Emmis, which owns WRXP (101.9 FM), WRKS (98.7 FM) and WQHT (97.1 FM), says in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission that it may consider selling one of them….

[WRXP] is in the top 10 among 18- to 34-year-olds, but rock stations have always faced an uphill ratings and ad climb here.

What’s pretty certain is that if Emmis does decide to sell, ESPN is interested. ESPN has plenty of cash, and its officials make no secret that they would love to put their all-sports WEPN (now at 1050 AM) on an FM signal.

– David Hinckley, New York Daily News.

I apologize for the lack of a link; I can’t find this story online. I don’t want to transcribe the whole thing, but the article goes on to explain that sports stations are growing increasingly popular on the FM dial.

Thinking about radio too long makes my head hurt. This came up in the comments section not too long ago: There’s free music, just floating about in the air, everywhere. All we need is an inexpensive device to access it.

And for the most part, it sucks. It sucks enough that we launch satellites into space, then pay for subscriptions to access better music in our cars and earphones. Sure, there’s probably some low-frequency electromagnetic waves bouncing around with Led Zeppelin on them near you right now, and that’s awesome, but soon that’ll turn to Phil Collins or something.

Apparently sports stations are getting more popular, and maybe as a member of the sports media that should excite me. It doesn’t, though, because I don’t really like listening to sports-talk nonsense and the sports programming I actually do enjoy on the radio — the games themselves — will always find a home somewhere.

Maybe I’m senselessly nostalgic for the medium and should just give in to always plugging my iPod into the cassette-adaptor thing I have, as I sometimes do. But my iPod only plays music I already know, and I can still remember when I relied on the radio to introduce me to new music.

I heard Sublime’s “Date Rape” for the first time on 92.7 WDRE during its short run of alternative-rock programming in the mid-90s. I bought 40oz. to Freedom the next day, I think, and played it about a million times. (Hasn’t gotten old yet, FWIW.)

Obviously WDRE in “The Underground Network” days wasn’t commercially viable, or at least not as profitable as the Adult Contemporary and Spanish-language channels it would become. Presumably the same is true of 101.9, the only station I know of in the city that plays anything like contemporary rock music, now apparently in jeopardy of turning to ESPN Radio.

And presumably market factors explain why Hot 97 and Power 105 don’t play a ton of great hip-hop and Q104.3 rotates some 100 classic rock songs, over and over again.

I can’t pretend to understand the forces that drive radio or what makes a radio station successful. But it strikes me as either baffling or a massive shame that not a single station on terrestrial radio — the source of so much free music — can manage to consistently play music I’m interested in listening to. That’s not abject snobbery either; I don’t know many people satisfied with tuning into a radio station for their music these days.

I’ve said before probably will again that I’d like my epitaph to say something like, “Here lies the man who saved radio.” Problem is, I have no idea how to do that, nor if radio even needs saving. Maybe I’m just crusty and old, and the people at ClearChannel could care less if I like what they’re putting out. I must not be the target audience.

All I know is it’d be pretty damn frustrating if one of the few halfway decent stations in this market started airing Michael Kay all the time.