Boston Radio Station Switches to Electronic Dance Format

“Dance music just doesn't work on the air.”

For years, that has been an inflexible truism in the radio business. Any record executive with a little experience in the promotions department will have stories to tell of visiting a pop station with a killer dance record - solid gold, baby, I'm telling you - only to be waved away by the program director.

This may be changing, however, as electronic dance music, or E.D.M., continues its surge in mainstream popularity and more media companies look to it as a way to a fun-loving, free-spending young audience. The clearest sign of this changing market emerged in Boston on Thursday, as the radio behemoth Clear Channel Communications introduced what one of its executives called “the first real E.D.M. station in the country.”

Shortly before 6 p.m. on WHBA there, just as Neil Diamond's “Sweet Caroline” faded out, a dance theme churned for a few minutes before the song “Don't You Worry Child” by the E.D .M. stars Swedish House Mafia began to play, and thus was born Clear Channel's new Evolution station, at 101.7 FM.

Evolution began just six weeks ago as an online-only station through the company's iHeartRadio app,with the popular British D.J. Pete Tong as its leading voice.

Tom Poleman, Clear Channel's president of national programming platforms, said the online station was intended partly as a test of the format, and that the reaction to it was so positive - it instantly became the most popular digital-only station on iHeartRadio - that the company decided to give it a go as a terrestrial station, where the investment and risk are, of course, much greater.

“It reaffirmed our gut that this is something that is ready for prime time,” Mr. Poleman said in an interview.

In what could be interp reted as a bit of symbolism about the tides of the music business, Evolution is taking over the former frequency of WFNX, for decades one of the country's most influential alternative rock stations. Clear Channel bought the station in May for $14.5 million, changed its call letters to WHBA, and set it on an “adult hits” format, which is promoted with on-air tagline “We play anything.” (On Thursday afternoon, the songs included Yes's “Owner of a Lonely Heart” and Counting Crows' cover of Joni Mitchell's “Big Yellow Taxi.”)

Electronic dance music's latest flirtation with the mainstream took root several years ago, as Top 40 began to embrace dance-heavy pop acts like Lady Gaga and Black Eyed Peas, and artists like David Guetta came to be seen not just as their producers but stars in their own right. (On Thursday, Spotify announced that Mr. Guetta's 2011 album “Nothing but the Beat” was the service's most popular album over the last year.)

Yet dance has struggled to find a hold on the radio. Many broadcasters have dabbled in it; the most recent example is KDHT-FM in Denver, which was briefly a dance station before switching last month to the “Jack” pop format. Billboard monitors only five full-time terrestrial dance stations for its dance/mix show airplay chart.

Boston is the 10th-largest radio market in the country, with an audience of just over four million, as ranked by the ratings service Arbitron.

Discounting stations like WKTU-FM in New York, which play plenty of dance music but technically have a “hot adult contemporary” format - leaning toward pop hits - Boston would be the biggest market in the country with a full-time E.D.M. station like Evolution.

Ben Sisario writes about t he music industry. Follow @sisario on Twitter.