When Howard Stern escapes FM radio on December 16th for the uncensored world of Sirius Satellite Radio, New York loses more than its most famous shock jock — it also loses K-Rock, the last major station to regularly play new rock music. On January 3rd, former Van Halen singer David Lee Roth will take over Stern’s WXRK-FM morning show, and the station will switch to talk radio, leaving classic Q104.3 as New York’s last remaining commercial rock station.
K-Rock is just the latest casualty for rock radio. Listenership declined sixteen percent from 1998 to 2004, according to Arbitron, despite a slight resurgence for the first half of 2005. Major rock stations in Washington, D.C., Miami and Houston have folded in the past year and a half. In February, Philadelphia’s twelve-year-old modern-rock fixture Y100 switched to hip-hop, and in June, New York’s thirty-three-year-old oldies station WCBS-FM fired its veteran DJs and transformed into the new format, Jack, which plays a jukebox-style mix of pop and rock hits from the last three decades. “It’s like a slap in the face,” says Doug Podell, operations manager for Detroit rock station WRIF-FM. “Those stations were just so big, with so much rock history — and it was wiped out in a matter of moments.”
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