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=== In General ===
* The death of [[Radio Drama]] due to the rise of television in the 1950s can be seen as an example of this.
* The oldies and classic rock formats in general has been undergoing a justified form of decay for a long time. The passage of time means that the line between "classic/oldies" and "modern" continues to move forward. It's not uncommon to hear music by [[Guns N'
** Lampshaded by a line in [[Bowling
{{quote|"When did [[
* In recent{{when}} years, a lot of modern rock stations around the country have undergone decay, either adding more classic rock to their playlists or dropping rock music altogether for something else entirely. Much like the decay of the music video networks, this one has a lot to do with the internet. The fanbase for modern rock is, by and large, more net-savvy than the average American, and rock musicians were among the first to start relying heavily on the internet for self-promotion, increasingly forgoing airplay on terrestrial radio. With their listeners migrating en masse to the internet, rock music stations were forced to adapt if they were to survive. As artists in other genres start moving online, this trend may soon start creeping across the airwaves, especially with respect to those stations targeting younger listeners.
** Many modern rock stations have begun to play indie rock to attract back listeners, and it's worked pretty well. (It also brings things full circle, inasmuch as "modern rock" is basically a more commercialized version of what was once known as "alternative rock" or "college rock", i.e. the original indie rock.) Others have switched to "active rock" stations (which play harder rock in addition to classic rock), which have also worked pretty well, too.
* The AM band used to be the only way to listen to radio, which meant that there used to be far more AM music stations. However, in [[The Seventies]] and [[The Eighties]], most music stations switched to FM, which has a much higher audio quality, and those that didn't found themselves hemorrhaging listeners and shutting down. As a result, countless AM radio stations decayed out of necessity, switching to the news, talk, and sports that now dominate commercial AM radio... and many of ''those'' are themselves moving to FM because many people, especially young people, often have receivers that only get FM without any AM at all.
** In Venezuela, many AM stations are still music stations... broadcasting popular music from the
** Radio [[Disney]] uses the AM band almost exclusively for their radio stations. [[Fridge Brilliance|It's a brilliant marketing tactic]] — the lower audio quality (and their demands for record companies to give them ultra-clean versions of songs) means that listeners will have to actually buy the music in order to hear it as it was meant to be played. It does help, though, that Radio Disney is among the biggest pushers of HD Radio, which provides at least FM-quality sound on AM, and is found in the newer cars of parents which are right down their marketing wheelhouse.
*** Speaking of Radio Disney, they too suffered network decay. When launched in the late 90s, they catered to kids of all ages and the kid-at-heart, with a night slot that played lullabies, a late night slot that played oldies with a mix of kids music and lullabies right up to morning, and an afternoon preschool block. Those are long gone, they now only play music of interest to tweens and teens..
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* Don't get any <s>cranky old broadcasting codgers</s> industry veterans started on Clear Channel. Or [[Jack FM]]. Or voicetracking, where a DJ in Philly fakes that he knows all about "the haps" in Walla Walla.
* A temporary form of [[Network Decay]] is when certain radio stations switch to all or mostly [[Christmas Songs|Christmas music]] over the winter holidays. Not only are there people who don't want to hear so much Christmas music (or, in some cases, ''any'' Christmas music), but this also disadvantages people who happen to really like the radio station's usual format.
** One of our local{{where}} "goodtime oldies" stations cheerily declared it was going All Christmas All The Time on Dec. 1. About ten days into it, they had so much listener complaint they had to put their usual stuff back on with a mere sprinkling of Xmas tunes!
*** Kansas City inverts that line of thought then. There are at least '''two''' stations that go All Christmas every year and one of them is starting earlier each year to get a jump on the other one. Another station in Wichita actually sees its ratings '''increase''' when it plays All Christmas because its normal format isn't suitable for workplaces and offices.
*** Similar circumstances in California. The
*** [[Sirius XM]] used to throw out their disco channel from November through New Year's for Christmas music, but backlash from fans (yes, Virginia, disco fans still exist, and in surprising numbers) caused them to move it to the religious music section instead, where the disco fans said it had belonged all along.
* Any public radio station when they stop carrying classical music to carry more talk programming. It gets ugly usually, with long time underwriters threatening to pull funding, verbose newspaper critics declaring the time of death for American radio, and people complaining about the station moving the format to the infant HD radio band so they have to buy new equipment. This, even though smooth jazz and classical music is dying in the same way elevator music pretty much left FM radio by the mid-
** The demise of St. Louis's KFUO-FM follows a similar track. KFUO was started by the Lutheran Church - Missouri Synod as a [[Classical Music]] station in 1948, and [[Long Runners|remained that way]] until it was sold to Gateway Creative Broadcasting in spring of 2010. Gateway completely revamped the format, and the rebranded KJLY started broadcasting [[Christian Rock|Christian music]] that summer. [[Rule of Cautious Editing Judgment|Regardless of how one feels about the genre]], classical music fans were outraged at the loss of the only game in town. The local NPR station helped pick up the slack with an HD channel devoted to classical music and weekly broadcasts of the local symphony orchestra, but terrestrial listeners are still left high and dry most of the week.
