On Monday, the New York Times reported that since April 2004, the hottest trend in radio formatting, Jack, had found its way onto 16 stations across the country. Over the weekend, Las Vegas' 100.5-FM became the latest station to change over to Jack.
"Jack is exploding across the country and new stations like the one in Las Vegas are opening all of the time," says Nathan Brackett, senior editor of Rolling Stone, who tracks changes in radio and music technology.
Few will mourn the passing of Lite 100, a torture that was usually applied to the ears of office workers and those visiting the dentist. But just what exactly is Jack? At the station's website (www.lite100.com) the only information on the new station is the motto "Playing What We Want."
If that suggests the radical eclecticism of college radio, don't be deceived. In practice, Jack is going at an audience as mainstream as its boring predecessor and it has adjusted its content accordingly.
"It's a format targeted at people in their 30s and 40s, not unlike Lite FM," says Brackett. "But the thing about Jack is that it takes songs from different radio formats. The reason this is a big deal is that until now radio has been all about honing in on 100 songs in a certain genre and playing those songs to death. Jack opens up the playlist."
So a promotional spot aired on Jack jumps between song fragments of hits by Smashing Pumpkins, Depeche Mode, No Doubt, the Rolling Stones, AC/DC, Prince and A Flock of Seagulls. "Brown Sugar" playing right alongside "I Ran." While that may sound like a surprising mix, it hardly amounts to adventurous music. An hour spent listening to Jack sounds mostly like watching MTV from the '80s (without the video) with a little '90s and some classic rock thrown in, or as the voice-over announcer puts it: "The iPod for grown-ups."
But it is the iPod for a grown-up who has never played a B-side. According to Brackett:
"As a listener, the problem I have with Jack is that they are still playing radio hits you have heard too many times—only before you heard them on different stations and now you are just hearing them all on one station." So, though the range is wide, according to Brackett, there is a problem with how deep Jack will go into each genre. "Yesterday, I was listening to Jack in New York and I heard Twisted Sister's 'We're Not Gonna Take it,' twice and that is a song I never needed to hear again. So, if you want to look at it in a negative light, Jack is the songs that have all been played to death from all over different radio formats in one format. On the plus, you are going to be a little more surprised by Jack."
Though the music programming gets most of the media attention, and is what Jack, itself, hypes, the more disturbing aspect of Jack, as a local station, is the almost total absence of a local personality connecting the station to the community outside.
Granted, it is still early to judge the new Jack in Las Vegas, but listening to it now there is almost a complete lack of a local character: no DJs, little news, no contests and not even a drive-time show during rush hour. If the format of Jack recalls the iPod, this aspect is not by coincidence a lot like satellite radio. According to Brackett, trying to compete with satellite radio and digital music has a lot to do with the creation and spread of Jack:
"A lot of the thinking behind Jack is that conventional radio is in big trouble because of new formats like satellite radio and the iPod and people are trying new things and Jack is one of them."
On Monday morning, among the few local references on Jack was a promo spot that features a voice-over announcer joking that Lite 100 was won by a guy named Jack in a game of Texas Hold 'Em. Actually, the station continues to be owned by Infinity Broadcasting.
The jury is out on whether Jack will be a commercial success locally like it has nationally, but it seems clear that just underneath the revolutionary and snarky rhetoric of its promo spots, the Jack format in reality seems to be the same old thing repackaged.