WNSR — the "little brother" of Nashville sports talk — will add an FM signal at 95.9 sometime this summer.

WNSR will become the area's third FM sports talk station, joining giant WGFX 104.5 The Zone and WPRT 102.5 The Game. The latter has struggled to compete with its more established competitor, in part because it has a weak signal in the heavily populated suburbs east and southeast of the city.

From Dirk Hoag at On The Forecheck:

What makes WNSR's move into the FM space interesting is that they don't have the broadcast partnerships with teams like the Preds, the Tennessee Titans or the University of Tennessee Volunteers that immediately bring a sizable audience with them. WNSR will have its work cut out for it to woo listeners from the competition, and perhaps that "independent" stance might allow them to position themselves as being different from the rest of the pack.

The full release from WNSR available at OTF.

Nashville-based SportsRadio 560 WNSR has expanded The Thom Abraham Show to 2-6 p.m., effective today. The sports talk show had aired from 3-6 p.m. Read more here.

Today marks the beginning of a new job for Justin Cole as the director of country programming for Premiere Radio Networks, a subsidiary of Clear Channel Communications. Cole, who has in the past worked at 103 WKDF, is returning to Nashville from Baltimore to lead the daily operations of Premiere's country shows as well as the CMA Awards broadcast and local promotions.

Cumulus Media is making a big splash in the New York media scene today with the launch of 94.7 Nash FM, which is already being billed as "The World's Biggest Country Station" and the cornerstone of a national brand for the Atlanta-based broadcaster. What that latter thought will mean down the road — it looks like other media formats could be involved — isn't yet clear. In the meantime, here's the station's website.

Didn't catch the show today, so this may be old news, but check this graf from Steve Gill's Web site [emphasis mine]:

Additionally, Steve Gill is an attorney and former host of the Steve Gill Show, an influential radio talk show in Tennessee.

Nashville-based Flying Island Entertainment has unveiled its Classic Country Media Services. Designed to support so-called heritage artists and the classic country radio format, the service creates audio and digital content that can promote tour dates, music and/or books. It then distributes that content to more than 100 stations and syndicated radio programs.

Sarah Skates and musicrow.com have the story here.

Franklin-based classical music label Naxos has struck a deal with Clear Channel to take over the programming of the Classica station on the broadcasting giant's iHeartRadio platform. Naxos' distribution division has a catalog of more than 30,000 albums.

“We are enormously impressed with Naxos’s digital distribution, which makes them an ideal partner for Clear Channel as we continue to change the industry in bold and innovative ways,” said Bob Pittman, Chief Executive Officer of Clear Channel. “Mozart, Brahms, Beethoven, Bach, Chopin, Haydn—these composers wrote the original power chords, and their work is as vital today as when it was first written. Our agreement with Naxos further demonstrates that the market-based business model we unveiled this past summer makes sense for labels, artists, broadcasters, and fans.”

Music Row veteran Gator Michaels and a number of his team members at radio promotions company InstiGator Entertainment have moved in-house at Blaster Entertainment, which is based in the Cleveland, Ohio, area. Apparently not making the move is David Haley, a former Warner Music colleague of Michaels' who joined InstiGator just two months ago.

Courthouse News has the lowdown on a lawsuit against SESAC brought on behalf of thousands of radio stations who say the performing-rights organization has created a quasi-monopoly that has driven up the price of playing songs of all kinds of genres. Attorneys want a judge to rule that SESAC is violating antitrust laws and want it barred from charging "supracompetitive prices." PRO competitors ASCAP and BMI have been hit with similar orders.

"SESAC's creation of a bottleneck to public-performance-right licenses for the works in its repertory contributes no efficiency benefits of any kind," the committee claims. "Instead, SESAC extracts monopoly rents for copyrighted music that would otherwise be available at competitive rates."