After Monday’s blizzard dropped over 30” of snow, over 130,000 homes on Cape Cod are still without power, with restoration not expected until Friday. There are downed trees, dark neighborhoods, and snow piled high along once-busy roads. The Cape is home to Liveline’s very first affiliate, WHYA (Y101), sometimes mistaken for our flagship, but since day one, the show has beamed live from the Boston suburbs in the same studio where John Garabedian’s Open House Party originated for 30 years. Here we saw 12-24” of snow, forcing virtually every business to close for a day, but things are already back to normal.
That contrast alone shows how differently one storm can impact communities, even within the same state, and it highlights why perspective matters. Having a story that so impacts one set of radio listeners while others experience it only on TV exposes the limitations of the often not-so-local voice tracks that stations rely on. But it’s a perfect opportunity for a national show like Liveline.
All along, audiences have had the option of both local and national news on radio, television and the internet. Local outlets focus on school closings, town meetings, fairs, artist concerts, festivals, and whether you need boots or sunscreen tomorrow. National platforms show the bigger picture: hurricanes devastating Florida, wildfire smoke drifting from Canada into the Midwest, flooding in California, and blizzards in the Northeast. Access to both levels of coverage has always existed. The difference is what you do with it. National does not replace local. It enhances it by connecting those individual stories into one broader narrative.
That is where scale becomes the game changer. On any given night, Liveline receives hundreds of calls, texts and messages from across the country. That level of interaction is simply impossible for any single station to replicate. It gives every listener the magic of “connection” to the world we live in. A bigger budget means more prizes and experiences for listeners. A bigger audience drawn by the excitement and enhanced entertainment value helps nighttime listeners to become fans of what becomes their favorite radio station.
The secret sauce is being live. When listeners from everywhere are all invited to this big party, you can feel the energy. Add in the immediacy added by dozens of live calls from listeners bringing a diversity of perspectives to create a faster, more dynamic, entertaining and unpredictable show. Unlike most local radio, national programming does not just sound bigger. It is bigger. It delivers the feeling that “something’s happening!”
As we’ve said before in this column, local morning shows absolutely have their place. They succeed not simply because they are “in the city” or part of the staff, but because they are good. At the same time, not every syndicated show works in every market. Some piped-in major-market personalities have actually hurt the ratings because the content feels distant and unrelatable.
Liveline is intentionally different. Because it’s live, the listeners are the stars. My job is to elicit interesting “mini-stories,” edit their calls and get to the goods in the course of a real 30-50 second conversation. As a result, you can actually bond with other listeners, as opposed to a fake sounding 12-second bit over a song intro with copied and pasted audio from when people actually used to call that station. You don’t hear that person’s name, where they’re from, what they’re doing or get any sense of who they are. There’s nothing to connect with.
With every call to Liveline, my job is to draw compelling conversation out of everyone, from little kids to senior citizens you would not even expect to be listening to Top 40. The content they provide does not belong to one city or one demographic. There’s nothing more local than a real person sharing their story, even if that story is being heard coast to coast.
It is almost silly to think that listeners of our Key West affiliate WEOW 92.7 would not be interested in the Blizzard of ’26. Some of them dream of seeing snow. Others are thankful they are not digging out of it. We love and thrive on different cultures, experiences, backgrounds, stories, and lifestyles. TikTok would be boring if it only showed you things happening in your neighborhood. A big, live, national night show delivers that broader stage while staying personal and immediate.
Songs To Watch
Two interesting stories among our Top 20 requests this week. Dominic Fike’s “Babydoll” came out 8 years ago and never did a thing on radio. It’s now at 910 million streams and is on the way to becoming his second song to reach a billion. (The first was “3 Nights” from that same year, which I actually loved.) “Babydoll” has been slowly re-climbing the Spotify charts for a couple weeks, but just today reached #10. 2018 was a huge year for “streaming hits” that Top 40 radio ignored almost completely. This was one of them. Today, there are very few golds titles from 2018 that any radio listeners care about. I was a senior in high school and this song was everywhere except for the radio, which would only add to the stigma that radio was out of touch. It’s #19 on Liveline and we’ve never played it before. Now it’s being pushed to Top 40.
Top 40 is desperate for great new pop material even though it’s right there in front of us.
“Stateside” takes a big jump everywhere, right now sitting at #3 on Spotify in America. It’s going to go No. 1 within weeks. It’s infectious. Industry download sites and airplay charts only show PinkPantheress as the artist, since the original didn’t feature Zara Larsson. It is also produced with a completely different track. The collaboration is the hit. Playing any other version is like hearing “Blinding Lights” sung by someone else. This is the exact same mistake made three years ago, when many stations were playing the solo PinkPanthress version of “Boy’s a liar”, but in fact it only became a hit because of Ice Spice on “Part 2”.
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“Stateside” just keeps getting bigger and I hope it doesn’t stop anytime soon. It’s nice to see two talented artists who were not expected to be consistent hitmakers do so well again, and on such a fun track. There are many delicious lyrical and contextual layers of irony considering our current uhh “geopolitical moment”, not to mention all the lovable quirks of the two stars. But for those PDs who hesitate on novelty and are comforted only by pre-baked “familiarity,” consider that the production is two baby steps away from “SexyBack” and part of the chorus is basically like a slightly misremembered version of the Estelle classic sung to oneself in the shower.
I find it very hard to be that excited about our current musical moment when our exciting new stars are Olivia Dean and Sienna Spiro, even when I enjoy individual songs of theirs. I see “Stateside” as one of the few current opportunities for our (rather weak/referential/indistinct) mainstream to be nudged in a somewhat more innovative-sounding direction. I hope radio does not fumble it. Consider not letting callout set the pace?
I love Olivia Dean, “Right for Each Other,” and I can’t deny the subsequent singles, but she fits as well on the new Yacht Rock stations as CHR. “Die On This Hill” has finally reached the same place as “You Broke Me First,” where I have to acknowledge that it might be a real hit, but it also solves nothing for the format. “Stateside” certainly moves things forward in a way those songs don’t, although I wish it were “Where Is My Husband,” in terms of being a little less discordant.