So I got back late, jet lagged out of my mind, woke up at 3:30am and began running a few errands at the bank a few blocks from my place and then wandered out to my car at 5:30am. Listened to the other modern rock station here for the drive over to the 24 hour sandwich store, 99.3 the Fox, my tape player is broken so all I got is the radio inside my old clunky near-antique. Got my sandwich, turned around to head back home, then switched over to the other rock station, 104.9 X fm, which plays the usual mix of modern rock but in a slight variation so it’s a bit less annoying. Less White Stripes and Nickelback, more Rage and Beasty Boys. You can only hear ‘seven nation army’ so many times before you snap, take my word for it.

Anyways, my car became filled with the unmistakable din of ‘ding-ding-dingaling’ and something about Christmas trees. I went in an early morning ‘what-the-fuck!?’ mode and listened some more, assuming it was some sort of sound bite, or the morning DJs were just fucking with their listeners. But no, the song ended, and another one resumed… was the station down? Tower trouble? What the hell was going on?

Then the DJs kicked in – not their usual morning guys, Pepper and Crash, but some guy that sounded like an X fm refugee and some woman. They engage in banter about the weekend’s Heritage Hockey game over in Edmonton and then the guy said “you’re listening to one – o – four – nine ~Christmas~ FM!”. Then the usual X fm selection of commercials kicked in, the same ones, about snowboard shops and stereo stores. Very out of place for an all Christmas music station.

I was baffled.

First of all, X fm usually placed in the top 10 for this city’s 25-30 radio stations, had a good listener base, presented several high-profile concerts every year and was a solid contributor in the radio corner of things in this city. I asked friends and co-workers and did some brief net searching for some sort of explanation, but found very little…. only that the local media giant of Western Canuckistan, Rogers Media, had bought the station and some others in the western provinces and was doing some sort of restructuring. So at the drop of a hat they canned the entire staff of X and turned it into a – Christmas station!? again…. what the fuck.

Perhaps some of you are more tuned into amazingly dumb corporate decisions than I am, though that may not be possible considering the industry I work in. Perhaps a former airline exec is managing their radio wing now. I still cannot understand what would compel a corporate giant to take what I assume was a reasonably profitable radio station with a solid listener base and just drop its entire format and start playing Christmas songs in mid November. Truth is really stranger than fiction. Considering that the people who might listen to a station like that are probably old doddered types who won’t be flipping through the radio stations, and assume the 104.9 dial is for some modern rock stuff. Compounded with the fact that they issued NO press release, no advertising, no notification to the city that they were doing this…. they just did it.

So I wonder if any of you can make sense of this corporate decision. Their angle, marketing strategy, restructuring plan, none of it makes sense to my addled profit-driven and market share oriented mind. Obviously these big corporations can soak up losses like this for the short term and it doesn’t make a difference, but wouldn’t it make sense to keep the current format and continue to make money on the advertising?

Yeah, so, uh, what the fuck?!?