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Dave Levora, PD/morning co-host/midday guy on Regional Media’s Alternative Planet 93.9/Quad Cities, IA-IL, never intended to spend 30 years in the market. “When I came here in 1995, I wrote my five-year plan in a notebook, and Step One was ‘Spend no more than 12 months in the Quad Cities,’” he admits. Over the past three decades, he’s run with the big boys – including Cumulus, Connoisseur, and what’s now iHeartMedia – but his past five years at a local company have been amazing.
In January 2020, Levora was part of a wave of layoffs at iHeart, and he thought that was his last chapter in radio. “I figured I had a good run. I’d worked for the big companies in town, and I was done with radio, so I needed to figure out what the next step is,” he says. But then the owner of Regional Media asked him to go to lunch, and Levora eventually said yes, even though he had his doubts about the overall future of radio and his place in it.
This lunch is where things get interesting, as the Regional Media owner asked Levora a question every PD aches to hear. “He says, ‘I’ve got this station, 93.9 FM, and what would you do if I just gave you the keys and said you could do whatever you want with it?’” Levora recounts.
When Dave heard this, his mind instantly went back to the reason why he arrived in the Quad Cities in the first place – to work at KORB (Planet 93.5). “It was such a great station, and it was so exciting,” Levora says. “1995 was an incredible time to work in Alternative radio, and that station really connected with people in this market. It was this super-cool Alternative station and brand that people loved.” Even 20 years after KORB flipped to Hot AC, locals were telling him how much they loved and missed The Planet.
So in that moment, Levora made his pitch: “I told him that I would bring back The Planet, but I wouldn’t want it to sound like an Alternative radio station in every other town. I would go back to the roots of what that movement was about, which was listening to stuff that wasn’t on the radio, and I would build a station for people who can’t stand radio, and I explained all the rules I would break,” he says.
Levora was quick to make sure the owner wouldn’t interfere because if he was really getting to do whatever he wanted, that’s what he wanted. “He said, ‘Great, why don’t we do that?’ It was one of those moments where I was like, holy [expletive], I could really do this?” Almost five years later, Levora’s vision is still going strong as Planet 93.9. And right now, every PD is probably thinking “no way,” but secretly incredibly envious of Dave.
Asked about what rules he’s breaking, Levora says the first one is that The Planet plays too much new music. “I can hear the voices in my head telling me everything I’m doing wrong, but I’m not interested in these things we did when we were just trying to hold onto quarter-hour listeners,” he says, laughing. “We play too much old music, we play too much unfamiliar music, and that’s all done on purpose.” It’s Levora’s goal to have people think “I haven’t heard that in forever!” when they hear a random track on the station.
Taking aim at most stations’ positioning at launch, Levora admits that people will buy into a new station’s claims that they play a variety of music – for the first couple of months. “After six or seven months, it becomes repetitive, and repetitive is good if you’re concerned about quarter-hours and audience retention, and you never want to play anything that will challenge an audience,” he says.
With The Planet, he believes it’s okay for the station to occasionally play a song that a listener won’t like. “We trust that you’re mature enough to handle it that every once in a while, you may hear a song that’s not for you,” he says, “but I also don’t want to pretend we’re living in a world where the audience can’t listen to whatever they want whenever they want. They don’t necessarily need us, but when you’re curating with intention and putting songs on that make sense together, it draws them back.”
Levora understands the analogy about radio being like listening to someone else’s playlist with commercials. “I think it should be a really cool playlist,” he says. “It should have a bunch of stuff that you wouldn’t think to include or things you haven’t heard in forever.”
He also isn’t afraid to go back in time for music discovery and feels like listeners shouldn’t be limited to finding out about new-to-them music that’s only a few weeks old. “I hear people say they couldn’t believe how much they loved a song, then they Shazamed it and found out it’s from 2005,” Levora says. “That’s terrific – if you fell in love with TV on the Radio, for example, because you heard it for the first time on our station and you haven’t heard it anywhere else, I’ll take that as a win.”
When he puts these unique tracks into rotation, Levora extends trust to the audience. “They have audio permanence,” he explains. “It’s not like your listeners are dogs or babies where they freak out if you leave the house because they think you’re never coming back. I understand that if an audience member thinks that a song isn’t for them and they push the preset to another station, I’ve built something worth coming back to – and they will. It’s not like they’re never going to listen to The Planet ever again. To think that they’ll leave because of one song is madness.”
