WHFS Changes Its Tune to Spanish
Alternative Rock Pioneer Targets Latino Audience
By Teresa Wiltz and Paul Farhi
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, January 13, 2005; Page A01
WHFS-FM, the Washington area radio station that was a pioneering purveyor of alternative rock to generations of young music fans, did a programming U-turn yesterday by ditching the genre for a Spanish-language, pop-music format that transforms it into the largest Spanish-language station on the local dial.
In an instant, the station abandoned the likes of the White Stripes, Green Day and Jet for middle-of-the-road superstars such as Marc Anthony, Juan Luis Guerra and Victor Manuelle.
The switch reflects both changing demographics and a corporate war of attrition involving Washington\'s two major radio station owners, Infinity Broadcasting, which owns WHFS, and Clear Channel Communications, which owns WHFS\'s chief competitor, DC-101.
Despite its self-proclaimed "legendary" status, WHFS (at 99.1 on the dial) has long trailed DC-101 in the race to win the ears of rock listeners in the Washington-Baltimore area. At the same time, Spanish-language radio is the fastest-growing format in the country, while alternative rock radio is a withering niche.
At noon yesterday, the station behind the HFStival, a popular annual concert, broadcast the late Jeff Buckley\'s 1995 hit, "Last Goodbye." And then came something that WHFS listeners hadn\'t heard before in the station\'s 36-year history as the arbiter of cutting-edge rock:
"WHFS transmitiendo desde la ciudad capital de America:
"Esta! Es! Tu! Nueva! Radio!"
"Transmitting from America\'s Capital City: This! Is! Your! New! Radio!"
Lanham-based WHFS is now "El Zol," where they\'re "siempre de fiesta" -- always partying. (Zol plays off sol, the Spanish word for sun, and is a station brand of the Spanish Broadcasting System Inc. which owns other "Zol" stations.)
Although radio insiders have discussed the likelihood of WHFS changing formats for many months, the switch came as a shock to former employees and fans who grew up listening to the radio station that, since the late 1960s, had gained a reputation as the place to go for new music. Radio stations often switch formats and often without promoting the change in advance.
WHFS was among a handful of stations that developed the album-oriented format: The music was alternative and free-form, featuring such groups as Led Zeppelin, the Who and Yes, but with the occasional bluegrass or other unexpected ditty. Disc jockeys weren\'t confined to the strictures of a corporate-mandated playlist. They played what they wanted.
Out of this freewheeling approach came the station\'s music festival, which grew from an offbeat spring event to a nationally recognized bacchanalia that last year drew 65,000 people to RFK Stadium.
"Certainly this will have major ramifications for new music in Washington, D.C.," said Seth Hurwitz, owner of the city\'s 9:30 club and producer of last year\'s HFStival, with featured 36 acts. "They were always the forerunner for presenting new music," said Hurwitz, who began his career in 1976 as a disc jockey at the station. "They were a vital fabric of Washington\'s culture."
WHFS began as a classical music station, then switched to pop music in the early-to-mid-1960s before turning to rock about 1968. The moves were orchestrated by Jake Einstein, who began as an advertising salesman and became one of the station\'s owners in the mid-1960s.
Einstein\'s son, Damian, a longtime on-air personality on WHFS, said yesterday that the station\'s reputation as a maverick programmer began to decline more than a decade ago, at the beginning of a rapid consolidation of ownership in the industry.
"They really weren\'t interested in the music anymore," said Einstein, who was one of WHFS\'s best-known personalities and who is now the program director at WRNR-FM, a small alternative rock station in Annapolis. "There really wasn\'t that much creativity there. Having been there for so long and having done so many things there, of course it\'s sad. But I guess you gotta do what you gotta do."
