Grandma got run over by a reindeer. In October.

Posted on October 31, 2014 by

WEST ATLANTIC CITY, N.J. — It was still two weeks before Halloween when WEZW-FM, the easy-listening standby of Cape May County, pushed the Christmas button.

Not to miss out on the merriment, two rival stations in Birmingham, Ala., activated their holiday playlists within minutes of each other last week, and by December nearly 500 stations around the country were expected to go eggnog-and-mistletoe.

Even in the age of Pandora and Spotify, the all-holiday format has remained one of radio’s most enduring and profitable gimmicks, with hundreds of stations luring listeners with endless loops of “Feliz Navidad” and “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer.” In the last decade, the number of stations embracing the format has nearly doubled, and competition between broadcasters often leads to stations turning earlier and earlier.

“I have never seen a more successful, impactful and sustainable impact on ratings as all Christmas music,” said Dan Vallie, a consultant to WEZW and other stations around the country.

As radio has been challenged by online media, one of broadcasters’ defensive strategies has been to emphasize their connections to local audiences through news and the kinds of community events that cannot be replicated online. Christmas programming has proved a perfect fulfillment of this, with broadcasters adding cheerful information in between the Burl Ives and Mariah Carey chestnuts.

For WEZW, at just 4,000 watts the smallest of eight stations operated by a local broadcaster, Equity Communications, the annual Christmas format change is also a bragging right. The most common time for stations to change — or “flip,” in industry parlance — is around Thanksgiving, but WEZW, also known as Easy 93.1, has carved a niche for itself as the first in the country to go all-Christmas, a change eagerly awaited by its mostly older, conservative listenership.

“I look forward to it,” said Marla Uzanus, 62, a retired hairdresser in the tiny community of Cape May Court House. “I would rather listen to this than some of this other nonsense you hear on the radio, these young people glorified for cursing and swearing.”

On a recent afternoon at the office of Equity Communications, stuffed reindeer dolls covered the reception desk and a retired corrections officer dressed as Santa Claus for WEZW’s toy drive.

Gary Fisher, Equity’s owner, said that the station’s s early format flip was partly timed to help sell eight-week advertising packages to local merchants. But he also stressed the role of light, nostalgic music in lifting the spirits of an area that has been buffeted by the ailing economy and Hurricane Sandy.

“Christmas music is comfort-zone radio for a lot of people,” Mr. Fisher said. “Given everything that has happened in Atlantic City and in South Jersey, this music really is a link to better times. That’s why we feel it works for us early.”

A seasonal playlist of just under 300 songs helps WEZW nearly double its normal ratings each year, Mr. Fisher said. According to Nielsen, adult contemporary stations that play Christmas music enjoy ratings increases of up to 87 percent during the workday hours but can gain as much as 129 percent in the evening, when listening is typically low. On Christmas Eve, listening can go up as much as 582 percent.

In New York, the adult-contemporary powerhouse Lite FM (WLTW, 106.7), which is owned by iHeartMedia, the company formerly known as Clear Channel, usually goes all-Christmas in mid-November; over the years it has fended off competition from various other stations, including the oldies outlet WCBS-FM.

Darren Davis, president of the iHeartRadio Network, said that planning for the format usually begins in August, which includes “dressing up” a station’s entire audio ambience.

“It’s about more than just the songs,” Mr. Davis said. “When you walk into a Hallmark store around the holidays, everything is Christmas — the carpet is Christmas, the window decorations are Christmas, it smells like Christmas candles and cookies. That’s the environment we try to create with our Christmas radio station.”

The origins of all-Christmas radio are disputed, but it began to take hold as a mainstream phenomenon by the mid-1990s. By the end of that decade, the trend had begun to wane, said Mr. Vallie, the consultant, but was embraced anew after the terrorist attacks in 2001. According to Inside Radio, a trade publication, 488 stations adopted the format last year, up from 279 in 2004.

Most of the stations that go all-holiday are usually in the easy-listening or adult contemporary format. But some programmers resist the change, saying that the benefits of gaining even many temporary listeners — the stations usually switch back immediately after Christmas — are outweighed by the risk of losing loyal listeners who are turned off by the seasonal hoopla.

“It’s like Starbucks saying, ‘We’re not going to serve anything but peppermint lattes for the next six weeks,’ ” said Tony Lorino, the program director at KZPT-FM in Kansas City, Mo. “For those six weeks, a lot of people are going to come in and get peppermint lattes, but somebody else who’s just looking for their regular coffee is really upset.”

Pandora, which this year has 35 holiday-themed channels, and Sirius XM, which will have eight such stations this season — including one, Holly, that streams online year-round — would seem to pose an existential challenge to all-Christmas radio. And in fact Pandora’s popularity as a holiday outlet rivals that of terrestrial radio.

In the 2012 season, for example, 25 million people listened to holiday music on Pandora, the company said. On Dec. 24 that year, 28.4 million people listening to holiday music in the top 48 radio markets, according to Nielsen, a number that climbed slightly to 28.6 last year. (Pandora’s numbers for 2013 were not available.)

But that competition appears to have had only minimal impact on the popularity of radio’s Christmas stations. “We’re not seeing any decline in growth” of holiday stations, said Paul Heine, a senior editor at Inside Radio.

For WEZW, the excitement over Christmas radio starts to build months before the format flips, when listeners take to the station’s Facebook page and begin to ask when the holiday music will start up again. Once the music begins, messages pile up asking the programmers to keep it going even past the holiday.

“It rekindles my faith in the power of local radio,” Mr. Fisher said. “Radio is still such a big deal down here that you can push the Christmas button on a little 4,000-watt station in Cape May County and have everybody go wild about it.”

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