Quote:
Originally Posted by topdog
Are you 90 years old? Ottawa has had FM radio stations playing pop music since the late 70's.
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It most certainly did not.
I was living just outside of Ottawa in Eastern Ontario in the mid to late 80s. We were in between Ottawa and Montreal, though much closer to Ottawa.
If the conditions were right we could tune in the Montreal FM stations that played pop music, like CKOI, CKMF (Énergie) and Mix 96. If I were to dig out my old cassette mixtapes from that era (with songs recorded off the radio) they're primarily filled with stuff I "stole" off the air from those stations.
Ottawa had relatively few FM stations in those days and of those it had there was none that played pop music: CKBY (country), CHEZ 106 (rock - which we also listened to, but no Madonna or even Elton John on there), CFMO (easy listening) plus a few others. The main pop stations were on the AM dial at the time: CFRA 580 and CFGO 1200. Their programming was as good as any station in any other city but the sound was shitty due to being on AM. Today CFRA is news-talk and CFGO is TSN sports radio.
The first pop FM station in Canada's capital region was actually CKTF 104.1 in Gatineau (now known as Énergie). I just checked and it came on the air in 1988. Since it was the only game in town, lots of Ottawa anglophone kids listened to it and the station responded in kind by programming as much anglophone pop music it could during prime listening hours without getting into trouble with the CRTC - it was a francophone station and as such had quotas of French music it had to respect. They did get into trouble and were fined by the CRTC a number of times IIRC.
It wasn't until the first half of the 1990s (1993 or so?) that Ottawa finally got a fully anglophone pop station on the FM dial: CKKL, branded as KOOL FM at 93.9.
Today there are at least two, maybe even three anglophone FM pop stations in Ottawa.