Doing what they\'ve got to do includes wooing the Latino radio market, the fastest growing in the business. The audience of Spanish-language stations has grown 37 percent since 1998 and currently accounts for about 9 percent of all listeners. (Some radio experts believe that this understates the actual audience, as it does not take into account the large numbers of undocumented Latinos for whom the radio is a vital source of information.) In 2003, Latin album sales increased 16 percent, according to Nielsen SoundScan.
In the Washington area, the Hispanic population has grown more than 25 percent in the last four years, Infinity says. "El Zol\'s" playlist is aimed at the region\'s largely Central American population, featuring Caribbean and Central American dance music, mostly salsa, merengue and bachata.
The station will target radio\'s "money demographic": Adults ages 25 to 54. Washington has five other radio stations aimed at Spanish speakers: WBZS-FM, WPLC-FM and WKDL-AM, all owned by Mega Broadcasting; WILC-AM, owned by ZGS Broadcasting; and WACA-AM, owned by Entrevision.
Spanish-language radio programs have scored some notable successes in recent years. In New York, "La Mega" (WSKQ-FM) has a morning show that frequently trumps Howard Stern in the quarterly Arbitron ratings, according to Seth Rosen, media director for Reynardus and Moya, a New York-based advertising agency that caters to the Latino market.
The Viacom media conglomerate owns Infinity Broadcasting, which in turn also owns Washington area stations WPGC-FM and AM, WARW-FM and WJFK-FM. Recently, it has been flipping some of its weaker-performing stations across the country to a Spanish-language format, reflecting an industry trend. The switches have been prompted by Infinity\'s alliance with the Spanish Broadcasting System Inc., the nation\'s largest Latino-controlled radio broadcasting company. Infinity owns an equity interest in the Florida-based company, which served as a consultant on the WHFS reformatting.
"We did extensive research about the Washington, D.C., market," said Infinity spokeswoman Karen Mateo. "We realized there was a void there for approximately 10 percent of the market."
The switch leaves the futures of WHFS\'s on-air personalities and other employees in question. Although Infinity has not announced personnel changes, insiders speculate that the station\'s most popular personalities, the Sports Junkies, will probably be reassigned to WJFK-FM.
No decision has been made about the future of HFStival, Mateo said.
Despite the arrival last year of Lisa Worden, a highly touted programming director, WHFS\'s progress in the ratings has been slow. The station ranked 20th overall in the most recent Arbitron audience survey, and ninth among its key target audience -- listeners 18 to 34. WHFS\'s demise as a rock station will likely benefit its chief rival, DC-101, but could also help more pop-oriented music stations such as Z104-FM and Hot 99.5, said Jim Farley, a veteran of Washington radio who is a vice president of WTOP, the all-news station. WTOP\'s owner, Bonneville International, also owns Z104; Clear Channel owns Hot 99.5, as well as DC-101.
"HFS is an institution around here, but the station has been struggling for a while," said Joe Howard, Washington bureau chief for Radio & Records, a research and analysis firm that also produces an industry magazine.
"I think Infinity saw this as an opportunity to attack an underserved market."
Staff writer Sean Daly contributed to this report.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A4390-2005Jan12.html
WHFS will always hold a special place in my heart.. my first chili peppers show was at the HFStival at RFK in ?99.. they also were pretty good to my earhole driving back home *alone* from breakfast in SC in 2002, when they were playing RHCP tracks off of ?By The Way? before it was released.
Surprising, but not, at the same time..
RIP WFHS
i request spanish hotel california then..
i always thought HFS was a decent station but not great. most of the time they only played weird lincoln park and godsmack/slip knot type stuff that i don\'t like because it scares me (sorry to offend whoever likes that kind of music). i would only be so lucky to hear rhcp, cypress hill or stone temple pilots every once in a while. it sucks that i have to change a preset on the radio in my car, not knowing about the change until a few days ago, i thought the whole spanish polka thing was a joke they were playing. i can\'t say that i will really miss this station because i never thought it was that great, this is just one more thing to make dc worse.
yeah, i guess they sort of declined like radio and music has in general.. here\'s another article that talks about that:
In a Way, WHFS Was Already Gone
By Marc Fisher
Sunday, January 16, 2005; Page C01
Eighteen thousand names on an Internet petition of protest don\'t begin to tell you why the conversion of a radio station from rock-and-roll to Spanish dance hits is a cultural watershed.
