95.5 WPLJ – Perhaps they should give away the station!
In the final week before WPLJ‘s sign off, WPLJ took the time to thank it’s listeners for 48 years of history. The story of WPLJ is published elsewhere, but here are a few links to get you started.
WPLJ Announces Sign-Off Date – radioinsight.com, May 8, 2019
WPLJ on Wikipidia – wikipedia.org, May 26, 2019
Ken Foote Pays Tribute to New York’s WPLJ-FM – dfw.cbslocal.com, May 24, 2019
New York’s Best Rock Q&A; Forum – web.archive.org, 2005
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The New York Daily News, on May 8, 2019, reported that WPLJ would be closing on May 31 upon the completion of it’s sale from Cumulus Media to Educational Media Foundation. Educational Media Foundation, EMF for short, is a Christian Pop Music company which airs the same format over hundreds of radio stations across the United States. The sale was announced on May 8, however, Cumulus entered into a LMA with EMF so that they could operate WPLJ through the end of the month.
That same day, WPLJ issued the following statement:
“As hard as it is to believe, WPLJ will be going away on Friday, May 31,” according to a recorded message on the station’s Twitter page. “The format and personalities you’ve come to love over the years will no longer broadcast on 95.5.”
Over the Memorial Day weekend, which used to be a special time for WPLJ’s AM sister station, 77 WABC during a nine-year period when they ran a retrospective called “WABC Rewound“. In a stroke of irony, the WPLJ sign-off was discussed on WABC on Friday, May 25th.
This recording is from Saturday, May 26th. 95.5 is doing something called “The WPLJ Time Machine – Celebrating 48 Years of History”. The special was not all oldies, all old WPLJ airchecks and jingles, but a mish-mash of those things interspersed in it’s Hot Adult Contemporary format. In many ways, this was done tastefully, respecting both the jocks, the station and the WPLJ listening audience.
I scoped out the music and present to you fourteen minutes and forty-five seconds of WPLJ, the weekend just before shutdown!
