Philadelphia-based Entercom didn’t waste any time shaking up the Chicago airwaves.
Hours after closing on its $2.4 billion acquisition of CBS Radio on Friday, Entercom flipped WJMK-FM 104.3 from classic hits to a new format: classic hip-hop.
The station, formerly known as K-Hits, will now be billed as the new 104.3 Jams, spinning hip-hop and rhythm and blues throwbacks that capture the “essence of Chicago” from the bygone era when the Bulls won six NBA championships and Oprah Winfrey and Barack Obama became “homegrown heroes,” the company said.
Doing the math, that would center the playlist somewhere around the 1990s and early 2000s.
The Jams format launched Friday with the promise of 10,000 commercial-free songs in a row. Artists getting airplay on day one included R. Kelly, Nelly, Jay-Z, The Notorious B.I.G., Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg.
“The time has come to usher in a brand-new chapter in Chicago radio,” Pat Paxton, Entercom’s president of programming, said in a news release. “Hip-hop and R&B always makes you feel a certain way. The memories will come back to you immediately.”
The Entercom-CBS megamerger, combining two of the nation’s largest radio station groups, was announced in February and creates a chain of 235 stations, including seven in Chicago.
Besides WJMK, other former Chicago CBS stations moving under the Entercom banner are: news stations WBBM-AM 780 and WCFS-FM 105.9, Top-40 station WBBM-FM 96.3, sports-talk station WSCR-AM 670, country station WUSN-FM 99.5 and adult alternative station WXRT-FM 93.1.
“We are thrilled to officially close our transformational merger with CBS Radio and welcome their talented employees and iconic brands to Entercom,” David Field, Entercom’s president and CEO, said in a news release. “We now have the scale and capabilities to drive meaningful growth and to compete more effectively with other media for a larger share of advertising dollars.”
The Chicago stations will be headed up by longtime radio executive Jimmy deCastro, who takes over as market manager for Entercom. DeCastro’s last radio gig was at the helm of Tribune Media’s WGN-AM 720, which he left in 2016 after three years. Previously, deCastro ran seminal rocker WLUP-FM 97.9 during its heyday in the 1980s.
WJMK tied for 18th among Chicago stations with a 2.4 share in the Nielsen listenership survey for October. It is the lowest-rated among the acquired CBS stations in Chicago.
Long known as Magic 104, WJMK played rock oldies for more than 20 years before adopting the Jack FM format — a robotic, music-intensive format that played like a baby boomer’s iPod on shuffle — in 2005. Jack FM was shelved in 2011 for K-Hits, an adult-hits format with live air personalities.
DeCastro thinks there will be a bigger audience for the Jams format, which will target 35- to 54-year-olds in the heart of the urban music demographic.
“There’s so many places that you can hear Journey and REO Speedwagon and Styx,” deCastro said. “While K-Hits was a great station, I think there’s huge opportunity to superserve Chicago and that audience.”
Twitter @RobertChannick
