Big Q DJ’s Kirby and PT playing the hits at the Princeton Community Expo.
WQPM has been a longtime Princeton, Minnesota standard, broadcasting oldies on AM 1300 and 103.3 FM. The signal, however, didn’t get much reach outside of the general Princeton vicinity. That changed in October, when the station owners decided that the time was right for an expansion.
“95.9 FM was something that recently struggled to find its true place,” Big Q Marketing Director Russ Hanes said. “For a while it was a Christian station, and after that it was Spanish radio, but it was never very big. We decided to take 95.9 and use it for the Big Q expansion so that it would mirror the Princeton station but have a much larger reach.”
The move paid off as the Big Q 95.9 FM can now be heard in Forest Lake, throughout the north metro and even into Wisconsin as far as Rice Lake and New Richmond.
“The reason we rebranded to the Big Q is that we loved the format and we believed that we could do oldies like they were not being done by anyone else in the north metro for many years,” Hanes said. “There was a hunger for this type of station in the area.”
So far, Russ and company are hearing a lot of positive feedback from listeners who appreciate being able to hear music that they have not heard for 30 or 40 years.
“Another unique thing about our station is that we basically have a no repeat clause which means you will always be hearing different stuff,” Hanes said. “We don’t take the top 100 songs and put them on repeat; we give listeners some deeper cuts from albums that maybe didn’t get a lot of airplay when they were new.”
Currently, the Big Q staff are working to involve themselves in many of the communities they serve in an effort to spread the word about the newly expanded station. Hanes is an active member of the Forest Lake Chamber of Commerce.
“We are doing a lot of community events including a summer promotion where we will be broadcasting live on location every Wednesday night from this coming June to August,” Hanes said. “We are calling it ‘Cruisin’ with the Q’ and we will be broadcasting live from different locations including four nights at Vannelli’s by the Lake.”
Hanes also said that if community members know of an event that could benefit from having a live radio broadcast on site, they can send a request to community@bigqradio.com. Requests will also be accepted for items to be placed on the community calendar which will be read on air weekly.
Community calendar events can be submitted week prior to event.
“We want to be a part of the communities we serve and a big part of that is knowing about and promoting local events,” Hanes said. “We definitely want to be on people’s radar. We’re here to bring fun lovin’ radio to the lakes area and north metro and were going to be very active in the community.”
One final word that Hanes left concerned the theory that radio is dead and that fewer and fewer people are tuning into radio and instead using streaming music services.
“Ninety-three percent of baby boomers and 90 percent of millenials listen to standard AM/FM radio two hours per week on average, making it the most consistently followed form of media that exists today,” Hanes said. “Radio is the only form of media where you get to have an interaction with the people on air. You can’t develop a relationship with an iPod like you can with the actual people who are playing the music that you love.”