Future of Rock n' Roll on the ropes again

BAM! It looks like "The Future of Rock n' Roll" (aka the former 97X in the 'Nati) is in jeopardy once more. Here's the omnious message today on the front page of WOXY.com: Beginning today, WOXY.com is becoming a listener-supported operation... Unfortunately, at the moment, advertisers just don’t know what to think about us. Are we a website or a radio station? Is our audience local or (inter)national? How do we track who’s listening? Everyone is intrigued by what we're doing, but advertisers are not quite ready to throw enough ad dollars our way to make it work. We have always prided ourselves on being a free radio station. No matter who you are, whether you’re a starving student or multi-millionaire, each day we bring you the best music we can find on the planet, and serve it up with live DJs to boot. We think we’re doing something pretty special, and don’t want anyone to miss out on the party. Unfortunately, until technology catches up and advertisers know how to quantify us, we have to find a way to sustain ourselves. For that reason we’ve decided to make the move to being a listener-supported operation... Starting today, we will begin offering our premium service. For the bargain price of $9.95/month we will be offering 24-hour, true broadband, CD-quality streams to subscribers...And for those of you who just can’t afford to pay one more bill each month, we’re keeping a low bandwidth stream. It may not be the best quality, but you can still tune in for free. But just because you can’t pay a monthly fee, we hope you’ll find a way to make a smaller financial contribution to keep us up and running. To ease the transition we’ll leave our 64 kbps streams running until February 13th. While it's sad that WOXY.com won't continue as a free service, I guess it's not a complete shocker, either. With just a few banner ads and no on-air commercials outside of the Budweiser plugs during the daily "new music break," I know I wasn't the only one who had occasionally pondered, "damn...how these guys paying the bills?" We're all huge fans here at RFC, so we sincerely offer our best wishes to everyone on the WOXY.com staff on the new business model. If you're a fan of the station as well, be sure to sign up and show your support.