I've been listening to 96.5 HD-2 a lot the last week...but it's just not connecting for me. The first few weeks they played a lot of AAA standards from the past decade but recently they've been moving away from that and getting more and more vanilla, and their recurrents/golds -- while AAA friendly -- are mostly songs that were also gigantic on Pop/Hot AC and you could still probably hear on Alice...or even KOIT (i.e. Tonic - If You Could Only See.) Probably the most AAA-specific of anything they play older than two years old is Jack Johnson. Their current selection isn't huge, but it's slightly (though only slightly) better. I guess I can't complain about hearing new songs by the Raconteurs and Local Natives, though I think they still play too much Lumineers and Billie Eilish.
I'm still trying to figure out what they're doing, though. They have put a lot of effort into sweepers that are pandering to local-ness (i.e. a millenial-sounding girl's voice saying "I like to walk my dog at Golden Gate Park and see a show at the Balboa Theater!!" and using the tagline "uniquely San Francisco" even though there is really nothing unique about the playlist at all IMO) as well as a "this month in music history" sweeper which is kind of interesting. And once in awhile (usually in the evenings), I actually hear a live DJ. But their playlist is as generic as it gets and doesn't seem to lean towards any time period. So they have put effort into it, but I have no clue why someone would want to start a new milquetoast AAA format on a HD-2 frequency in 2019. Maybe they're trying to see if it's worth putting it on one of their other main frequencies, or maybe they're just throwing a bone to disenfranchised KFOG listeners.
Their website (which doesn't have much, but at least they have one) is
www.96hd2.com
