There is certainly enough trauma as 2026 begins that you could, as the online world has chosen to do, describe 2016 as “the last good year.” In radio, a lot of our current landscape issues were already taking hold, particularly the beginning of a seemingly endless pop-music doldrums and its impact on not just CHR but Hot AC and AC as well. It was around then that Classic Hits and Classic Rock became all-ages formats, for the first time.
It might be a little late to capitalize on the new year’s 2016 nostalgia. (I proudly resisted the urge to write anything about how those stations on 106-7 FM were acknowledging the kids and their wacky slang, particularly once I would have been doing so after The New York Times.) But there is no shortage of insight in looking back through that year’s Ross on Radio.
In this week’s issue, I’m republishing one of the newsletter’s annual centerpieces, “Intriguing Stations of 2016.” At the time, there was so much to write about that the article had to be a two-parter. Like a number of ROR articles from that era, “Intriguing 2016” has been unavailable online, so I’m happy to share it again.
If you’re cynical about the state of radio, you’re probably likely to regard each year’s list of Intriguing Stations that way. But there are a lot of 2016 entries that remain successful or at least relevant today, usually in slightly evolved form: KISQ (The Breeze) San Francisco, KXSN (Sunny 98.1) San Diego, KTWV (The Wave) Los Angeles, WRME (Me-TV-FM) Chicago, KDGE (Star 102.1) Dallas, WMGC (The Bounce) Detroit, and others.
The station atop my list that year was WRMA (Ritmo 95.7) Miami, whose “Cubatón y más” format was not, as acknowledged, likely to become a national format trend. But the then-noted strength of reggaeton and “Urbano” music has only endured on Spanish-language formats, thus prompting the need for softer stations like the recently profiled bilingual AC WEPN (La Exitosa) New York.
I also wrote that year, in Intriguing and elsewhere, about how Classic Hits was modernizing. My article about hearing “This Is How We Do It” by Montell Jordan on WCBS-FM New York for the first time has never gone out of print. In that time, of course, any surprise at hearing ’90s Hip-Hop on Classic Hits radio now sounds quaint with many stations pushing well into the 2000s.
In 2016, my most intriguing offering from beyond the world of broadcast radio was Spotify’s Discover Weekly. As radio tried to cling to some sort of music-discovery franchise, I suggested in a separate column that year that it was time to make the radio-station music director an on-air presence as such and rebrand the job as “Music Supervisor.” Now, a lot fewer stations have a music director in the building.
In 2016, it was already clear that the mass-appeal mother/daughter moments of CHR in the late ’00s and early ’10s were fewer and further between. During the year, I wrote about hearing WHTZ (Z100) New York play “No Scrubs” by TLC, which certainly sounded better on the radio that year than the second- and third generation “trap pop” that was starting to clog current radio. When I wrote my year-end recap about “Songs That Made a Difference” in 2016, there wasn’t much to be enthusiastic about.
Z100 playing “No Scrubs” was, as predicted, a harbinger of all stations leaning more heavily on gold to fill in gaps in current product, a strategy that hasn’t worked for most CHRs, but one that we’re still reluctant to abandon. I also wrote about how AC radio, having decided to rely primarily on CHR-ratified hits, was struggling for new music as those songs became edgier. A decade later, that has translated to the AC format playing little recent music and almost no true currents.
Country radio was having its own “back to reality” moment in 2016. The rise of what was called either “tailgate country” (if you liked the songs in question) or “bro country” (if you didn’t) had been slowed, but in the pre-Morgan Wallen/streaming-driven era of the format, nothing had quite come along to replace it. I encouraged PDs that year not to alienate the format’s newer, younger audience by merely becoming more recurrent and gold, which wouldn’t necessarily make older listeners happier either.
A decade later, Country is the format with the most robust supply of new music and the best balance between streaming-driven active records and ballads that break more glacially through traditional callout stories. Active Rock is starting to show glimmers of musical excitement now as well, but in 2016 the trend was in new stations that played an Active Rock library without bothering with currents at all.
In 2016, I went to the fall NAB Radio show concerned that broadcasters still hadn’t cracked the code on streaming or how to compete with digital music. (That story was reprinted in this column a few months ago.) I came out of NAB with some short-lived optimism over several recent efforts (iHeart Radio adding song streaming; the launch of Radioplayer Canada). I also wrote about the launch of the curation site Radiogarden that year, proving that the market for audio tourism at least existed in some way.
A few other topics from 2016:
- Handling the death of a veteran artist, prompted by the loss of Prince, and certainly an issue on an ongoing basis in 2026, particularly for any artist unlucky enough to pass away on a weekend.
- How Classic Hits stations were suddenly enjoying the kind of summer bump that once went to CHR stations, suggesting that more people liked Boston (“More Than a Feeling”) than Justin (Timberlake, whose “Can’t Stop the Feeling” was the not-so-inspiring song of the summer for many).
- How low-powered FM translators had proliferated to the point where some markets, such as Nashville, had enough to constitute a medium-sized market’s worth of radio unto themselves.
Finally, there were indeed references to “yacht rock,” the genre retroactively being formed around certain elements of late ‘70s/early ‘80s soft rock. As unlikely as the return of Robbie Dupree in the first place, the first weeks of 2026 have been marked by new launches that incorporate the subgenre somehow.
If all of this feels too retrograde to you, this month’s most prominent format launch has been one that the industry coverage of 2016 did not anticipate. Triple-A KZON-HD-2 (The Zone) Phoenix has been controversial in its own way for its use of AI-driven hosts. If all these throwbacks are making you welcome some future shock instead, here’s our “First Listen.”
