KHRO is dead

Hero Rocks. Well, its rolling over in a grave now. KHRO entered the El Paso market sometime in 2001 to try and unseat KLAQ as El Paso's modern rock leader. At that time, KLAQ (or "The Q" as its known) was known for its classic and "new" rock. New rock just meant new music from the same tired artists. KHRO was the new upstart in the market and was trying to take away as much of the Q's audience as they could.

At first, it was innocent. KHRO would mimic many of the song lists played on the Q to prove to people that both stations played the music, but KHRO started to wean out the older rock and kept the modern rock. KHRO started playing artists that the Q would never play, and played them with a high rotation so you could hear and enjoy the song as many times as people loved. The Q was under pressure from KHRO and also from XHEPR, 99.1 The Bandit for classic rock. The Bandit already started playing classic rock and was good at it. Owned by Clearchannel, The Bandit was in no danger of going under. It was time to choose their enemy.

The Q slowly realized that their ratings were starting to lag because of KHRO. They knew of only one way to get out of their slump, and that was to change their format to better serve their music audience. They already lost their classic rock listeners to the Bandit, now they had to salvage their other demographic to stay in the game. The Q changed their format, changed their line-up during the day and started to make a dent in the ratings war between them and KHRO. Hero was trying badly to steal all of the Q's advertisers, but couldn't. Ratings went up for the Q, and dropped for KHRO.

It was told to me sometime last week that KHRO would change to a Spanish format. I didn't tell anyone, cause it really didn't affect me. I have a satellite radio on the Mustang and haven't had to listen to the shitty music this city has to offer.