The Weekend Classic Rock FM

Its been a great week.

Classic Rock and Baseball. Sunday is opening day for the 2007 season of Major League Baseball. This season, Grand Rapids' classic rock WLAV will air Detroit Tiger night and weekend games.

I'm sure WLAV is hoping the Tigers can repeat the success they had in 2006. Sports isn't foreign to classic rock; many carry the NFL. Anyone else with baseball?

Next Thursday is opening day for our local minor-league Lansing Lugnuts. Best value for the money in our family. Minor league baseball understands that its the experience, not just the game. My two boys (8 & 11) love it!

Rush On Tour. Been receiving lots of email blasts from classic rock stations coast-to-coast with pre-sale info and on-air ticket giveaways. Check out the tour schedule here. Rush will have a new CD "Snakes and Arrows" on May 1st.

Sound Bites: Catch ZZ Top on "King Of The Hill" - Fox Television Sunday Night. TiVo or roll tape for imaging drops.

A happy ending out of Santa Fe (a market where I spent seven years in the late 70s/early 80s). The story: corporation sells local radio station to religious broadcaster. Employees and friends of the station rally and successfully save "their" station. Read about KBAC here.

Failure To Launch. Is it me - or are we seeing a lot more format launch failures in the last few years as compared to the past? Not too many years ago, failure to sustain and grow seemed to be an periodic issue with some start-ups. You'd see a great launch with lots of buzz and excitement - but for any number of reasons - after a book or two - the station would become stagnant.

Of course the great ones were fed, nourished - and continued to grow into legends.

But these days there seems to be a epidemic of launch failures. DOA. We likely would come up with the same list of reasons. Edison Media Research's Sean Ross just wrote a piece on this topic here. I guess its not just me.

Have a good weekend. More here Sunday.