Commentary: Why I’ll miss “Two for Tuesday” on classic rock radio in Baltimore

Recently, I got in the car and a song by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers came on the radio. I was hoping the next song would be another favorite Tom Petty song, since it was Tuesday and “Twofer Tuesday” has been a staple of rock radio since Petty’s time. But the next song was Journey, and the song after that wasn’t another Journey song.

WBIG, better known as the “Big 100,” broadcasting from Rockville, had dropped Twofer Tuesday from its schedule. And I wouldn’t have been so disappointed about the disruption of a small part of my weekly car radio routine if the area’s other classic rock station, 100.7 The Bay (WZBA, broadcasting from Hunt Valley), hadn’t also dropped its Twofer Tuesday tradition last spring.

Within a year, Twofer Tuesday had disappeared from Maryland radio stations.

Of course, in 2024, fewer and fewer people would even notice a programming change on a local radio station. Between streaming services and satellite radio, traditional terrestrial radio has more competition than ever and is dwindling in cultural relevance. After all, who cares if you can’t listen to two songs in a row when an entire playlist of an artist’s greatest hits is just a click away on Spotify?

Radio, however, has proven resilient—Nielsen Media Research found that 82% of Americans ages 12 and older listened to terrestrial radio at least once a week in 2022. Satellite radio giants like Sirius XM, on the other hand, saw steady subscriber growth in the 2010s but stagnated this decade. Ads on Big 100 often encourage you to listen via an online app rather than the radio dial, which is likely a smart survival strategy if automakers eventually start producing more vehicles without radio.

Classic rock stations like The Bay and Big 100 rely on reliability and familiarity and the ability to bring back decades-old memories with the playing of a great old song. If you want to hear new music, you can tune the station to 98 Rock or 92Q. If you want to hear the same Neil Young and Elton John songs that have been on the radio for half a century, tune into a classic rock station. Program directors at WZBA and WBIG did not respond to email requests for comment.

Part of the fun of Twofer Tuesday was the excitement of hearing a song and not knowing what track by the same artist is coming next. At least most of the time—there are a few bands with exactly two songs in the classic rock canon, so if you hear Steppenwolf’s “Born to be Wild” on a Tuesday, you can safely assume that “Magic Carpet Ride” is coming next.

Much of the fun of Twofer Tuesday comes down to execution. Playing two songs from the same album is a bit boring, but sometimes two songs can clash, especially when you alternate a David Lee Roth-era Van Halen song with a Sammy Hagar-era song. Big 100 was very loose with the concept, sometimes following a Genesis song with a Phil Collins solo song. Still, the format gave stations a chance to delve deeper into an act’s catalog. A few years ago, The Bay made a habit of pairing a well-known Pink Floyd classic with a relatively unknown song: 1971’s “Fearless.”

Of course, the definition of “classic rock” and the parameters of the format have been constantly changing. I can still remember in the early 2000s when it felt novel and even risky for a classic rock station to play music from 1987, the year of blockbusters like U2’s “The Joshua Tree” and Guns N’ Roses’ “Appetite For Destruction.”

However, after the demise of Maryland’s pioneering alternative station 99.1 WHFS in 2005, it was perhaps inevitable that ’90s bands like Nirvana and Green Day would be inducted into the classic rock canon. Today, you can even hear songs from the early 21st century on classic rock radio. This is probably due more than anything to the influence of the Internet, which divides all music into “new” or “old,” perhaps accelerated by trends in satellite radio.

WZBA is one of nine radio stations owned by Pennsylvania-based media company Times-Shamrock Communications, which once owned the Baltimore City Paper. During the decades the company owned the 100.7 frequency, the station alternated between easy listening, modern rock and country music before finally changing its call sign to WZBA in late 1999 at the turn of the millennium and settling on The Bay’s classic rock format in 2003.

Even though Twofer Tuesday is gone, The Bay still offers many of the hallmarks of classic rock radio, including “Get the Led Out,” a nightly selection of Led Zeppelin songs at 10 p.m. Mike Brilhart, a seasoned radio veteran who has been on the air for more than 40 years, is the station’s best DJ, the kind of golden-throated rock musician who can recall obscure trivia about a song or that time he saw a band at the Baltimore Civic Center. Brilhart leads both the Zep set and The Bay’s more unique regular offerings: “The Vinyl Frontier,” where he plays one uninterrupted side of a classic album each night, and “Acoustic Café,” a quiet Sunday morning show featuring unplugged versions of popular classic rock tunes.

Big 100, a classic rock station since 2009, is part of the iHeart Radio network, a cheery-sounding company with a controversial reputation. Founded in 1972 as Clear Channel Communications, the company became the largest owner of radio stations in America after federal media ownership regulations were relaxed.

Before the Telecommunications Act of 1996, Clear Channel owned 43 radio stations. Today, the company owns 855 stations, although it rebranded itself as iHeartMedia in 2008 to distance itself from the perception that Clear Channel was an ownership that was making the American radio landscape more monotonous and less diverse.

Tuesdays used to have more significance in the music world. For decades, Tuesday was the standard release day for new albums, observed by most record labels and music retailers. However, in 2015, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry decided to make Friday the standard release day for new albums.

For competitive reasons, radio stations don’t often publicly disclose the reasons behind their programming decisions. While the Big 100 and The Bay have market research showing that Twofer Tuesday was bad for ratings, it’s hard to imagine that such a popular trademark of the format was a liability.

iHeart stations often travel in lockstep, so the fact that Big 100 is abandoning that tradition is a bad sign that it will likely happen outside of Maryland as well, and that’s a shame.

As Lynyrd Skynyrd once sang: “Tuesday is gone with the wind.”

Al Shipley is a Maryland-based journalist and music critic.