Future Sounds Partner Says He Hopes to Bring WOXY Back to Life (Again)

Sad news came yesterday in the form of an announcement that WOXY.com had been forced to stop broadcasting due to lack of funding.

The station, which has had to fight for its life a number of times since its inception as 97X, an FM station in Cincinnati in 1983, doesn’t seem to be going down without a fight.

John Mascarenhas of Future Sounds, which has owned WOXY for the past year, told Cincinnati.com that the L.A.-based company hopes to keep the station afloat, whether by retaining ownership and finding investors or by selling the station.

In 2004, after six years of broadcasting both on FM radio and online, WOXY began online-only broadcasting after spending a few months off the air due to a lack of funding. In September, staffers moved to Austin to expand WOXY.com’s programming. Knowing that Future Sounds is seeking a way to bring the station, which is visited by about 100,000 people a month, back to life, fans of the station now have a glimmer of hope that yesterday’s shut-down may be just another bump in WOXY’s long and troubled road.

But what of the staffers who made WOXY great? “It will take a pretty incredible company/plan coming around now to make me want to stick around at this point (although I guess we have to wait to see if anything shakes out in the days ahead),” Music Dirctor Matt Shiv said in a statement. The station’s general manager Bryan Jay Miller told Cincinnati.com, “Unless we felt really good about the situation, I don’t think any of us want to repeat this again. I think we would rather just let it go than jump into bed with someone that might not be ideal.”

For now, The Future of Rock ‘n’ Roll’s fate hangs in the balance. “There are a lot of people circulating right now,” says Mascarenhas. “But no one has written a check, and we need to be able to pay people.”

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