Ever tune into a radio station and hear the same song playing... for hours? That's called radio stunting, and it's one of the weirdest, most effective tricks in broadcasting history.
This episode digs into the crazy world of radio stunts - from a Louisiana governor who played an obscure song for almost 60 hours straight in 1955, to the California station that somehow found 823 different versions of "Louie Louie" to play back-to-back.
But the real story here is personal. Back in 1998, when I was 12 years old living in Tampa, this new station WLLD pulled off the most creative stunt I'd ever seen. They played Tone Loc's "Wild Thing" on repeat for two days while these fake DJs named Josh and Brian pretended to broadcast from a boat on Tampa Bay. I spent hours trying to call their "celly" but never got through - along with thousands of other people who got completely sucked into this elaborate hoax.
That stunt launched Tampa's first major hip-hop FM station and led to these massive concerts called "The Last Damn Show" that I actually went to. We're talking 14,000 people watching Eminem back when he was just starting to blow up.
You'll also hear about the Tampa rock station that played "Stairway to Heaven" for 24 hours straight (imagine being the intern who had to keep changing the CDs), plus how modern stations are still pulling these stunts but now they go viral on TikTok instead of just local news.
Some of these stunts made millions, others got stations in trouble with the FCC, and a few actually helped launch major music careers. They're basically the original way radio figured out how to "break the internet" decades before the internet even existed.
If you've ever wondered why radio can be so wonderfully weird, this episode explains it all.
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