WAY-FM’s Jeff Brown

DJ buoyed by station’s audience

By Art Toalston

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It might seem that Jeff Brown is doing fine on his own.

He’s the operations director at WAY-FM, a contemporary Christian radio station based in Franklin.

He’s the morning co-host of the aptly named “Jeff and Stace” show with Stace Whitmire.

He’s getting some national recognition and has helped WAY-FM garner two Station of the Year awards from the Gospel Music Association.

Nevertheless, hundreds of people help Brown do his job.

Several dozen of them spend an hour and a half in a hotel conference room each summer rating the music typically played by the station.

Dozens are listeners who send e-mails each month, many recounting the spiritual uplift they have received in one way or another from the station.

And hundreds more are members of the “WAY-FM Music Team,” who receive an e-mail every couple of weeks that is part promotional but also offers a crack at rating various new songs.

As WAY-FM’s operations director, Brown is involved in “everything that comes out of the speakers.” He helps shape “what we’re about musically” – whether “we have the right songs on the air.” And he gives input into “what goes on between the songs, what’s called ‘imaging,’” including the listener-supported station’s on-air promotions and business announcements.

Brown remembers the first stereo he and his brother shared as kids, complete with an AM-FM tuner, eight-track player, record turntable and “speakers that were as big as I was.”

“Between the radio and the eight track and the record player, I would put on the headphones and pretend to be a DJ,” he recounts. Otherwise, he listened to radio “constantly,” especially the Top-40 countdown shows with Casey Kasem and Rick Dees. And: “I would call radio stations all the time and bug the DJs” with questions about the various songs on their playlist.

He also remembers the tape recorder he received one Christmas and capturing the sound of most everything he happened to be doing.

“[I] was just fascinated with the whole process.”

Brown’s high school in Indianapolis had a radio station and he had taken one of the school’s radio classes. When he was signing up for a second radio class, a guidance counselor cast doubt on the idea, asking, “Are you planning on doing that as a career?” Because Brown had excelled in music over the years, the counselor and “everybody around me” seemed to be saying, “You’re going to become a music teacher.”

So, he stepped away from the second radio course and school radio station. In college, however, he increasingly realized that “I had chosen the wrong path. I didn’t want to be a music teacher for the rest of my life. I love my music teachers; they had a huge impact on me growing up. But that’s not what I wanted to be.”

He turned from college to a small radio school where he completed a six-month course of study and, on July 4, 1987, he went on the air at a Top-40 radio station in Indianapolis.

But nine months later, it seemed like his first radio job might be his last: He got fired.

Now, Brown calls it “the first domino to fall in my finding God.”

The Sunday after he was fired was Easter, so “I was in church because that’s where you went on Easter Sunday and maybe Christmas. … I went to church a couple times a year.”

But there was something about the sermon that morning that propelled Brown, then 22, to kneel beside his bed that afternoon and ask God “to make himself real to me and to be Lord of my life. I also asked that he show me specifically the career path he would have me choose.”

That night, Brown also listened to a local Christian radio station, Love 98, for the first time.

Two days later at his dad’s service station, where Brown began working after his firing, Love 98’s sales manager came by to talk about trading radio ads for gasoline fill-ups.

“All I heard was, ‘I’m Dick Sickels from Love 98.’ … This was my sign, what I had prayed about. I had a tape and resumé in his hand the next day.”

Two weeks later, Brown was on the air at Love 98.

At WAY-FM nearly 20 years later, Brown voices amazement at something that “has never happened in any other radio station where I’ve worked” – daily positive response from listeners.

“When you see some of these [e-mails], you see people realizing that suicide wasn’t the way to go, or cutting themselves wasn’t the way to live their lives. Or they had this eating disorder. And hearing the positive songs we play or a particular message in a specific song … was the thing that got them out of that bad situation.

“And then on the lighter side, it may just be, ‘Hey sometimes you get out of bed on the wrong foot and the first thing I do when I get in my car is turn you on.’”

Yes, there are negative e-mails and phone calls, but Brown’s tally of the positive outweighing the negative is “20 or 30 to 1.”

Among the “coolest” e-mails: “those from 12- and 13- and 14-year-olds who realize the impact the station is having on them,” Brown says. Equally gratifying: e-mails from parents enthused at how WAY-FM reinforces the messages they’re trying to teach their kids at home and at church or parents who simply had been uncomfortable with their kids “singing everything they’re hearing” on other radio stations.

“Music moves people,” Brown says, “and we’re purposefully playing music that impacts lives in a positive way.”

In aiming for that impact, WAY-FM asks its listeners for some help. Once each summer, two groups of regular listeners are enlisted in various age categories for “auditorium testing” in a conference room at a nearby hotel, with one group’s hour-and-a-half session in the morning followed by the other group in the afternoon.

They evaluate several dozen of the songs that form the station’s musical “DNA,” as Brown puts it, by using a metering system in which they turn a dial to the right for songs they like and to the left for songs they don’t like. The greater the like or dislike, the farther they turn the dial.

The data later is analyzed to help the station’s staff determine whether a song should be played more often, less often or cut from the rotation.

Throughout the year, hundreds of “WAY-FM Music Team” members provide similar help via twice-a-month surveys linking them to 20 or more songs to rate on a 1-to-5 scale, with 5 being “love the song” and 1 being “don’t like the song at all.”

“Obviously, the lyrics are important,” Brown notes. “That’s the one thing that makes the Christian music category what it is. Musically, it’s the same as anything else out there. … It’s the one genre of music that is defined by its lyrics.”

Sometimes, however, a person may call the station “wondering why a song isn’t more obvious or more specific, as if a person of faith can’t possibly be left to figure it out on their own,” Brown says, adding that Jesus in his earthly ministry “wasn’t spoon-feeding anybody. He often spoke in parables that occasionally had people scratching their heads.”

Several years ago, WAY-FM “sort of morphed” into a more inclusive on-air persona beyond the “Christian subculture,” Brown recounts.

They even talk about “American Idol” or whatever may be generating an “everybody-is-watching-it” buzz.

“But when we grab those things from the culture, we always try and sift them through the Christian worldview,” Brown says. “They’re going to get some of those culture type of things, but from a different perspective that only our station will give. We strive to find that ‘sweet spot’ where faith and culture mix.”

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Art Toalston can be contacted at editor@clusterpaper.com.

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