Andre Yancey’s trajectory through radio demonstrates what happens when you combine genuine warmth with strategic rigor. At eighteen, he showed up at KMEL in San Francisco with ambition and a dream born from listening to Rick Chase on afternoon drive. He’d spent three years trying to get on a street team, driven by a single image: a radio companion making people feel less alone. When the morning zoo stuck a microphone in his face during a gas giveaway, he went for it. It worked.
Now, decades later, he straddles two coasts for Audacy as Assistant Brand Manager at 94.7 The Block (KXBK-FM) in New York and Brand Manager of 102 JAMS (KRBQ-FM) in San Francisco. That instinct — to keep people company, to make them feel less alone — runs through everything he does. But he backed it up with a full MBA from NYU, graduating in 2025, with a focus on organizational and change management, finance, and strategy. He’s the rare radio leader thinking in parallel about both the soul of the medium and the mathematics that keep it alive. At Audacy, where he’s built consecutive award-winning content, that balance between artistry and analytics has become his defining leadership approach.
Radio is for Everybody
Walk into a conversation with Yancey, and you’ll quickly notice he talks about the audience as dynamic human beings, not demographic buckets. This philosophy came from growing up in the South Bay, where his friends and family didn’t organize around format boundaries. He watched KMEL and KYLD dominate as twin cultural forces and understood something fundamental: the Bay Area’s power came from its diversity and refusal to be sorted.
“There’s a time where, whether it was a hip hop, rock song, or even country, people would say that’s my jam, and I want to bring the essence of that back,” he explains. “My generation, I believe, was the first to not be constrained by our parents won’t listen to X, Y, and Z. It was all available to us, and I want that unification and that coalition to really sing loud, and that’s how we’re going to represent the Bay Area properly.”
This ethos now defines both 102 JAMS and 94.7 The Block. At 102 JAMS in San Francisco, he’s rebuilding radio as fundamentally inclusive. “We’re here for everybody,” he says. “So again, I’m going to reference KMEL. When I grew up, they had this tagline called the People Station, music across color lines. This music right here, because of growing up in the South Bay, where my friends were all races and shapes and sizes, just like my family, the same people that were listening to Wu Tang Clan, the same people that were listening to hip hop, were also listening to Linkin Park. They were listening to Metallica. They were listening to Jewel. And they were listening to Nirvana. All of those.”
Building Bridges Between Worlds
What separates Yancey from other radio leaders is his graduate education. While many run their careers on instinct, Yancey recognized a gap: he could feel the industry’s pain but lacked the framework to articulate solutions at scale. He went to grad school to understand why the industry works.
“I went to grad school because I saw what was happening to our industry — the constraints and the pains of it,” he explains. “I grew up on the personality side and on the street team side, and then grew into leadership. What happens after I’m in brand management? How do I create help create a balance between business and the craft? I studied that from a private equity vantage point at NYU. I would go in, speak with my professors, and think through how I could build a bridge between the two so that we can serve — have personalities serve locally while also maintaining a healthy business.”
This is what compassion and intelligence look like in practice: studying financial models not to become a suit, but to protect radio itself. To keep voices on air. To keep people employed.
Teaching the Why, Not Just the What
When Yancey left radio to explore other industries, he hit a wall. A McKinsey executive told him his skill set had no currency elsewhere. The experience triggered a commitment to understanding the entire ecosystem. He realized he’d been operating inside radio’s language without understanding radio’s business.
So he went back. He studied. He learned the metrics. “I learned how everything works — how they come up with AQH when TSL is brought up, where that comes from,” he says. “I started understanding the formulas. Then it’s okay, what do ratings actually mean? We need people to listen in different occasions. The biggest stations really win with Nielsen because people are leaving and coming back, leaving and coming back.”
When he moved to New York in 2021, he relaunched the morning program at WCBS-FM post-pandemic, then helped establish 94.7 The Block as Audacy’s most-used urban streaming brand. But here’s where compassion kicks back in: he didn’t keep that knowledge to himself. “Once I understood that, I started talking to my colleagues,” he says. “Often we’re trained to do our job, but we’re not taught all of the whys. And now I try to help as many people as possible because you can perform and knock it out of the ballpark, but you need to understand the why.”
The Two Cities, One Philosophy
At 94.7 The Block in New York, Yancey applies the same inclusive framework as Assistant Brand Manager, helping craft a format that’s become one of Audacy’s most-used urban streaming brand. Rather than retreat from New York gatekeeping, he dug in and learned from tastemakers like DJ Mister C and DJ Scratch. The Block format emerged from the same “People Station” philosophy from KMEL, but applied to contemporary streaming and mix show culture. When DJ Mister C passed away in 2024, Yancey understood the platform’s deeper meaning — it was a gathering place where tastemakers could be honored and the community could mourn together.
Meanwhile, at 102 JAMS in San Francisco, his role as Brand Manager puts him at the helm of rebuilding a new Audacy station from the ground up. This is his chance to architect an entire brand philosophy, not just support one. The station is a love letter to the Bay Area, as he describes it — a place where companionship and connection are central to everything they broadcast. He’s bringing everything he learned at The Block to San Francisco, but with the freedom to shape the station’s complete identity.
“I want to celebrate women 12 months of the year,” he says. “There’s Pride Month, well, let’s have Pride all the time. Doesn’t matter if you’re from the hood or from the cul-de-sac. This music has affected all of us. How can we be as inclusive as possible so that we can take that strain and stop that chip on the shoulder that everybody carries as they try to make it through these crazy times in this incredibly fast city?”
That’s both a compassionate vision and a strategic one: radio as relief, not division. In a streaming age, the biggest audiences come from removing barriers.
The Message for What Comes Next
As we wrapped our conversation, Yancey offered closing thoughts that crystallize why this combination matters. He believes in radio — all of it. Radio may not look the same in five years, but the core mission — being a companion, creating connection — won’t change. His message was aimed at people grinding it out right now.
“Growth is more than getting a promotion,” he says. “Growth is understanding why we’re doing what we’re doing. For personalities, keep honing your craft. If you want to learn programming, reach out to people and ask. That’s it.”
Simple. Direct. But underneath it is everything Yancey has learned: that craft without business acumen won’t survive, and business acumen without craft is just noise. Compassion without intelligence is sentiment. Intelligence without compassion is cold.
Andre Yancey doesn’t operate from a playbook. He operates from a heart that wants to lift people up and a mind that understands how radio — the business, the craft, and the human connection — actually works. That combination is rare. That combination is winning.
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David Hill serves as a Music Radio Editor, Columnist and Features writer for Barrett Media. A radio lifer with more than 30 years behind the mic, in the control room, and in the program director’s chair, David’s career spans influential stops at brands such as WIYY 98 Rock, WBAL-AM, and 99X. He has worked across multiple formats and ownership groups, including iHeartMedia and Cumulus Media, developing talent, breaking music, and navigating every major industry shift from diary to PPM and terrestrial dominance to streaming disruption. When he’s not writing or analyzing the industry, Dave runs The Tune Farm, a marketing firm built to help artists and brands grow audience the same way great radio always has—by creating connection, not just impressions. He can be reached at David@BarrettMedia.com.