And that’s a solid basis for Levora’s philosophy: He’s built a station that respects his listeners, doesn’t pander to them, and expands their musical horizons a bit. “I don’t know if you could get away with this with a lot of other formats,” he admits, “but the whole point of the Alternative format is that we’re the weirdos playing the weird music. Everything doesn’t have to be #1.”
The variety is what distinguishes The Planet from his crosstown competitor run by one of the big companies (rhymes with “Shy Smart Wikipedia”). “I get feedback that it’s harder and harder for our listeners to go back to them because the audience is so much more aware of how repetitive it is when they’re given another option,” Levora says.
He makes an effort to vary the sounds being played on his station as well. “You have to think about new music in the context of what else is being played,” Levora says. “I don’t want everything to sound a little too much the same, so how do I find something that stands out?”
He cites “Sailor Song” by Gigi Perez as one of those newer tracks he’s currently playing to mix it up a bit. “I love that song, and I love that it doesn’t sound like Foo Fighters or Imagine Dragons or Cage the Elephant,” he says. “I want our listeners to realize they’re not going to hear this anywhere else, but the hoop I ask every song to jump through before I put it on air is that it’s really, really good.”
What’s listener response been like? Levora did a homegrown call for research earlier this year, where he put a call for input up on the website. The station calls its listener base “Planeteers,” and Levora asked them to give honest feedback via a questionnaire – both the things they like about Planet 93.9 and the things they don’t like.
“The feedback, for the most part, was super-positive, but someone who’s going to take the time to go to your website and tell you what they think about your station is someone who is probably already biased,” he admits, “but I have to say – I didn’t mind reading pages and pages of comments.”
While everyone who responded also received a sticker, Levora says he was blown away by the thought listeners put into their submissions. “We’ve built something that is different, and our positioning statement is that we’re fiercely independent and locally owned. The themes in the feedback seemed to be that the listeners understand what we’re trying to do, they understand why we’re doing it, and they really appreciate having something completely different than what’s available in other places,” he says, also joking that he finally sent out the last of the stickers earlier this month but still can’t get the taste of envelope glue out of his mouth.
Having rabid followers is essential for a station to succeed, and Levora thinks that it’s like having fans who claim you’re their favorite band. “You’re going to doodle the name of that band on your notebook, you’re going to talk about that band on social media, and you won’t shut up about them,” he says. “It’s no different for radio – you need passionate advocates.”
Levora’s take on the importance of radio, in general, is an interesting one: He feels like having a really good radio station is an indication of the quality of life in a market. “I’ve always thought that your town is judged by how good are the breweries, how good are the coffee shops, and how good are the radio stations,” he says. Considering the ridiculous amount of reaction the station also gets from out-of-market listeners who are streaming online, having The Planet in-market reflects well on Quad Cities.
With this version of The Planet coming up on its five-year anniversary, Levora is still excited about what he’s doing. “This is a dream job, and I wasn’t prepared for people to love what we’re doing enough to have it be important to them,” he admits. “I was worried for the first year or so about how long they’re going to let us get away with this. But the owner’s only goal is just to make something cool and make something that people really like, so we’re able to deliver that, and that’s super-satisfying.”
Mission accomplished, Dave.
Stream The Planet live at planet939.com.
Sample hour: Tuesday, November 5 at 4pm CT
Balu Brigada – “So Cold”
Queens of the Stone Age – “Emotion Sickness”
Jack White – “Taking Me Back”
Jimmy Eat World – “My Best Theory”
Live – “Selling the Drama”
Blink 182 – “What’s My Age Again?”
Black Keys – “I’m With the Band”
Pixies – “Here Comes Your Man”
All Time Low – “Once in a Lifetime”
Dandy Warhols – “We Used to Be Friends”
Green Day – “Bobby Sox”
Coheed & Cambria – “The Suffering”
R.E.M. – “Star 69”
Jawny – “Take It Back”
Audioslave – “I Am the Highway”
MJ Lenderman – “She’s Leaving You”
A former air personality and industry journalist, Keith Berman worked at the late Radio & Records for several years, where he held a number of positions before being promoted to format editor. While at R&R, he also served as a writer and reporter, covering breaking news; authoring weekly columns, format roundups and features; and contributing heavily to Street Talk Daily. When R&R folded, he co-founded RAMP (Radio and Music Pros) and spent 3 years covering radio and record labels before taking a hiatus from the industry. His experiences also include time on-air at stations in Connecticut, Boston and Southern California. He can be reached at KeithBerman@gmail.com.