=== [[
* [[CBC]] Radio Two was Canada's version of BBC Radio 3, mostly playing jazz and classical music. In a gradual period spanning over 12 months in 2007-2008, the station replaced most of its programming with "Adult Album Alternative" music.▼
* 99X in Atlanta was an influential modern rock station that, one random Friday, became the Top 40 station Q100, formerly housed at 100.5.▼
** For (relative) clarity, here's how it happened. 99X (then on 99.7) was competing with another modern rock station, Project 9-6-1 (96.1 on the radio), which had already undergone its own slight [[Network Decay]] when it moved from 105.3. (Before that, 96.1 used to be a classic rock station, and the Project kept playing some of those classic rock songs.) Despite the decay, the Project became more popular than 99X, leading to Q100 getting the 99.7 frequency rights (the same company, Cumulus Media, owns both 99X and Q100). Afterwards, many of the DJs from 99X moved to a new rock station, Rock 100.5 (which was Q100's old position, and also owned by Cumulus Media). After a year, 99X then briefly began broadcasting on the 97.9 frequency--making the name a [[Non-Indicative Name|non-indicative]] [[Artifact Title]]--before moving to 99.1 in 2010. The new frequency doesn't have as wide a range as the old frequency (advertised as the strongest signal in the Atlanta area), unfortunately, meaning the reemergence of the station is irrelevant to many listeners farther outside the city. [[Sarcasm Mode|Isn't]] [[Executive Meddling]] [[Sarcasm Mode|fun?]]▼
* Some people think 95.5 The Beat was this, in that it used to play mostly rap, hip-hop and R&B with a little bit of pop crossover hits. In the later stages, however, they started playing more and more pop (so much so that the other rap station, Hot 107.9 advertised themselves as not being watered down with [[Justin Bieber]]) until finally they were replaced with the FM version of WSB radio.▼
* The [[Toronto]] rock station 102.1 The Edge (aka CFNY FM, "The Spirit Of Radio" that [[Rush]] so famously wrote a song about) has suffered this, especially over the last few years. The station started broadcasting in 1961, and experienced a critically positive reception in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when it was known as one of the few Canadian radio stations which played alternative music. In the late 1990s, the station was bought by Rogers Communications, and became another corporate rock station. Its programming was homogenized to a point that listeners started to rebel against the station, calling in for alternative songs during all-rock countdowns. Another buyout, this time by Corus Entertainment, completed the transfer of CFNY from truly independent to corporate radio that stifled all creativity. Its decline culminated in a round of layoffs in the company, which included two prominent DJ's: Barry Taylor (who hosted the Thursday block of programming, a traditionally dead block that flourished through his charisma and personality) and Martin Streek, who had worked at the station for over 20 years (he was part of the station's success in the 1980s) and hosted the weekend "live-to-air" events at Toronto clubs. Shortly after the two men were fired, the station whitewashed their biographies and any trace of their careers from the company's website. A few weeks later, Streek wrote a cryptic status message on Facebook ("So...I guess that's it...thanks everyone...I will see you all again soon (not too soon though)... Let the stories begin.") Soon after, Streek committed suicide, and many called The Edge to task for their non-existent coverage of his death. There may be The Edge, but The Spirit Of Radio has finally left the station for good.▼
** Actually a ''double'' decay. In the late '90s, 95.5's playlist incorporated a lot of electronic dance music such as Groove Armada and Eiffel 65. They dropped most of that for hip-hop in the 2000s, thus annoying the listeners who actually did like electronica.▼
* An extreme amount with 107.5 and 102.5, which were a jazz station and oldies/R&B/Soul station respectively, but in 2009, 102.5's programming was moved to 107.5 and 102.5 became a gospel station.▼
=== [[Hungary]] ===▼
* Sláger Rádió (Hit Radio; yup, they didn't really use their imagination). It started in [[The Nineties]] and differentiated itself from the other radios by playing songs from [[The Sixties]] and [[The Seventies]] only. The time interval slowly crawled upwards, in the end of the '90s they started playing songs from [[The Eighties]], somewhere in the early 00s they started playing songs from the '90s (and dropped the '60s) and later they started playing contemporary hits thus the only thing differentiating it from its main rivals was its morning show.▼
** After its cancellation in '09, they launched a new radio station, Neo FM, in its place on the same wavelength. It offers much of the same programming with the same presenters, but the new name clearly indicates it's a separate entity from its predecessor with different goals, thus in a way negating the complaints raised against its "former self" and how it shifted focus.▼
* Time Highway Radio (99.3 FM). Dear god, Time Highway Radio. In the 90s, they were a mostly English channel, playing mostly pop with a weekend oldies slot and had a very witty station ID. Then, they very suddenly went off the air when the monopolizing Astro bought them, and then they reappeared... '''as a Tamil station!'''.▼
* Radio 4 (100.1 FM). Apart from it's pop music, it had a childrens slot between 2 to 5 on Saturday and oldies and country from Sunday afternoon all the way to 2AM Monday. The rest was dedicated to English indie and mainstream pop and rock. The childrens slot was outright removed and the oldies and country slots shrank until it was no more. They now only play hip-hop, mainstream pop, and metal. And they changed their name to Traxx FM to reflect their new playlist. While no one cared about the childrens slot, the gradual shrinking of the country and oldies slot, and the removal of them, was the point of decay to many of the older listeners.▼
* Light and Easy (105.7 FM). Originally playing songs from the 50s, 60s and 70s, as of 2010 they changed their name to Light FM, moved on to playing ''easy-listening'' genre songs of the 80s, 90s and ''today''. Much of the senior citizen demographics who started listening in when the station started in the 90s were not pleased.▼
===
* [[The BBC|BBC Five Live]] began life in 1990 as BBC Radio 5, which had a combination of sports and young people's programmes (including the [[Sound to Screen Adaptation|original radio version]] of ''[[Room 101]]''). Then in 1994 it became the "rolling news" station Five Live. Since then Five Live has gradually become filled with phone-in programmes, rather than actual news.
