WXKS-FM
Encyclopedia
WXKS-FM, better known as Kiss 108, is a radio station in Boston, Massachusetts, licensed to nearby Medford
Medford, Massachusetts
Medford is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, in the United States, on the Mystic River, five miles northwest of downtown Boston. In the 2010 U.S. Census, Medford's population was 56,173...

 broadcasting a Top 40 (CHR)
Contemporary hit radio
Contemporary hit radio is a radio format that is common in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada and Australia that focuses on playing current and recurrent popular music as determined by the Top 40 music charts...

 format. Owned by Clear Channel Communications
Clear Channel Communications
Clear Channel Communications, Inc. is an American media conglomerate company headquartered in San Antonio, Texas. It was founded in 1972 by Lowry Mays and Red McCombs, and was taken private by Bain Capital LLC and Thomas H. Lee Partners LP in a leveraged buyout in 2008...

, the station operates on 107.9 FM
Frequency modulation
In telecommunications and signal processing, frequency modulation conveys information over a carrier wave by varying its instantaneous frequency. This contrasts with amplitude modulation, in which the amplitude of the carrier is varied while its frequency remains constant...

, and is a sister station to Rhythmic Contemporary
Rhythmic Contemporary
Rhythmic contemporary, also known as rhythmic top 40, rhythmic contemporary hit radio or rhythmic crossover, is a music radio format that includes a mix of EDM, upbeat rhythmic pop, hip-hop and R&B hits. Rhythmic contemporary rarely uses rock music or country music in its airplay, but it may...

 WJMN
WJMN (FM)
WJMN is a successful Rhythmic Top 40 radio station licensed to Boston, Massachusetts, USA, under the ownership of Clear Channel Communications. Its current slogan is "Hip Hop and Today's Hit Music!" and can be heard as far north as the White Mountains under good conditions, and in portions of...

, once a major rival to Kiss.

Kiss 108 is one of the most prominent top 40 stations in New England
New England
New England is a region in the northeastern corner of the United States consisting of the six states of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut...

 notable primarily for its annual Kiss Concert, which draws some of the best-known names in the pop music business to Mansfield
Mansfield, Massachusetts
Mansfield is a town in Bristol County, Massachusetts, United States. As of the United States 2010 Census, the town population is 23,184. Mansfield is in the south-southwest suburbs of Boston and is also close to Providence, Rhode Island....

's Comcast Center concert venue each spring. Morning DJ Matt Siegel has been a fixture on the Boston airwaves for several decades, and was briefly nationally syndicated during the late 1990s. Kiss 108 was also the flagship station for Open House Party
Open House Party
Open House Party is an American radio show hosted on Saturday nights by John Garabedian that promotes itself as "the biggest party on the planet". It focuses on playing contemporary hit radio music, also known as Top 40. The show differentiates itself from most Top 40 stations because it plays a...

 Saturday hosted by John Garabedian
John Garabedian
John H. Garabedian is an American radio personality and disc jockey, known as the host of Open House Party. He has been involved in Massachusetts radio and television stations for around fifty years. John lives in Southborough, Massachusetts....

, broadcasting from his house in suburban Boston, but on March 10, 2007, Kiss 108 dropped Saturday edition Open House Party and began a new show called The Saturday Night Mash-Up. The Sunday edition of Open House Party hosted by Kannon was broadcast shortly on Kiss 108, replacing the Saturday night show, until May 2008.

History

The station first went on the air September 1, 1960 as WHIL-FM, a simulcast of sister station WHIL (1430 AM, now WKOX), and broadcasting its own programming after sunset when WHIL signed-off. For much of the sixties, WHIL & WHIL-FM were country-music stations, but in late 1972, both stations switched to beautiful music
Beautiful music
Beautiful music is a mostly instrumental music format that was prominent in American radio from the 1960s through the 1980s...

 as WWEL (AM) and FM ("Well").

Despite moving the FM transmitter to the top of the Prudential Tower
Prudential Tower
The Prudential Tower, also known as the Prudential Building or, colloquially, The Pru, is a skyscraper in Boston, Massachusetts. The building, a part of the Prudential Center complex, currently stands as the 2nd-tallest building in Boston, behind the John Hancock Tower. The Prudential Tower was...

 in 1972, WWEL-FM was not very successful as a beautiful-music format. The stations were sold to Heftel Communications, operated by U.S. Rep. Cecil Heftel (D-Hawai'i) in early 1979. Heftel changed the call letters to WXKS, adopted "Kiss 108" as an identity and changed to a disco
Disco
Disco is a genre of dance music. Disco acts charted high during the mid-1970s, and the genre's popularity peaked during the late 1970s. It had its roots in clubs that catered to African American, gay, psychedelic, and other communities in New York City and Philadelphia during the late 1960s and...

 format. The first record played under this new format was At Midnight by T-Connection
T-Connection
T-Connection was a funk and disco group from Nassau, the Bahamas, who scored two hits on the Billboard Hot 100 between 1977 and 1979. They did better on the US Hot Dance Music/Club Play chart, where they had five Top 10 hits, including "Do What You Wanna Do", which reached #1, and "Everything Is...

