It’s beginning to sound a lot like Christmas in Ohio’s Mahoning Valley. Z104 in Youngstown is now Christmas 104 The Valley’s Christmas Station.
“We Need a Little Christmas” by Percy Faith and His Orchestra kicked off the flip at the Cumulus Oldies station. The switch to a familiar lineup of holiday tunes, which will run through the end of the year, happened about a month earlier this year.
“We’re bringing much-loved Christmas music to our listeners about a month earlier than we did last year, “said Charley Connolly, Operations Manager. “By playing traditional and new Christmas classics, we are doing our part to usher in the season of love, peace and joy even earlier.”
Why doesn’t someone just air Christmas music as a permanent format? Stations that flip to all-Christmas music during the fourth quarter always seem to see a big uptick in their ratings. They could span the whole gamut from evergreens such as Bing Crosby’s 1942 recording of “White Christmas” and Nat King Cole’s “Christmas Song” to Christmas turkeys such as “Jingle Bells” by The Singing Dogs, voted by one station as the worst record of 1971. Stations that are normally more oriented toward rock could play Frank Zappa’s famous trilogy, “Don’t Eat Yellow Snow”, “Nanook Rubs It”, and “St. Alfonso’s”. Hey, those songs mention snow and winter, don’t they? So they must be Christmas songs!