mr. Magic gathered a sort of hip-hop collective that included artists like Big Daddy Kane, Biz Markie, Roxanne and Kool G Rap, and was called the Juice Crew. (Mr. Magic was Sir Juice.) Red Alert was affiliated with a rap group called Boogie Down Productions.

The two sides staged elaborate battles, recording songs as insults to respond to taunts from the other side. The exchanges were wildly popular, on and off the air.

John Rivas was born in the Bronx on March 15, 1956. In a 1995 interview with Hiphopmusic.com, he called himself something of a hoodlum as a youth, but by the time he was in his early 20s he had a van and was working as a mobile D.J. He also worked at an electronics store, where he gave up-and-coming musicians discounts on speakers.

In her book “Rap Music and Street Consciousness” (2002), Cheryl L. Keyes wrote that WBLS assigned Mr. Williams, a sportscaster known as Fly Ty, to be Mr. Magic’s manager. Marley Marl was assigned to be his sound engineer, but he soon came to be called the Engineer All Star for his provocative mixing — what the three called “the dirty basement sound.”

Many rappers they presented on the radio did not have record contracts, much less fame. That came later, often abundantly.

Together, the three toured the country to do what were often the first rap shows on many stations. They then sent tapes by mail to the stations so they could do more shows.

In 1985 KDAY in Redondo Beach, Calif., became the first radio station in the country to adapt an-all rap format.

Mr. Williams said that in 1984, WBLS wanted to abandon the rap show and offered Mr. Magic the chance to host a show playing softer music.

“If I stop playing, rap will die,” Mr. Magic said, and returned to WHBI. He came back to WBLS the next year and stayed until 1989. He then worked for WEBB in Baltimore until 1992. In 2000 he left to work for WQHT in New York, a station known as Hot-97.

For more than six years, he had been unable to get another show, Mr. Williams said. “I watched Magic become sadder, thinner and upset,” he said. Mr. Williams said that at the time of his death Mr. Magic was negotiating to return to WBLS.

Mr. Magic was separated from his wife, Lisa Rivas. He is also survived by his sons John Jr. and Jabar, and his daughter, Domonique Rivas.

Mr. Magic was often described as arrogant, although his on-the-air manner was smooth and warm. When he met Magic Johnson, the basketball great, he said, “The world is not big enough for two Magics.”

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Kiss-FM, R.I.P.

On Thursday Kiss-FM announced that after 30 years, it would stop broadcasting on 98.7 FM and join forces with WBLS, its longtime rival in the "adult urban contemporary" radio format in New York City. The stations will merge under the motto "One Family, One Station, Our Voice," with several Kiss-FM personalities migrating to WBLS's roster of hosts.

Although all the talk of "merging" and "coming together" sounds nice, here's what's really happening: Kiss-FM is dead. Parent company Emmis Communications, who also owns Hot 97 and 18 other stations around the country, sold Kiss-FM's frequency to ESPN in a deal worth $96 million. Emmis executives say that the ratings show there simply isn't room in the market anymore for two "adult urban" stations. As of Monday, there will be only one spot on the dial for fans of old-school soul and R&B slow jams: 107.5 WBLS.

In recent years, Kiss-FM was the kind of station that played O'Jays "For The Love of Money," Whitney Houston's "I Wanna Dance With Somebody", and a new Beyoncé track, back to back. It was a mix of soul, funk, R&B and disco catered primarily to older Black listeners, and a welcome respite from canned pop playlists during a long commute. But Kiss-FM's importance in radio history goes beyond today's throwback programming. Once upon a time, it was the very first station in the US to give fringe genre known as hip-hop a chance on primetime radio, helping to change the flavor of American pop culture forever.

Kiss-FM was born in 1981, when a rock station called WXLO decided to move to 98.9 and reinvent itself as a Black Top 40 station under the call letters WRKS, which it branded with big red pair of lips. The station's ratings slumped for the first few years until a young African-American program director named Barry Mayo began to go off-script by experimenting with playing hip-hop, at that time still an underground sound not thought to have much commercial potential. He gave a weekend mix show slot to DJ Red Alert, a member of Afrika Bambaataa's Zulu Nation crew.

For hip-hop heads who came of age in the 1980s, Red Alert's show was one of the only venues for discovering new tracks. "In those days, there was no hip-hop on the radio in the morning or afternoon," says Bobbito García, a hip-hop DJ who hosted a popular show on 89.9 FM in the '90s. "As a young adult, I would sit there every weekend when Red's show was on with a tape and a cassette recorder with my finger on the record button. That show, for me, was the blueprint for what a hip-hop radio show could be."