** BBC Radio 2 and 3 often get accused of this: Radio 2 suffers the "oldies/classic rock" problem mentioned above, while Radio 3 (officially "classical, jazz, world music and arts") is [[From a Certain Point of View|frequently accused of "dumbing down"]] for classifying modern jazz, folk, or "experimental" music as part of their remit.
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** [[The Breeze]] - owned by [[Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?|Celador]], is also criticised, for being bland and formulaic. To quote one radio forum: "Mark Walker - square peg, round hole. Should have been on 95.8 Capital FM breakfast instead of Johnny & Lisa." And that's saying something...
===
==== [[Atlanta]] ====
▲* 99X in Atlanta was an influential modern rock station that, one random Friday, became the Top 40 station Q100, formerly housed at 100.5.
▲** For (relative) clarity, here's how it happened. 99X (then on 99.7) was competing with another modern rock station, Project 9-6-1 (96.1 on the radio), which had already undergone its own slight [[Network Decay]] when it moved from 105.3. (Before that, 96.1 used to be a classic rock station, and the Project kept playing some of those classic rock songs.) Despite the decay, the Project became more popular than 99X, leading to Q100 getting the 99.7 frequency rights (the same company, Cumulus Media, owns both 99X and Q100). Afterwards, many of the DJs from 99X moved to a new rock station, Rock 100.5 (which was Q100's old position, and also owned by Cumulus Media). After a year, 99X then briefly began broadcasting on the 97.9 frequency--making the name a [[Non-Indicative Name|non-indicative]] [[Artifact Title]]--before moving to 99.1 in 2010. The new frequency doesn't have as wide a range as the old frequency (advertised as the strongest signal in the Atlanta area), unfortunately, meaning the reemergence of the station is irrelevant to many listeners farther outside the city. [[Sarcasm Mode|Isn't]] [[Executive Meddling]] [[Sarcasm Mode|fun?]]
▲* Some people think 95.5 The Beat was this, in that it used to play mostly rap, hip-hop and R&B with a little bit of pop crossover hits. In the later stages, however, they started playing more and more pop (so much so that the other rap station, Hot 107.9 advertised themselves as not being watered down with [[Justin Bieber]]) until finally they were replaced with the FM version of WSB radio.
▲** Actually a ''double'' decay. In the late '90s, 95.5's playlist incorporated a lot of electronic dance music such as Groove Armada and Eiffel 65. They dropped most of that for hip-hop in the 2000s, thus annoying the listeners who actually did like electronica.
▲* An extreme amount with 107.5 and 102.5, which were a jazz station and oldies/R&B/Soul station respectively, but in 2009, 102.5's programming was moved to 107.5 and 102.5 became a gospel station.
==== [[California]] ====
* Fresno station KFYE, which was a Christian radio station broadcasting Christian music, sermons, and stories from the Bible, suddenly turned into a "porn radio" station, which played songs overlaid with prerecorded moans and groans. After one year as KSXE, the station became a more generic Top-40 one, changing its callsign to KVPW. The station is now off the air after some disputes with another broadcaster.
