It would surprise me if anyone hasn't changed already.

Yeah this kind of thing has been going on all over the country and even before the stations were dropped the formats were moving farther and farther away from jazz. Listeners have been turning to other sources for years now.

As I have said before, I feel bad for those of you who have lost your smooth jazz stations, but I quit listening to the radio as a source of music a long time ago. Peace and goodwill.

Absolutely unreal the crap being hurled at us in the name of "broadcasting". Maybe its "just my radio", but every station sounds the same calling themselves classic rock, or light rock with a couple guys, or some dude with a female and the pair making hideously unfunny stabs at humor while playing laugh tracks that are enough to drive you up a wall. The alternative is country which I have nothing against except I don't care to listen to it, or NPR which I'm listening to more and more because it is at least intelligent.

Lansing has a station that calls themselves "smooth jazz" and at start-up a couple years ago they actually played SG, The Ripps, and more. Now it's all about pop vocals. Better than the "classic rock" cookie cutters all over "my radio", but not what I choose to listen to all day. And surprise of surprises; V98.7, WVMV in Detroit, the station with Alexander Zonjic as the morning DJ and which hosted summer jazz festivals and weekly jazz series......well, they flipped too. It is hard to imagine Detroit losing it's only jazz station and with it all the concerts by guys like Paul Taylor.

I love my CD player because I can't listen on-line. So now where do I find new jazz and new musicians?

You still find the station online:

http://www.smoothjazzdetroit.com

I know that's not a substitute for the radio station.

I talked about that with Dave McMurray lately:

http://www.smooth-jazz.de/Conversation/McMurray/McMurray.htm

Oh yeah, there are many good stations on-line, but I'm afraid I don't have internet access in any of my vehicles and cannot justify the expense of satellite radio.

Being in the UK, I've always used internet radio. These days I mainly listen to the following online:

www.sky.fm/smoothjazz/
and on Sunday (9am your time) there is a 2 hour live show, making it unique.

www.ksbr.net/webcast.html

www.jazztrax.com/jazz/radio.html

It might sound a bit harsh, but I think some of the commercial stations had it coming, they seemed to loose touch with the listeners, or perhaps it's the advertisers who didn't understand the listeners. Too many vocals, not enough relaxing music. I wonder if Acoustic Alchemy were just starting now, with their original sound, would the commercial stations now even consider playing that sound? Well perhaps at 3am...

There was also a new take on the 'name' discussion at SmoothViews.com this month. www.smoothviews.com/perspectives.htm

I couldn't agree more with stations losing touch and definitely too many vocals. Unfortunately along with the demise of the terestrial stations comes the stark realization to listeners that what was there was better than nothing.

Again; I can't listen to the internet in my car and I'm not ready to subscribe to paid radio.

I live Near Detroit and only listened to WVMV. They were an awesome station that connected with the people all of the time but flipped to HD2. I'm going to school in NY and when I drove back to my dismay, it was some crappy Punk station that played a conglomeration of all the other stations.

Their website is all but non existant, but I can listen to the station on the internet.

Also, I have an FM mod in my car (an AUX Cable connected to the raido its better than a transmitter). Instead of getting a HD converter which would be 300$, im going to get a portable HD radio from 20$-40$ at Best Buy and hook it up that way.

But This really sucks.