While Red Alert's show remained important to hip-hop's hardcore fans, Kiss-FM's real innovation was to mix rap records into their playlists during peak "drive-time" hours. "It's one thing to play it at night; it's another thing to play it during the day," says author Dan Charnas. "Barry Mayo changed everything when he put Run-DMC's 'Sucker MC' on rotation."

In his book on hip-hop business history, The Big Payback, Charnas tells the story of a radio war between Barry Mayo and Frankie Crocker, the celebrity DJ and program director at WBLS famed for occasionally riding into Studio 54 on a white stallion during the disco heyday. WBLS was the country's first Black-owned radio station (its call letters originally stood for "Black Liberation Station") and it dominated New York's radio market in the 1970s, largely though Crocker's outsize personality and devoted fanbase. Mayo, new to his radio job and hoping to build some good will, tried to introduce himself to Crocker one day while backstage at the Beacon Theater. Crocker completely snubbed him, leading Mayo to develop a deep personal grudge against the star DJ. That night, Mayo vowed to himself to unseat Crocker as the king of Black radio. In the years that followed, the stations' DJs would hurl insults at each other on-air, while the two program directors jockeyed to stay one step ahead of each other by spinning the latest records.

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In the end, Run-DMC became Mayo's secret weapon. Mayo didn't like hip-hop, but was willing to give anything a try in order to beat Frankie Crocker. The first time he played Run-DMC's 1983 record "It's Like That", the phone lines lit up instantly with listeners requesting it again. After that, rap records became a mainstay for the station. It wasn't a coincidence that in the summer of 1984, Kiss-FM became the highest rated station in New York. Mayo had won, and in the process, he proved that hip-hop could work on the radio. "Basically, this personal rivalry ended up leading to an explosion of innovation. The war between Kiss and WBLS created the golden age of hip-hop, effectively," says Charnas.

Kiss-FM continued to sprinkle hip-hop onto the airwaves until 1994, when Hot 97 switched from playing pop to an all-rap format, prompting its owner, Emmis Communications, to buy up Kiss and change the programming to classic soul and R&B in order to squash the competition. In the years that followed, R&B celebrities from Roberta Flack to Isaac Hayes had stints hosting shows at the station. After the format switch, Red Alert left for Hot 97, although in 2007 he returned to Kiss for a more old-school-oriented hip-hop show.

Considering their decades-long history of mutual hatred, there's a sick irony that WBLS will be absorbing Kiss-FM next week. "It's the Yankees and the Mets merging. It's cats and dogs living together. It's like Arafat shaking hands with Yitzhak Rabin," says Charnas.

According to Kiss-FM's General Manager Alex Cameron, however, the merger wasn't quite as stressful as Arab-Israeli peace negotiations. "I thought it would be very uncomfortable, to be honest, with more ego involved," says Cameron. "But it was a very classy and respectful collaboration. Sort of a surreal experience, actually."

WBLS, for its part, seems surprisingly down about the whole thing considering it just vanquished its archnemesis. "I think it's sad," says WBLS spokesperson Deon Livingston. "A station that serviced our community for 30 years is gone, their voice is gone."

Whether or not that sentiment is genuine, many New Yorkers raised on a Kiss-FM diet are mourning right now.

"I'm crazy downtrodden," says Queens rapper Homeboy Sandman. "I've stopped listening to the radio for a while, but when I'm in somebody's car, or I have to listen to the radio, Kiss-FM is the last bastion that plays good tunes and not terrible, terrible music."

"It's truly heartbreaking to see such an important station in the annals of New York Radio be dissolved into another station," says DJ Rich Medina. "As a DJ, my time as a child listening to Red Alert, Chuck Chillout, Jay Mixin' Dixon, and all the other incredible radio jocks that have passed through the Kiss-FM stable were incredibly formative for me and my musical perspective, and I'm selfishly thankful that I lived through that experience."

WBLS and Kiss-FM will be simulcasting until the changeover on Monday. Current Kiss-FM DJs Shaila, Jeff Foxx, and Lenny Green will move to WBLS. WBLS officials say they hope to get more of Kiss-FM's programming on their airwaves in the future, and no decisions have been made about DJ Red Alert's show yet.