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And Now A Journey In The Wayback Machine

Close to 1000 years ago, I worked at WLOL in Minneapolis. One of the truly great Top 40's ever. Until Emmis bought the Mariners and the station was unloaded to help pay player salaries. No matter what we did on New Years, whether we did a party at the Hyatt or had six clubs in different corners of the market so a party was never more then a few miles from any listener, we always did a top 99 countdown. And, when the whole thing was wrapped up sometime post-midnight, we played a collage of hooks from some of the top songs, year by year, of the previous 15 or so years. Every year, another 20 or so hooks were added on. The thing ran for about ten minutes and it was kind of like the final dance medley for all the house parties where people were listening along. But that wasn't all, we turned it into a contest: write in and ID the song title and artist of every hook in the collage. My final year there, I think there was something like 400 songs in the thing and we usually got at least 1000 people who taped the whole damn thing and wrote them all down...getting every single one. The prize was $1000. It was big. Steal this.

New Years: Reloaded

One of the stations did three separate countdowns last year: club, sales and request. They also burned a load of CD's of the shows and gave them away when they were party crashing. This might also be a good weekend after New Years music feature and contest prize.

Office Parties

I was listening to a station in Vegas last year and their guest was talking about Office Party Etiquette. Because, seriously, who hasn't woken up the morning after a company holiday party thinking, "Oh no. Did I really say that to my boss?" (Bob West and I once called and left a dirty message on Jerry Clifton's teenage step-daughter's answering machine at 3 am from a hotel room in New York, drunk after the WBLS party. The next morning at breakfast we both looked at each other and said, in unison, "Uh, did we call Amy last night?")

I have no doubt that you could burn up 30 minutes on the morning show with people calling in with horror stories. (In 1987, we had an intern at WLOL who literally puked on the shoes of Jeff Smulyen.) Also, you still have time to contact Chilis or Applebees or Fridays and reserve it for an upcoming Friday afternoon. Open up the phones and e-mails and let the mid-day audience sound off on how cheap their employer is to get admittance for them all their co-workers. Hot in Memphis did this a few years years ago and it was large. And both Wild in Tampa and WIOG in Saginaw have done weekend contests around the premise that there was a huge, 72 hour bash at the station.