I just have to catch up on a few things: There's no "e" in "Warwick" anymore. She tried it for awhile and the hits stopped coming. I have to disagree about the 16-22 concept, at least regarding the Beatles. I was ten and it had a tremendous effect on me! I once dated a girl who was two years younger and she felt the same way. For me, musically, 62-66 is the strongest and it slowly drops from that point until about 83, when the music really began to change. Michael, I think you're having one of my moments of "selective memory". "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" was a very current sounding, MTV, teen leaning song that I don't think AC would have touched with a ten foot pole! 30 years later, of course, it's perfect!
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Musical selections that seem out of character
- Thread starter vchimpanzee
- Start date
Semoochie: As for age, your mileage may vary. But when programming one radio station for hundreds of thousands (or in major markets, millions) of people, you work with averages for majorities.
As for Cyndi, I guess it would have depended if I'd been programming the way I always had or if I'd jumped on the "Continuous Soft Hits" approach.
With "Continuous Soft Hits", you're right...Cyndi wouldn't have fit. But if I hadn't moved to TV and in 1984 was programming the type of AC I always had...60% current, 40% gold with the currents essentially being the same as the local CHR minus the 6 or 7 hardest records, then I'd absolutely have played Cyndi.
I also would have been, in the summer of '84, among the last stations doing AC that way.
Just for fun, Semoochie, I took a look at the chart where Cyndi was at her peak...March 17, 1984. Unfortunately, that issue is missing from the Billboard archive at Google Books, and Billboard only allows you to see the top 10 of the Hot 100 without a business subscription, but from the Top 10 that week, if I'd been programming AC as I had been, here's what I would have done:
1. Van Halen: Jump (No)
2. Cyndi Lauper: Girls Just Want To Have Fun (Yes)
3. Rockwell: Somebody's Watching Me (No)
4. Nena: 99 Luftballons (No)
5. Kenny Loggins: Footloose (Yes)
6. Michael Jackson: Thriller (Yes)
7. Huey Lewis & The News: I Want A New Drug (Yes)
8. Eurythmics: Here Comes The Rain Again (Yes)
9. John Lennon: Nobody Told Me (Yes)
10.Duran Duran: New Moon On Monday (No)
Obviously, by 1984, there'd be a lot more than 6 or 7 songs a week difference between even an uptempo AC chart and CHR.
1. Van Halen: Jump (No)
2. Cyndi Lauper: Girls Just Want To Have Fun (Yes)
3. Rockwell: Somebody's Watching Me (No)
4. Nena: 99 Luftballons (No)
5. Kenny Loggins: Footloose (Yes)
6. Michael Jackson: Thriller (Yes)
7. Huey Lewis & The News: I Want A New Drug (Yes)
8. Eurythmics: Here Comes The Rain Again (Yes)
9. John Lennon: Nobody Told Me (Yes)
10.Duran Duran: New Moon On Monday (No)
Obviously, by 1984, there'd be a lot more than 6 or 7 songs a week difference between even an uptempo AC chart and CHR.
There's got to be a way to contemporize an easy listening format that works. The old NBC Monitor back in the 70's may have had the right idea in that they would play strictly-MOR stuff like Ray Conniff or Steve 'n' Eydie but still find a way to slip in lighter, uptempo pop-rock a la Cher or Neil Diamond. Music Of Your Life is trying but not making it; you can't play Streisand and Sinatra, then jump to a Chuck Berry rave-up. Something like the Platters or Everly Bros, even an Elvis ballad, sure; but not that, it's too jarring.
Trouble is the bulk of the audience you need isn't buying easy right now. And it didn't work for Monitor in the 70s, either...which was so desperate by '73, they turned Don Imus, Wolfman Jack and Robert W. Morgan loose on the show. That was what they were trying to do to stay relevant with 40 year olds....40 years ago.
