WSM-FM

WSM-FM is a Nashville, Tennessee FM radio station.

Sister of the legendary clear-channel WSM-AM, the FM began in the late 1940s on an experimental license with callsign W47NV, and was the first commercial FM radio station to be granted an FCC license in the U.S.

This initial license was later divested; the current FM station (located on the dial at 95.5 MHz) dates only from 1968 and its country format only from 1983. It is now owned by Cumulus Media, which also operates the sales department of sister station WSM (AM), but (as of 2005) does not own it.

History

The present-day FM was founded originally in the early 1960s as WLWM-FM, owned by Webber Parrish, a local Nashville businessman. National Life and Accident Insurance Company, licensee of WSM-AM and owners of the Grand Ole Opry, purchased the station from Parrish in 1968, and after a short period of simulcasting the AM, programmed an easy listening format on it from 1969 until early 1976. Afterward, NL&AI allowed a change (despite some management misgivings) to a soft-rock playlist that was very broad by today's standards; during those years, the station adopted the branding "SM95". In demographics, the station went after an audience of people in their twenties and thirties who, obviously enough, wanted something more musically interesting than easy listening but disliked the harder and louder rock (or disco) that was becoming popular among teenagers then. SM95 was one of the few outlets in the nation for upcoming singer-songwriters to get airplay without having a smash record elsewhere; some of the artists were in fact Nashville-based, reflecting the growth in non-country artists recording there. One might consider the moderately eclectic format a forerunner of the "adult alternative" playlists that achieved some success years later, in the 1990s and early 2000s.

The appeal of SM95, however, began to decline (and thus advertiser appeal) as its audience began aging in the early 1980s. By 1983, some four years after the conversion of the AM to a full-time country format and after the sale of WSM, Inc. to Gaylord Broadcasting, management decided to bring the FM in line with the AM, and brought in country (with an emphasis on current hits, instead of the AM's empahsis on oldies) full-time. For most of the 1980s and 1990s, 95.5 FM was a highly-competitive, yet usually #2 (behind rival WSIX-FM), country station. It went by brandings such as "Nashville 95," "95 Dot 5," and such.

However, upon the arrival of a fourth country station in the market in 1999 (the legendary FM rocker WKDF, which shocked longtime Nashvillians by changing formats), WSM-FM fell to a distant third, and sometimes fourth, place. In September 2004, the station adopted a revised country format, referred to as "The Wolf," in an attempt to again become competitive in Nashville's highly-competitive country radio market; early indications are that it is boosting Arbitron ratings considerably, and the station is approaching the #1 spot, held in recent times by WSIX.

Miscellanea

When WSM-AM had the rights to broadcast Vanderbilt Commodore football and basketball games, it had WSM-FM air them whenever they took place on Saturday nights, in order not to preempt the live Grand Ole Opry shows on AM 650. WSM did this during most of the 1970s and again from the mid-1990s through the mid-2000s. Vanderbilt games now air on competitors WNSR-AM and WGFX-FM in Nashville and several other stations elsewhere in middle Tennessee.

External links

[Cumulus press release on WSM-FM acquisition]

Nashville FM radio stations
By frequency: 88.1 | 88.3 | 88.5 | 88.7 | 89.1 | 89.5 | 90.3 | 91.1 | 92.1 | 92.9 | 93.7 | 94.1 | 95.5 | 96.3 | 97.1 | 97.9 | 98.9 (WANT) | 98.9 (WRFN-LP) | 99.7
100.1 | 101.1 | 102.5 | 102.9 | 103.3 | 104.5 | 104.9 | 105.1 | 105.9 | 106.7 | 107.5

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