By the way, those long stopsets are the norm in Chicago. They all tend to run them around the top of the hour. iHeart does. WKSC's stopsets can be pretty excessive.

Q101 used to have 10 minute stopsets back in the Mancow days. So it's not really a new thing but it's very common these days.

Early or Mid 2000s, Clear Channel did a "Less Is More" approach by running more frequent stopsets but shorter, usually under 5 minutes. The problem with that was they were stopping the music way more often.