 . Under Heftel, the station soared to near the top of the Arbitron
Arbitron
Arbitron is a consumer research company in the United States that collects listener data on radio audiences. It was founded as American Research Bureau by Jim Seiler in 1949 and became national by merging with L.A. based Coffin, Cooper and Clay in the early 1950s...

 ratings, and forced WBOS
WBOS
WBOS is a commercial radio station located in Brookline, Massachusetts, broadcasting to the Greater Boston area on 92.9 FM. The station airs a mainstream rock format branded as "Radio 92.9"...

 (which had been first in Boston with a 24/7 disco sound and had a short period of huge success with it) out of the format in early 1980.

Sunny Joe White, a young programmer (who had previously programmed WILD
WILD (AM)
WILD 1090 AM is a radio station licensed to Boston, Massachusetts. It broadcasts on 1090 kHz and airs programming from China Radio International under a lease agreement...

 in Boston) came aboard at Kiss-108 upon its shift to disco and had much to do with the station's early success.

At the end of 1979, WXKS dropped disco to adopt an adult standards
Adult standards
Adult standards is a North American radio format heard primarily on AM or class A FM stations.Adult standards is aimed at "mature" adults, meaning mainly those persons over 50 years of age, but it is mostly targeted for senior citizens...

 format, while the FM slowly evolved into urban contemporary when disco's popularity crashed. It eventually became a mainstream contemporary hit station, the only one in the Boston market, and one of the most influential Top 40 stations in the nation.

On January 27, 2006, WXKS-FM went live with an HD2
HD Radio
HD Radio, which originally stood for "Hybrid Digital", is the trademark for iBiquity's in-band on-channel digital radio technology used by AM and FM radio stations to transmit audio and data via a digital signal in conjunction with their analog signals...

 digital broadcast referred to by Clear Channel as the "Artists' Channel". The broadcast is also available as an Internet radio
Internet radio
Internet radio is an audio service transmitted via the Internet...

 station. It then went to a "new CHR" format before becoming a simulcast of conservative talk
Conservative talk
Conservative talk radio is a talk radio format in the United States and Canada devoted to expressing conservative viewpoints of issues, as opposed to progressive talk radio...

 station WXKS
WXKS (AM)
WKOX is a radio station in the Boston radio market, licensed to Everett, Massachusetts. The station is owned by Clear Channel Communications and carries a Spanish Hits format.- History :...

 (1200 AM) in 2010.

On January 14, 2008 WSKX
WSKX
WSKX , known as "Kiss 95.3", is a radio station licensed to York Center, Maine, United States, which airs a Top 40 format.-History:The station went on the air in May 1987 as WQMI with an middle of the road format. In 1988 it became WCQL as "Cool 95.3" with an oldies format...

/95.3 FM in York, Maine
York, Maine
York is a town in York County, Maine, United States at the southwest corner of the state. The population in the 2000 census was 12,854. Situated beside the Atlantic Ocean on the Gulf of Maine, York is a well-known summer resort. It is home to three 18-hole golf clubs, three sandy beaches, and...

 began simulcast
Simulcast
Simulcast, shorthand for "simultaneous broadcast", refers to programs or events broadcast across more than one medium, or more than one service on the same medium, at the same time. For example, Absolute Radio is simulcast on both AM and on satellite radio, and the BBC's Prom concerts are often...

ing WXKS-FM. In August 2009, WSKX stopped simulcasting Kiss 108, but retained a Top 40 format.

Kiss 108 Top 30 Countdown

The Kiss 108 Top 30 Countdown is a locally produced program on Kiss 108, hosted by DJ Billy Costa
Billy Costa
-Early life:Costa grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts. On a hockey scholarship, he attended college at Merrimack College for an English major. After transferring to Emerson College, he lost his scholarship and money, so got a job as a DJ at a local nightclub. He later joined the Emerson radio...

. The countdown once aired solely on Saturday mornings from 7AM to 10AM, but now, is broadcast twice on the weekend: Saturday mornings from 9AM to 12PM and Sunday nights from 7PM to 10PM.

Notable past employees

  • Carson Daly
    Carson Daly
    Carson Jones Daly is an American television host. He is the host of NBC's Last Call with Carson Daly, a late-night talk show that began airing on January 7, 2002. Before his role as host of that program, Daly was a VJ on MTV's TRL, and a DJ for the Southern California based radio station KROQ-FM...

  • Jay Thomas
    Jay Thomas
    Jay Thomas is an American actor, comedian and radio talk show host.-Personal life:Thomas was born in Kermit, Texas. He was raised in his Italian American mother's Roman Catholic faith, although his father was Protestant....

  • Wendy Williams
    Wendy Williams (radio host)
    Wendy Williams Hunter is an American media personality and New York Times bestselling author. She calls herself the "Queen Of All Media" and hosts her own syndicated talk show, The Wendy Williams Show. Williams has gained notoriety for her on-air spats with celebrities...

  • Dale Dorman
    Dale Dorman
    Dale Dorman is an American Rock and Roll Hall of Fame radio disc jockey on WODS in Boston. Until September 15 2008 , he hosted The Breakfast Club with Dale Dorman weekday mornings from 5:30-9 AM. Dorman finished his career as a weekend personality with the station. He is now happily retired...


External links

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