* San Diego's XHMORE-FM More FM 98.9 zigzagged this trope. For those who don't live in either San Diego, CA, or Tijuana, Mexico, More FM was a station which was aimed to the northwest Baja California (in Mexico) and to the Spanish-speaking communities in San Diego, broadcasting pop music in Spanish like your average Top-40 station, called back then as "Radio Sensación". It gradually changed since its inception until 1994, when it became MORE FM, and it's considered [[Nostalgia Filter|its most memorable phase]], as it broadcasted Latin American Rock (and Oldies every Saturday Night), and it was a great way to know about independent Latin American rock bands which deserved more recognition than the same overexposed groups and musicians that swamped the remaining pop music stations in Tijuana (A good thing in Tijuana, since the stations there are either regional folk music or Top 40 clones) and San Diego. But in late 2003, due to the station [[Executive Meddling|being acquired by MEC Network,]] and the death of More FM's original owner, it changed now into a generic English-speaking Hip-Hop station, changing its name to Blazin' 98.9 without any warning, and alienating its former fanbase (which was a very bad decision, since as it was, it didn't have any direct competition and was one of the most listened stations in both cities, and as a hip-hop station it had to compete with two radio stations from San Diego which were already established for some time. The fact their presenters spoke in English, even when presenting in Tijuana drove the point further); And then again, it changed into an English-speaking branch of ESPN Radio somewhere in 2009, again, without any warning. Fortunately, Cadena Baja California (its owner before MEC bought it) transferred it back to its lineup, and brought back the usual Spanish-speaking rock in late September 2010, [[And the Fandom Rejoiced|announcing a string of concerts of Spanish and Latin American Rock Bands, more of the good ol' Rock en Español everyone loved and promotion for local rock bands, causing their former audience to shed tears of joy.]] Their only change from their 90's era was the fact that the oldies are now played all day during Saturday and Sunday, and these oldies are both in English and Spanish.
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* Bakersfield's KKXX (FM 108), which from 1977 to 1988 was the market's #1 FM station, playing a broad variety of pop and rock music. That all changed when owner Buck Owens decided to drop the KKXX call letters and use the frequency for his country station, KUZZ. Not long after, another station at 105.3 FM dropped their call letters and adopted the KKXX call sign and format. This lasted only a few weeks before KKXX was completely re-tooled as "Power 105", and focused entirely on dance, R&B, and Latin freestyle, leaving Bakersfield without an actual Top-40 station for a number of years.
==== [[
▲* [[CBC]] Radio Two was Canada's version of BBC Radio 3, mostly playing jazz and classical music. In a gradual period spanning over 12 months in 2007-2008, the station replaced most of its programming with "Adult Album Alternative" music.
* A rare example of Network Decay coming full-circle. In the mid-to-late 1990s, three suburban radio frequencies were simulcasting from Arlington Heights (92.7 FM), De Kalb (92.5 FM), and Park Forest (99.9 FM) to achieve full-market range as a single station, albeit on three entirely separate frequencies. The station was broadcasting as "Energy", a format dedicated exclusively to dance/electronic/club music without urban/rap/R&B music. In the early 2000s, the station switched to Spanish-language format and the dance format went off the air. Cut to the mid 2000s, when the three frequencies changed format again from the Spanish format to "Nine FM", a wide-ranging format to compete with off-radio iPod playlists (billing themselves as "we play anything"). Later, Nine FM began broadcasting "Dance Factory", a late-night weekend format that rekindled the dance format from the late 1990s with many of the former DJs returning to spin. The broadcasting hours were expanded to 9pm to 5am nightly. Due to low ratings, 92.5/92.7/99.9 switched away from the "we play anything" format and became an FM mirror for WCPT, an AM progressive talk radio format. Despite the format switch, Dance Factory continues to broadcast nightly on these three frequencies every night as "paid programming" on the same three frequencies as precursor Energy did (helped by the death of [[Air America]] creating a dearth of progressive radio shows).
* Kevin "Pig Virus" Matheny, [[Howard Stern]]'s longtime antagonist in the 1980's ran full-service station WGN (under the nose of CEO Randy Michaels, who was well known for turning Clear Channel into the voicetracking machine it is today), long the home of [[Paul Harvey]], the ongoing soap opera of futility known as Chicago Cubs baseball (or more known as "The Pat and Ron Show" to listeners for announcers Pat Hughes and Cub legend Ron Santo), and the home of personalities that lasted '''decades''' on the station and never had a political agenda, from 2008-2010. During those two years since WGN owner Tribune went from a public company resistant to any change to the plaything of billionaire Sam Zell, listeners to "The Voice of Chicago" suffered.
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** Though fortunately, the old Q101 format returned on 87.7(WLFM-LP) in May 2012: http://chicagoradioandmedia.com/news/2476-alternative-music-on-877-fm-begins-monday
==== [[Dallas]] ====
* For years, 570 KLIF was the leader in talk radio with a wide range of local straight talk and sports talk talk hosts with a politically neutral slant and a loyal fan base known as "[[AD Ls]]" (All Day Listeners). The decay arguably started in 1994 when parent company Susquehanna founded the area's first all-sports station, 1310 The Ticket. A couple of years later, sports talk was dropped from KLIF (only Norm Hitzges was retained by the company and moved to the other station). A couple of years later, centrist hosts like Kevin McCarthy and Humble Billy Hayes were let go and replaced by the like of "Mouth of the South" Tom Kamb. Eventually, all localized hosts were dropped and the station has run national right-wing, Fox News-style hosts like Dr. Laura and Bill O' Reilly since.
