oWOW Radio

» see owowradio.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

oWOW Radio went live on 20 February 2015 out of a small temporary room in Cleveland while builders finished a 1,600 square foot studio at the 78th Street Studios complex in the Gordon Square Arts District. It was an adult album alternative station, marketed as timeless rock, owned by Wow Media and programmed by John Gorman, whose name carries weight in that city because of what WMMS was in the 1970s.

The staffing told you what kind of project it was. Gorman brought in Jim Marchyshyn, formerly WMMS marketing director, to run sales, and the two were the principal partners until Marchyshyn's death. John Chaffee, once president of Malrite Communications, came on as a consultant in April 2015. David Helton, who drew the Buzzard that WMMS put on half the T-shirts in Ohio, designed the logo. Every one of them had already done this once, with a transmitter.

Money came from private investors including Bass Energy, alongside ordinary bank loans. There was also a small business grant from the city of Cleveland itself, which is worth sitting with: a municipal government part-funding an internet radio station on the grounds that the city needed one.

~ the dossier ~

~ the pitch ~

Gorman's argument was that AM and FM had become, in his words, a dated appliance in the digital age, and that Pandora and Spotify had proved streaming radio could work while being useless at serving a specific place. oWOW aimed itself at Northeast Ohio deliberately. The industry analyst Sean Ross later described it as a local Cleveland station that just happened not to have an FM antenna.

The localism was not only in the playlist. The station joined the monthly third Friday at 78th Street Studios so listeners could walk in, tour the place and meet whoever was on air. Friday Night Live ran recorded rock concerts and Alan Greene hosted a weekly blues hour. The WKYC reporter Monica Robins presented an acoustic program called Naked Brunch. oWOW was also an early pusher of the local band Welshly Arms.

Nothing about this was built for me. The entire value proposition was being from one American city, and I have never been to Ohio. I spent the same years listening to streams that were deliberately placeless, which is the opposite trade, and I understand why a Cleveland listener would want the other one.

~ running out ~

In March 2020 the local restaurants and concert venues that bought almost all of oWOW's advertising canceled their accounts at once, and every event the station had planned was called off. Gorman announced the shutdown in mid-September 2020, effective 2 October, and noted that listening had actually gone up sharply when the pandemic started, which made the loss of ad revenue, in his phrase, a moot point.

Then it did not quite stop. Listeners pushed back hard enough on social media that Gorman kept the stream alive past 2 October while dropping all local programming, helped by a small uptick in advertising and by the money from an oWOW compilation album of local bands. The deal he announced was that it would last through October or as long as the station could financially and contractually endure. It endured until 17 January 2021, when the money from the album ran out and everything stopped. Gorman told the Plain Dealer he was already planning the next thing.

owowradio.com answers a 502 today. The airstaff left in October and the music played on by itself for fifteen more weeks, which is a strange way for a station whose whole argument was live human presence to actually end.

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