Radio Perez, twice-daily updates voiced by noxious gossip blogger Mario Lavandiera, a.k.a. Perez Hilton, is set to debut across America on May 5. Not to be left behind, the syndicated radio division of Astral Media inked him to a Canadian deal that will find Perez heard twice daily on Newstalk 1010 CFRB and 99.9 MIX-FM.

Since morning shows on pop chart-driven commercial radio generally get most of their talking points from gossip blogs, this gayest of marriages makes perfect sense. Those wondering what became of the commodity of news will just have to deal.

Perez will also appear live Friday mornings on MIX, granting four or five minutes to Mad Dog and Billie, whose job description generally entails skimming websites for celeb dirt and cheat sheets for discussing last night’s reality shows. But the advent of Radio Perez is just a tiny element of a resurgent effort at the 99.9 frequency to chase the most mainstream of current music stations, CHUM-FM.

New owner Astral, who bought MIX and 51 other radio stations for $1.3 billion from Standard Radio last year, are determined to prevail in the marketplace — which, nowadays, means stealing listeners from elsewhere. So, they’ve started by poaching the air talent: Chris Biggs and Taylor Kaye from CHUM-FM, and a local guy named Jimmy T who was working at Buffalo top 40 station Kiss 98.5.

But, in the era where anyone can be an online attention whore — just like Perez! — does it really matter who is speaking into the radio microphone between tunes?

“You’d have to be an idiot not to notice that pretty much every human being alive wants to be a star,” says Astral Radio Toronto’s vice-president and general manager, Pat Holiday. “The question is, what exactly do you want to do with it. Gossip about anyone — not just celebrities — has become a big deal for people.”

What follows, naturally, is the effort to turn that into a business — even if all of the voyeuristic web traffic ends up going to the likes of Facebook. Radio still has its share of captives: “We are always evaluating which levers to pull,” says Holiday.

Contrary to press reports, there must still be a mainstream if Mariah Carey can rack up more first-week album sales than anytime in her career, right? Or, there’s enough of a mainstream to make the mainstream the most popular niche of all.

Holiday’s experience dates back to a time and place when such debates were unfathomable. There was even a documentary made about it, Radio Revolution: The Rise and Fall of the Big 8, which chronicled how Windsor AM station CKLW blasted its influence into Detroit, but was then quashed by the CRTC when a flip to FM was proposed. Part of the Big 8’s legacy were government-mandated newscasts every 20 minutes — from a manic team that included Dick Smyth and Mark Dailey and — that made bombastic casserole out of Murder City.

And now, the between-song chatter is, like, "did you hear who got voted off The Bachelor last night" and "maybe that barely-legal Hermoine should try shaving?"

Does this make it better, or worse — or a little bit of both? Probably the latter, when you’re in the business of encapsulating the zeitgeist between commercials.

“Realize what this celebrity gossip replaced,” says Holiday. “DJs talking about how Jack Benny and Dwight Eisenhower were celebrating birthdays. Seriously”

What a station like MIX-FM has to calculate, Holiday explains, is how much content listeners can freely access, and what chatter requires a mental admission price.

“You can do a talk radio topic like, ‘What was your favourite episode of Gilligan’s Island?' or you can ask people whether bank presidents should be prosecuted if they’re running deals on the side. The first discussion is something that anyone who’s seen the show can get in on, the second demands a greater awareness.”

And now, the assumption is that anyone who hasn’t seen that video of David Hasselhoff lying drunk on the floor can hear about it, and want to have a peek.

What that means for the kind of radio that relies on music to fill most of its airtime is still uncertain but, after tweaking its sound nearly every year since adopting the name in 1991, the MIX is now completely unabashed in its pursuit of CHUM-FM.

Consolidation plays a huge role in that decision, explains Holiday, since CTV GlobeMedia have television to push their radio offerings. Astral’s big weapon in this market is outdoor — some of their inventory can be found at IllegalSigns.ca not to mention being awarded Toronto’s contentious street furniture contract — which provides a platform to remind the masses that they’re spinning the hits.

While it’s now a given that teenagers won’t listen, this radio format is actually undergoing a renaissance with aging Gen Xers — similar stations are at the top of the ratings heap in New York and Los Angeles. CHUM-FM has been a perennial ratings chart-topper around here, despite the fact that morning team Roger, Rick and Marilyn are markedly older than the demographic that they’re speaking to.

The impression left by radio may well prove more indelible than anything online.

“When I was on the air at CKLW people used to complain that everyone on the station sounded the same,” says Holiday. “But every six weeks or so I’ll get an email from someone who finds me online, and recalls something they heard me say 35 years ago — a throwaway line that I can’t remember that stuck with them.

“What information sticks with people is really something for a psychiatrist to figure out. All I know is that we’re in the business of asking for people’s time. That means doing whatever they think is worth their while.” 

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