** This pushed the local talk focus to Live 105.3 with the likes of Pugs & Kelly, Russ Martin and "Big Dick" Hunter...until 2008, when parent company CBS Radio decided Dallas needed a third all-sports station and rebranded it as 105.3 The Fan, grabbing the Dallas Cowboys from rival 1310 and moving the Texas Rangers from sister station KRLD 1080, and canning all their current talent except morning host Jagger. The station has seen ratings go up recently, likely driven by the Rangers' 2010 World Series run and hiring popular host Gregg Williams after he was fired by the other two sports stations for drug use, but the price has been that localized talk radio is all but dead in Big D.
* 103.7 KVIL's change from adult contemporary to "lite rock" could be seen as this, especially since it drove longtime morning host Ron Chapman to request a transfer to oldies station 98.7 KLUV, where he lasted until his 2005 retirement.
==== [[Motor City|Detroit]] ====
* In the late 1990s and early 2000s, 96.3 WDVD in the [[Motor City|Detroit]] area sold itself on having the audacity to ''not play rap''. It played a lot of Sheryl Crow, Nine Days, Three Doors Down, and their ilk. Now if you switch to it you're still unlikely to get actual rap, but good luck finding something that's not Nelly Furtado, [[Justin Timberlake]], or the latest Disney pop "artist".
* 105.1 WXDG was, one day, completely overhauled into Jazz and R&B after being exclusively Alternative/Indie for quite some time, presumably as a result of these bands beginning to self-promote heavily through the internet and their net-saavy fanbases before anyone else leapt on the boat.
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*** And the chain reaction goes on: In 2010, WNIC switched to a "hot" AC format, edging in on WDVD's turf. Results have yet to be seen.
==== [[Florida]] ====
* [[wikipedia:WPBZ|WPBZ]] in the Palm Beach County market was an alternative rock station called "103.1 The Buzz" since it went on the air in 1995... until December 5, 2011, when it suddenly and without warning switched to a format of top 40 music, or as it calls it, "today's best hits without the rap". [[They Changed It, Now It Sucks|Alt-rock fans weren't too happy, to say the least.]] Compounding the anger is that the annual "Buzz Bake Sale" concert festival occurred only a month before the switch, ''and nobody was aware of the change that was coming.'' The original format lives on in the HD Radio feed, but the damage has been done, and Palm Beach County no longer has an alt-rock station to call its own- the only rock station left at all is [[wikipedia:WKGR|WKGR, "98.7 The Gator"]], which plays classic rock.
* WHDR 93.1 was originally a classical station, then it flipped to dance music and became the popular Party 93.1, "South Florida's Pure Dance Channel." Then it changed to Hispanic music and finally ROCK. Many techno/trance/house fans became devastated until 2008 when Party 93.1 relaunched...on HD Radio. Granted, this is better than nothing.
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* [http://www.realradio.fm/ Orlando's REAL Radio 104.1]. Currently under call signal WTKS-FM, it has, and still does, serve mainly as a talk radio station, with notable shows such as Monsters in the Morning. they in the past were known to play indie, alternative, and modern rock on weekends. In more recent memories, the weekend lineup is more or less classic rock.
==== Lansing ====
* Radio stations owned by Rubber City that have dial positions in the greater area of Lansing, MI, are frequently victims of being [[Screwed by the Network]]. In 1995, 92.1 was known as "92-1 The Edge," with 97.5 being an iffy format and 94.1 being 94.1 "The Bear." The Bear had to compete with B-93.7 in Grand Rapids and 100.7-WITL for country music listeners. One of the most popular pop stations was Z-101.7. By 1999, The Bear became "Kick 94," and started losing its audience to 93.7 and 100.7. 94.1 was re-branded about two years later as WVIC, and became a moderate rock/adult contemporary station. It would become 94-1 "The Edge" in late 2010/early 2011, with an emphasis on alternative rock. All that was different from the original 92-1 Edge was fewer sophomoric sex jokes from the DJs. The original 92-1 Edge was re-branded overnight without warning into My-92.1 in 2001, pretty much becoming the Sheryl Crow Channel. It remained that way until 2004, when it was rebranded overnight without warning into sports radio. By 2011, 92.1 would become a bland country music station on par with its predecessor Kicks 94. The same time that 92.1 lost its title of The Edge, Z101.7 was rebranded as Mike FM. Also without warning. That was in spite the fact the 101.7 had an established audience and was extremely popular. A clone of it was put on the 97.5 dial and dubbed "The New 97-5."
** Moral of the story: If you live in Lansing, don't get too attached to any one given radio dial position. Its formatting can change overnight.▼
==== [[Maine]] ====
▲Moral of the story: If you live in Lansing, don't get too attached to any one given radio dial position. Its formatting can change overnight.
