Music

Calgary radio station stops cutting songs in half after only three weeks

by Mark Teo

Well, that was fast. After Calgary’s AMP 90.3 announced that they’d be cutting their songs in half to avoid boring listeners, they’ve abandoned the experiment—and it only took three weeks. After questions about the legality of their actions (and a healthy amount of animosity from both artists and listeners alike), the station has pulled the plug.

“We realized that in order to successfully do this we were going to face a lengthy and divisive and expensive legal process that we weren’t willing to do right now, especially when some of those would come from the very content providers we work with,” AMP’s vice president of programming, Steve Jones, told the CBC, “they are partners in our success.”

The cynically titled “content providers” that he references, of course, are artists and record labels, both of whom balked at AMP’s format—Jann Arden was among the station’s fiercest critics, and in a fierce Twitter takedown, she mentioned that her label supported her. Jones, for his part, acknowledged Arden’s freakout, essentially calling it unprofessional.

“The whole thing with Jann Arden was really blown out of proportion because of personal attacks,” he said, when CBC questioned him on the topic. “We have a tremendous amount of respect for the artists that we play and the artists we don’t play, and the music they make. From the very beginning we knew there would be issues and challenges like this, we just didn’t think they would amount to quite as much as they have.”

Issues and challenges like, y’know, taking the artistic license to edit their songs down into two-minute chunks. Nonetheless, at face value, AMP’s vision had some merit: The station claimed they wanted to deliver their listeners twice the music, and they’re not wrong to assume that attention spans are shrinking. What they may have underestimated, though, is the desires of their audiences—A.D.D.-riddled as they may be, listeners still understand the value, craft, and art behind complete songs.

Arden, for her part, stayed silent this time around.

AMP’s Jones, however, said some were intrigued by the format. “It was greeted with a lot of curiosity and it was also greeted with numerous legal threats from a variety of different directions,” he told the Huffington Post.

But while AMP may have done away with the format after three weeks of heartache, the damage the station’s done to its reputation may last longer still. While the station has earned itself a reputation for being relentlessly thirsty—remember their Breast Summer Ever plastic surgery contest, or the time they burned $15,000?—the station may have permanently severed their relationship with music listeners. And for good reason, we might add.