Kiss FM radio station
There are some hundreds of radios operating under the name of Kiss FM radio station, and although most of them are located in the United States, the Kiss brand is now present in Canada, Europe and Brazil too. The foundation of the very first Kiss FM radio station started in the 1970s when lots of radio stations across the US started calling themselves Kiss. The first to have adopted the name was an LA radio that operated both in FM and AM. The name kiss resulted from the dial position 1150 that resembles two Is and and an S in letters. This Kiss radio station owner registered the name as a trademark in 1986, and presently the logo is only attributed to the stations acquired in the development of the Clear Channel company.
The present-day logo of a Kiss FM radio station is a blue ball with the name of the radio written in red and the radio frequency in yellow. Depending on the country or the state in which it operates, a Kiss FM radio station can include other symbols too; for instance, some use the cushy-lipped mouth as a representation for the kiss and the frequency in black and white, but this is just one case among many others. There are other Kiss FM radio station situations where the brand name rights do not apply as the stations as such are not owned by Clear Channel.
In 2007, plenty of Kiss FM radio station bureaus were sold to smaller radio markets, yet, this was more of an internal matter that did not affect the Kiss user worldwide. Kiss radios can be listened to for free on the Internet and they carry the label of the geographical area for which they broadcast. It is not just about the language used for broadcasting but rather about the internal policy dictated by the local owner or manager of a station. Even so, diversity is surely the best way to define a Kiss FM radio station.
Along the years, lots of legal claims were made by Clear Channel against one Kiss FM radio station or another for using a branding almost identical to the so-called original one. Chicago, Cleveland and Bakersfield, California are just three of the locations where other radio stations broadcast under similar names and slogans, yet not many changes occurred after the intervention of Clear Channel with the authorities. Presently, the title of Kiss FM radio station is encountered with lots of pirate and licensed stations not only in the US but in the European Union as well.