What is JACK FM?

I don't listen to terrestrial radio very much anymore. But I do listen while driving and I like to put on the radio on weekends when I'm working around the house or cleaning the pool. There's really only two stations I listen to, Nashville's NPR station WPLN, and JACK FM (in Nashville it is 96.3).

I guess it's my age (I was born in the fifties) but JACK FM plays the music I like best. Much of it is the same that was on the radio when I was in my youth, in my teens and even in college. The Beatles, the Stones, Aerosmith, Steely Dan, Steve Miller Band. As I travel the country, more and more I search for and usually find a JACK FM station. (There are now 60 of them around the globe, many here in the U.S.) JACK FM is part of the Radio.com network of stations that are seemingly making the successful transition, finally, to Internet radio.

Radio.com is part of the CBS Interactive Music Group. It's nice to see that radio can still be done right. Rock on JACK!

From Wikipedia:

"JACK FM is the alternative name and on-air brand of 60 radio stations in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Russia. Jack stations play a mix of 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s hits with some current hot adult contemporary singles. Jack stations use the slogan 'playing what we want,' and promote themselves as having a larger and more varied playlist than other commercial radio stations. It is not unusual for a Jack-FM station to have a playlist of over 1000 songs compared to normal FM stations which sometimes have playlists of fewer than 500 songs. The stations are officially classified as the Variety Hits or Adult Hits format by radio research companies.

"One of the early originators of this format was radio programmer Bob Perry, on an American Internet radio stream in 2000. Perry named the station after a fictitious persona, "Cadillac Jack" Garrett, "a hard-living radio cowboy." The back story created by Perry for the original web stream was that Garrett, a DJ who had worked a lot of 'big sticks,' finally got his own radio station and after years of being told what he was to play on-air was creating a station where the motto was 'playing what we want.' However, according to Rogers Communications, the only thing taken, without permission, for the first Jack-FM radio station, in Vancouver, was the name and the tagline. Pat Cardinal, one of the first JACK Program Directors, says that he was unaware of the type of music on the American website and that 'JACK' was one of several names that were considered for the format. Rogers Communications came to an agreement with Perry for the use of the Jack-FM name in Canada soon after the launch."