▲=== [[Maine]] ===
* TOS was a popular hard/progressive rock station in Maine that was mostly listened to for the variety of entertaining DJs and hosts. After changing hands a few times in the late '00s, in late 2008 it was finally bought by the newly formed Blueberry Broadcasting, which completely changed the format to Top 40 with some 80s and 90s thrown in (originally, the only older music TOS played was by hard rock icons like Black Sabbath and AC/DC). Even worse, they fired all of their radio personalities, retaining only Tom O. and Mr. Mike, their morning show hosts (although their show is now heavily sanitized and word on the street is they're close to quitting). They even fired popular DJ Chris Rush, known for his publicity stunts and willingness to try new things and meet new people (including one stunt that actually resulted in him once ''having his jaw ripped off'' by a tow truck's hook by accident at a local fair, requiring him to have extensive reconstructive surgery to build a new one using one of his ribs). All of the fired personalities were quickly picked up by competing station WKIT (which is owned by none other than [[Stephen King]]), and as the ratings for TOS have fallen, WKIT's have gone up steadily since acquiring TOS' DJs.
==== [[Milwaukee]] ====
* WQBW 97.3 The Brew has become a major victim of this trope. While they've remained consistent with their emphasis on '80s rock, they underwent several tweaks to their music format — while keeping their station moniker. The most recent of their tweaks was the excising of a large portion of their 1970s classic rock songs, and the addition of 1980s pop songs. Interestingly enough, the station continues to air "Rockin' '70s" on Sunday nights, along with "Rockin' '80s".
** [[It Got Worse]]. The Brew eventually began using the tag line "The NEW generation of Classic Rock". They even ran promos that made fun of the other classic rock stations in the city for playing outdated music, as if including songs by Billy Idol and Sting in their otherwise typical classic rock playlist somehow made them more hip and relevant. Needless to say, this cemented The Brew's status as the [[Butt Monkey]] of Milwaukee radio and [[Fun T-Shirt|t-shirts]] featuring a spoof of The Brew's famous beer-cap logo reading "Milwaukee Radio Sucks" became popular sellers.
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** And on Memorial Day weekend they finally blinked and converted The Brew to a Top 40 format called "Radio Now" to take on the local Kiss FM station (here not owned by Clear Channel), mainly because a smooth jazz station with a lousy signal was threatening to switch over to the same "Radio Now" format and try to steal listeners from Clear Channel's other Milwaukee stations. A possible purposeful [[Self-Destructive Charge]] by the smooth jazz station, as their parent company also owns classic rock powerhouses WKLH and The Hog and were willing to pull a stunt to force The Brew to switch over off-guard.
==== [[
▲* Time Highway Radio (99.3 FM). Dear god, Time Highway Radio. In the 90s, they were a mostly English channel, playing mostly pop with a weekend oldies slot and had a very witty station ID. Then, they very suddenly went off the air when the monopolizing Astro bought them, and then they reappeared... '''as a Tamil station!'''.
▲* Radio 4 (100.1 FM). Apart from it's pop music, it had a childrens slot between 2 to 5 on Saturday and oldies and country from Sunday afternoon all the way to 2AM Monday. The rest was dedicated to English indie and mainstream pop and rock. The childrens slot was outright removed and the oldies and country slots shrank until it was no more. They now only play hip-hop, mainstream pop, and metal. And they changed their name to Traxx FM to reflect their new playlist. While no one cared about the childrens slot, the gradual shrinking of the country and oldies slot, and the removal of them, was the point of decay to many of the older listeners.
▲* Light and Easy (105.7 FM). Originally playing songs from the 50s, 60s and 70s, as of 2010 they changed their name to Light FM, moved on to playing ''easy-listening'' genre songs of the 80s, 90s and ''today''. Much of the senior citizen demographics who started listening in when the station started in the 90s were not pleased.
▲=== [[New York City]] ===
* The WCBS-FM affair in New York. For over 30 years, 101.1 CBS-FM was an iconic oldies station, its DJs being local celebrities. Enter [[Executive Meddling]], and in 2005 came JACK-FM, a random music, jockey-less format that focused on the '80s-2000s and punctuated its programming with obnoxious comments by announcer Howard Cogen. To add insult to injury, the former CBS-FM DJs were fired on the day of the flip, without warning. The new station was universally reviled by New Yorkers, with many calling it "Jack Shit FM," and mayor Mike Bloomberg saying he would "[[Precision F-Strike|never listen to that fucking CBS radio again]]." It took two years for them to get the message, and in 2007, CBS-FM returned to an oldies format. Now, the only decay present at the station is that it's starting to play more '80s music and less '50s music, but that's true for oldies stations everywhere.
