By early September, the Future of Rock and Roll will be in Texas.
WOXY.com, the Internet radio station that began as Oxford-based station 97X in 1983 and whose tagline Dustin Hoffman famously repeated in 1988’s “Rain Man” (“97X – Bam! – The Future of Rock and Roll”), announced today that it will begin broadcasting from Austin on Sept. 8.
The move from downtown Cincinnati’s Longworth Hall to a theater with a sound stage in Austin will allow the station to expand its specialty programming and its Lounge Act live in-studio performances, which it will broadcast online in high-definition video, general manager Bryan Jay Miller said today.
The station had considered moving before but not seriously until Los Angeles-based Future Sounds, a management and record company with a weekly radio program on WOXY, bought the station from Palo Alto-based music streaming company Lala.com in January, Miller said.
The station has been an innovator not only in its rock broadcast format but in its move to online broadcasting. It returned to the air as a radio station, in addition to maintaining its online status, and is heard on WVXU-HD2.
WOXY has traveled to Austin every March for the past three years to broadcast live Lounge Act sessions with bands playing at Austin’s South by Southwest music festival, and it chose the city because it will give the station better access to artists year-round.
“Nearly everyone tours through Austin,” Miller said. “The problem that we have been having around here is that it seems that people have been skipping Cincinnati on their tour schedules.”
Miller relocated to San Francisco after Lala.com bought the station two years ago, but the station’s other three employees, all originally from Greater Cincinnati, Northern Kentucky and Dayton, are relocating to Austin with the station. Three have been with WOXY since its days in Oxford, before it sold its FM broadcast license in 2004, became one of the first terrestrial radio stations in the country go online-only and was rescued twice by investors after revenue shortfalls temporarily silenced the Internet broadcast.
“If this is something that all of us are willing to uproot our entire lives and families to do, it’s something that we believe is really going to take what we do to the next level,” said Matt “Shiv” Shiverdecker, the station’s music director and a DJ.
As it expands its live and specialty programming after the move, WOXY’s modern and alternative rock format, one that it helped pioneer in the early ’80s, will remain the same. Listeners from all over the world will still be able to listen to DJs broadcasting live and taking requests Monday through Friday on WOXY.com or the station’s iPhone application.
WOXY also wants to continue its partnership with WVXU-FM to broadcast its programming in high-definition locally on WVXU-HD-2, but the stations are still working out the technical details, Miller said.
Listeners on Thursday reacted to the news with mixed feelings, congratulating the station on its growth while expressing concerns that Cincinnati is losing an influential champion of local music and a bit of its cool factor.
“Even though they have been kind of international since they went all-Internet, I still considered them local, and they gave extra air time to Cincinnati bands. I’m worried that attention will now be focused on Austin bands,” said Sean Kerns, 43, of Colerain Township, a WOXY listener since 1989. “All of that said, I am glad that they’re still ‘on the air’ and apparently doing well. I’d rather have WOXY in Austin than no WOXY at all.”
Thursday, on WOXY.com’s message boards, Twitter and on the air, staffers tried to reassure listeners that they won’t forget their roots.
“You can take WOXY out of Cincinnati, but you can’t take the Cincinnati out of us,” DJ and blogger Joe Long told listeners on the air. “We’ll champion local music wherever we are and continue to champion Cincinnati artists.”
WOXY’s last day of broadcasting live from Cincinnati will be Aug. 28.
From our readers
I first discovered WOXY when I was 16 just fooling around with the radio dial. WOXY has been a part of my daily life for just over 20 years, through the radio signal, the resurrections, move to woxy.com (In 2003 I was relocated out of state & I put in the relo that I had to be able to listen to woxy.com while I was at work - yes its that important to me. I have a woxy keychain, woxy window cling sticker on the car, woxy shirts. Woxy has introduced me so many bands its a dear friend!
– Karen, Oakley
