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I moved from Houston to Indianapolis in the summer of 1996. When I got there, I discovered that the alternative radio station was the exact same as the alternative station in Houston, down to the identical commercial bumpers using the same announcer. https://twitter.com/dangerfishback/status/1358558874090016768
Soon, one of the Houston DJs even got transferred up to Indianapolis. I'd moved a thousand miles and ended up WITH THE EXACT SAME RADIO STATION. Some might have been comforted by the familiarity in a new city; I found it deeply, deeply disconcerting. Consolidation suuuuucked.
Another story about the Indianapolis alt-rock station: From 9-noon every Sunday, it was listener-programmed. Dave Dugan, blessings be upon his name, would play nothing but requests and his own choices for three hours, and it was AMAZING. Things you would've never heard otherwise.
Sleater-Kinney, Fiona Apple, Superchunk, Guided By Voices, Aimee Mann and many, many others never got a second of airplay otherwise. Think about that: When the listeners got to program the station, they picked everything BUT what they were being fed the rest of the week.
The flip side was that the station was playing everything BUT what the audience was telling it directly that they wanted to hear. It was a weird self-own that played out every weekend before slumping back to Limp Bizkit, the Nixons and Marcy Playground.
But that was corporate radio consolidation in the late '90s for you. Which, to recap, suuuuucked.