* 92.3 K-Rock in New York went through decay ''twice''. First, at the start of 2006, the station switched from its modern rock format (which it had run since [[The Eighties]]) to a talk format, with the new name Free FM. This left the largest radio market in the country without a modern rock station. Free FM, anchored by [[Van Halen|David Lee Roth]]'s morning show, was a disaster, and K-Rock was brought back on the air in less than 18 months, with [[Opie and Anthony|Opie & Anthony]] replacing Roth as morning hosts. So far so good, right? Well, in March 2009, the station switched ''again'', this time without warning (Free FM had been announced a month prior to the switch), to "Now FM", a pop station in the vein of Z-100. At least this time, New York had a modern rock station to pick up the slack, 101.9 WRXP... which itself switched from a jazz format in February 2008, leaving jazz fans with only [[NPR]] and a single AM radio station to listen to.
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* 102.7 WNEW is a sad tale indeed. It started as an influential AOR station in the 1970s and 1980s. However, the station failed to adapt to the trends of rock, instead squeezing it's playlist. The station would often go into a format a year. To many NY rock fans, the station jumped past the point of no return when the station paid little attention to the death of Jerry Garcia, a far cry compared to their tribute to other rock musicians. Then, Opie and Anthony came on, and had a predominantly talk-based format. So, management torpedoed "The Rock of New York" in September 1999 for talk. The ratings stayed stagnant (I.e. pathetic) in the 1-2 range, outside of Opie and Anthony. Then, Opie and Anthony got canned due to daring people to have sex in St. Pats Cathedral. (The church even called for the revocation of the license.) The fact the station lost it's stars and got fined $750,000 is bad enough, but it's ratings went to 0.8, which, until 101.9 went news, was not accomplished by any other major FM frequency in NYC. CBS nuked the Talk format in January 2003 for a Top 40 stunt. Then, it went into a hybrid Talk/Hot AC format, under the name "Blink 102.7", with Lynda Lopez (sister to [[Jennifer Lopez]]) in the morning. Ratings still stunk, so the station canned all of it's DJs, and went to a basic AC format, still called Blink 102.7. Then it went christmas....... and then relaunched as a more upbeat AC format as Mix 102.7. THAT eventually degenerated into a Disco Format, which was actually pretty cool. However, people did not know it existed, so the station was nuked in January 2007 for ANOTHER Hot AC format that took potshots at WLTW, at which point, the station got out of the gutter and is now holding it's own.
==== [[Philadelphia (useful notes)|Philadelphia]] ====
* A mainstay for modern rock in [[Philadelphia (useful notes)|Philadelphia]] was Y100. Overnight, the station was switched, with no warning, to rap and R&B. To make it even worse, it was an existing station just moving to the more popular frequency... and it kept being simulcast on the old frequency for a few weeks. There was an uproar among the previous listener-ship, but no action ended up occurring. Fortunately, the morning show from Y100 was rescued by WMMR, its former competitor, and arguably the only modern rock station left in Philly.
* Another station that played most rock besides WMMR was 94.1, also called WYSP: playing The Rock You Grew Up With from the 70's, 80's, and 90's. However, the station was replaced overnight with [[Sports Radio]].
==== [[
▲* The [[Toronto]] rock station 102.1 The Edge (aka CFNY FM, "The Spirit Of Radio" that [[Rush]] so famously wrote a song about) has suffered this, especially over the last few years. The station started broadcasting in 1961, and experienced a critically positive reception in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when it was known as one of the few Canadian radio stations which played alternative music. In the late 1990s, the station was bought by Rogers Communications, and became another corporate rock station. Its programming was homogenized to a point that listeners started to rebel against the station, calling in for alternative songs during all-rock countdowns. Another buyout, this time by Corus Entertainment, completed the transfer of CFNY from truly independent to corporate radio that stifled all creativity. Its decline culminated in a round of layoffs in the company, which included two prominent DJ's: Barry Taylor (who hosted the Thursday block of programming, a traditionally dead block that flourished through his charisma and personality) and Martin Streek, who had worked at the station for over 20 years (he was part of the station's success in the 1980s) and hosted the weekend "live-to-air" events at Toronto clubs. Shortly after the two men were fired, the station whitewashed their biographies and any trace of their careers from the company's website. A few weeks later, Streek wrote a cryptic status message on Facebook ("So...I guess that's it...thanks everyone...I will see you all again soon (not too soon though)... Let the stories begin.") Soon after, Streek committed suicide, and many called The Edge to task for their non-existent coverage of his death. There may be The Edge, but The Spirit Of Radio has finally left the station for good.
▲=== [[Washington DC]] ===
* WHFS, a long-running alternative-rock station owned by CBS/Infinity, suffered a very similar fate to co-owned K-Rock in New York. In January of 2005, WHFS' 99.1 slot changed to a Spanish-language station known as "El Zol". The call letters, meanwhile, migrated over to 105.7, which was at the time a talk radio station with a very similar format to New York's Free FM; to play on those call letters, they began broadcasting alternative rock on nights and weekends. Eventually, that too was dropped, and 105.7 switched to a sports talk format. It still exists on the HD Radio subchannel of the Washington iteration of "Fresh FM", but by far very few people own an HD Radio, and the famous [[HF Stival]] is now just another concert with the has-beens of the 90's playing turn of the millennium rock music which has been run into the ground by dull and unadventurous adult contemporary stations.
