The River Crashes Its Own Campus
• It’s been a weird couple of weeks, to say the least, for the crew at iHeartMedia Top 40 WRVW (107.5 The River)/Nashville, after the station’s creative “#Crash Your Campus” promotion offering an area high school a performance from hugely popular Atlantic recording artist GAYLE (“abcdefu”) took an unexpected left turn.
After thousands of votes were cast from excited area high schools, and the station began contacting potential winning schools — and GAYLE agreeing to perform clean, radio and school-friendly versions of her music — something odd happened, as PD Jonathan Shuford explains to RAMP, “We started to contact top vote-getting schools on Monday and started to get weird responses — either very vague, downright rude, or total radio silence… even from some schools we had spoken with before launching the campaign. I guess they decided to google GAYLE and felt that she was inappropriate, even with radio-friendly edits. Needless to say, this came as a surprise to us and to GAYLE’s team, but we were able to work together to make sure that the kids don’t get punished for their schools not understanding them.”
[Cut to…] Lemons Into Lemonade Dept. — This Monday, March 7, at 4pm The River is letting students from the four top vote-getting schools, crash its “campus,” a.k.a. the High Watt club on Nashville’s Cannery Row. Students from Blackman High, Wilson Central, John Overton, or Riverdale may present their student ID at the door for free entry, and the first 107 kids at the door will get in. The River will also be raffling off tickets to GAYLE’s full show at EXIT/In on March 9.
As the social post perfectly states, “Come join us. Live life, love music, and sing your freakin’ heart out. And your principals can’t do a thing about it.”
