History
Traditionally known as an Easy Listening radio station, The Breeze dropped this dated title in 2011 in line with many other stations globally. The station first started in Auckland, Waikato and Wellington in 1993 when then owner Independent Broadcasting Company rebranded local stations 91FM (Auckland), Kiwi 898FM (Waikato) and Windy FM (Wellington) to The Breeze. The Auckland and Waikato stations previously played a Hit Music format and were changed to a Hot AC format using the slogan "Not Too Heavy, Not Too Soft". Wellington was different where Windy FM had been playing Classic Rock prior to rebranding and changed to the Easy Listening format used all on The Breeze stations today. All three The Breeze stations operated separately from each with local shows in each market. In 1995 The Breeze in Wellington was sold to the MORE FM Group and in 1996 the parent company of The Breeze in Auckland and Waikato was sold to Prospect Limited. Prospect Limited was then at the end of 1996 sold to The Radio Network. In 1997 The Radio Network closed down The Breeze in Auckland and Waikato and used these frequencies to start 91ZM in Auckland and 89.8ZM in Waikato. For Auckland this was a return of ZM as the station had been absent from the Auckland market since 1987.
The Breeze continued to broadcast in Wellington after the Auckland and Waikato stations closed down, by 2000 the station was now owned by CanWest along with MORE FM and Channel Z, CanWest then purchased RadioWorks and in 2001 The Breeze became part of RadioWorks collection of local once off station known as LocalWorks.
The Breeze made a return to Waikato in 2003 when local station Y 99.3 was rebranded as The Breeze retaining Y 99.3 local announcers but changing music format from Adult Contemporary to the Easy Listening format used on The Breeze in Wellington. In 2004 The Breeze was rolled out to other regions around New Zealand by rebranding existing stations as The Breeze and in some cases even changing the format of the local station to Easy Listening. In April 2007 many of The Breeze stations had local shows or shows that were fed from a nearby region replaced with a network show based from the Auckland studio, creating a network allowed The Breeze to then launch in other markets such as Hawkes Bay, Bay of Plenty and Southland. For most regions where The Breeze launched after 2007 the breakfast show was local but not a live show instead a pre-recorded show featuring mostly music and very little talk from the announcer and in most cases actually presented by the RadioWorks Programme Director for that region. In March 2009 a live networked breakfast show was introduced the show was presented from a second studio in Auckland separate from the main The Breeze studios as Auckland continued to present their own local breakfast exclusive to Auckland, this show first presented by Pete Ashdown and later Tony Murrell. The networked breakfast could only be heard in regions that previously had a local voice tracked breakfast show, regions with a live breakfast show were not affected. In 2010 the networked breakfast was replaced with the Auckland breakfast show presented by The Two Robbies.
Read more about this topic: The Breeze (New Zealand)
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