For nearly a quarter of a century, rock fans in the Washington area have argued about exactly when WHFS began to, you\'ll excuse the expression, suck. Some say the glory days of free-form rock ended when the station stripped deejays of the right to play whatever music they were into. Some say it happened when the station was sold to a big company that wanted the deejays to sound as smooth and solid as polished jewels.
Now, it hardly matters. The station that introduced Washington listeners to The Who and Root Boy Slim, to sandals at Georgetown Leather Design and bongs at local head shops has flipped to tropical love songs.
In Frederick, where Josh Brooks has lived since he left HFS in 1978, this week\'s format change won\'t change listening habits -- Brooks catches up with new tunes on Internet stations that play music you can\'t hear on the radio -- as much as it serves as a reminder that the \'70s were a long time ago. Brooks, now 58, was one of the original members of Spiritus Cheese, the trio of deejays who took over HFS starting in 1969, adding underground rock to a station that specialized in the serene sounds of Mantovani and the 101 Strings.
Brooks, Mark Gorbulew and Sarah Vass came to Washington that year fresh from Bard College in New York, intent on getting their music on the radio. "Everybody threw us out of their offices," Brooks says of their job search. "At WHFS, Jake [Einstein, the owner,] wouldn\'t hire us, but he would sell us time." So the kids bought two hours of airtime each evening and spent days hitting up record stores, used-clothing outlets and head shops for commercial spots.
"We had spent our years in college being stoned and listening to music, and we wanted to be able to continue that," Brooks says. "We just wanted to get the music out there and make enough money to sustain ourselves."
FM radio was still new. Car radios generally were AM only. FM was wide-open terrain, a technology sufficiently obscure that it could be entrusted to 22-year-olds running on passion. Einstein was intrigued to see the kids who bought his airtime connecting to a generation with no media voice of its own. A few local kids, including an American University student named Tom Trapnell, came to HFS in the summer of \'68 to play the songs they\'d been spinning on college stations, and all of a sudden, HFS was where young people turned for the ride board, concert information, open talk about drugs and shows called "Through the Looking Glass" and "Stoned."
Trapnell, now art director at the Los Angeles Times, got $80 a week to do his rock show, but he\'d have done it for free. He did it to share his music, and he did it because the phone didn\'t stop ringing. "A guy called and said, \'If you don\'t play [Bob Dylan\'s] "Visions of Johanna," all the acid in the D.C. area will turn to peanut butter,\' " Trapnell recalls. He played the record, because who would want to take that chance?
HFS never won huge ratings numbers, but as Brooks says, "It was always much more fervent than it was quantity." Rockers playing Washington gigs would make the pilgrimage to the studios on Cordell Avenue in Bethesda and play on the air, then maybe stop by the Psyche Delly nearby. Listening to HFS was a marker, a cultural identifier as powerful and telling as what you wore and where you hung out. It meant that you spurned conformity, sneered at the slick and cherished rebellion.
Brooks took pride in being a deejay with no shtick. "I just played records," he says. "The whole point was not to have slick deejays with a trained delivery. It was about the music, not the personalities." So when Einstein sold the station to a big, out-of-town company in 1987 and that company replaced the old HFS jocks with guys who sounded polished, Brooks, who had long since moved to Frederick to work in radio sales, stopped listening.
He still plays deejay at home, burning CDs with songs that fit themes, just as he used to craft his shows on HFS -- songs about Valentine\'s Day or songs about rain, songs about Mardi Gras or songs about trains. He passes them out to friends, and the music brings them closer, just as it did on the radio, when it was all about the tunes.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A12756-2005Jan15.html