** WHFS has returned as of August 2011 on 97.5 in Baltimore on a translator with only city-wide range.
▲=== [[Hungary]] ===
▲* Sláger Rádió (Hit Radio; yup, they didn't really use their imagination). It started in [[The Nineties]] and differentiated itself from the other radios by playing songs from [[The Sixties]] and [[The Seventies]] only. The time interval slowly crawled upwards, in the end of the '90s they started playing songs from [[The Eighties]], somewhere in the early 00s they started playing songs from the '90s (and dropped the '60s) and later they started playing contemporary hits thus the only thing differentiating it from its main rivals was its morning show.
▲** After its cancellation in '09, they launched a new radio station, Neo FM, in its place on the same wavelength. It offers much of the same programming with the same presenters, but the new name clearly indicates it's a separate entity from its predecessor with different goals, thus in a way negating the complaints raised against its "former self" and how it shifted focus.
=== [[Shortwave]] ===
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=== [[Satellite Radio]] ===
* XM had a hard rock/metal oriented station called "The Boneyard" which played all kinds of hard rock and metal, new and old. It
== Film and TV Studios ==
=== Slipped ===
* In the later Weinstein-run years, arthouse distributor [[Miramax Films]] began distributing "mainstream" films like ''[[She's All That]]''. ''[[
=== Major Shifts That Fit ===
* [[Metro Goldwyn Mayer]], the studio that once brought us such famed classics as ''[[The Wizard of Oz (film)|The Wizard of Oz]]'', ''[[Gone with the Wind]]'', and ''[[2001: A Space Odyssey]]'', is more of a smaller studio releasing low budget movies nowadays. It all started in 1969, when MGM was bought out by Kirk Kerkorian, a Las Vegas billionaire whose only reason to buy the studio is to destroy it [[Executive Meddling|by selling off their studio memorabilia (including Dorothy's ruby slippers), shutting down their production facility and animation unit, selling their record label, and turning it into a Las Vegas hotel simply called MGM Grand, in addition to forcing the studio to only distribute several low budget productions]]. Later on in the early 1980s, Kerkorian, realizing that MGM is not a studio, decided to revamp it by buying out [[United Artists]] and merging it with MGM. And then in 1985, Kerkorian sold the combined MGM/UA to Ted Turner, who then sold United Artists and the MGM trademark seventy-four days later back to Kerkorian and MGM's Culver City studio lot to [[Lorimar]] while keeping MGM's film library (excluding the UA stuff). Then in the mid-1990s, Turner sold his empire to Time Warner and thus MGM's pre-1986 library was acquired by [[Warner Bros]] (who actually had nothing to do with these movies), and Kerkorian wasted his time "revamping" MGM by buying out several smaller low budget film companies and their libraries, such as Orion Pictures and [[Polygram Filmed Entertainment|PolyGram]]'s pre-1996 library. As a result, MGM is currently a low budget studio instead of one of the Big Six major studios
** Following their bankruptcy in 2010, MGM isn't even ''that'' anymore [a standalone film studio]. Currently{{when}} they only focus on co-investing films for other companies as well as handling international television distribution of their own films (new and existing films from its film library). All of their new and existing films for the are co-financed, marketed, and/or distributed by other larger film companies. So it's at the point that MGM ''doesn't even create or handle distribution of their own films anymore.'' At least for the most part anyway.
=== Unique Situations ===
* [[Cartoon Network]] Studios, and its subsidiary, Williams Street, known for their high quality animated productions for [[Cartoon Network]] and [[Adult Swim]], shifted their focus in the mid-
== Record Companies ==
=== Total Abandonment ===
* Roadrunner Records used to be known for their reputation of holding extreme metal bands on their label. They used to be very particularly picky about the skill level of the musicians they let on the label and held many critically acclaimed artists during their early days. Then [[Nickelback]] somehow got signed onto the label. Because of their sudden commercial success, Roadrunner dumped many of the extreme metal bands they once held and let on many other Post-Grunge bands. YMMV on
=== Major Shifts That Fit ===
* [[Four AD Records]] started out as a small independent label without a niche. Then, after the success of the [[Cocteau Twins]], they started catering to mostly [[Dream Pop]]/ [[Shoegazing]] acts with a small number of other [[Alternative Rock]] bands (i.e. [[The Pixies|Pixies]]). Then, after Dream Pop and Shoegazing started taking a spiral in popularity, the label made their main niche [[Slowcore]] with bands like [[Red House Painters]] and American Music Club. Then around the 2000s, the label started struggling financially and had to branch out into other Indie Bands (i.e. [[The National]] and [[TV On the Radio]]). They still maintain their general Alternative/Indie branch, they just change their main emphasis ever few years as the times change.
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