Maybe so, but I haven't seen any better ideas here. Klutch00 and RBW have offered thoughtful commentaries (I don't know how old Klutch is but I'm just over RBW's age.) Ever noticed how stations throw away demographics at Christmas? Tom Petty, Bing Crosby, and David Seville are all created equal; and the audience tunes in and listens. Maybe it's just the season, or maybe audiences can enjoy more kinds of music in the "mix" than programmers will give them credit for...
No, the rules and the demos still apply. The demo views those songs as "Christmas Hits", and increasingly, the artists that performed them as "Christmas Artists".
We've just entered a phase where even senior citizens were raised on rock and those 40 and under are more about rhythm.
If pre-Beatles rock oldies aren't salable, and neither is smooth jazz, I don't know what sort of easy listening you can make a business case for.
I'm having a real problem with the idea of "peak musical awareness" being 16-22, as if a person's formative years meant nothing, musically. Under this reasoning, nothing that happened to me before 1969 should have affected me to any degree, Not the Beatles, Beach Boys, Herman's Hermits, Dave Clark Five, Supremes, Four Seasons, none of that! To extend this, am I not to have been affected by the Kennedy assassination, either or the Vietnam War? Back on topic, I'm sure that a fair amount of records were sold to people under the age of 16 and that a fair amount of 1960s Top 40 stations listeners were as well. Now, if this is the case, it means that at this time, nothing before 1974 should be on the radio because anyone younger than 55 was younger than 16 in 1974. The caveat is that this music is still on the radio, not because people younger than 16, at the time of release, were musically aware but because current 40 year olds might like some of it! I have to say that the whole idea of playing music that people were never passionate about, in the first place, is a recipe for disaster and it's just a matter of time before the whole thing implodes!
Semoochie:
You misunderstand. Here's how I defined Peak Musical Awareness a few posts back:
No one's suggesting that's it's an on/off switch, on at 16, off at 22...just that, for most people, the peak falls in those six years.
Any Top 40 DJ from back in the day can tell you that there were 7-year olds on those request lines. There are songs I like from when I was four. And there are several songs that are current hits right now that I like. That's a 53-year span.
And if you ran a search of this site, you'd find dozens of quotes from me saying the same thing: It's not about the age of the song, nor its chart performance when new. It's about how many people in the core of the demo have it in common as a song they want to hear now.
The thing is this: When you start dealing with large numbers of people, patterns begin to emerge.
The majority of Americans care less about music than you or I or probably most people on this board.
They have far fewer songs that they care about.
The bulk of those songs (not all, but a majority) that they have in common with their peers tend to come from the peak musical awareness years.
Right now, the heart of the 25-54 money demo, 40 year olds, are an exception. They like enough music from before their time and early childhood and enough current music that they haven't developed any group nostalgia for their high school and college music.
But this thread is about upper-demo nostalgia radio, and easy listening and what can be done to save it. And peak musical awareness is an important concept here.
Stations are dying because their formats, which started out 30 years ago as 50+, are now 80+. Boomers didn't magically adopt Nat Cole, Peggy Lee and Perry Como or lush instrumental covers of pop hits when their AARP cards arrived in the mail.
So the nostalgia stations added 70s and 80s AC hits. But as I noted from personal experience, that was music for 40-year olds 35 years ago...you're still really appealing to 75 year olds.
There aren't enough people under 70 willing to listen at the same time on a regular basis to move the needle.
The bulk of 50-70 year old music listeners are tuned to classic hits and classic rock. They're not looking for easy or beautiful, at least not in significant enough numbers to sustain a format.
In the same way that Nat, Peggy and Perry pretty much fell off the airwaves in the 70s, there's a cliff coming (actually, we're past it, and like Wile E. Coyote, we're starting to realize it). Nostalgia stations are either going to have to take a very different approach to their music, or, like KOY, stop playing it altogether.
Wow. That's hostile.
I gave my opinion, one that's grounded in experience in the industry, and demonstrated patterns of how people in different demographics use media today.
I put my real, full name behind it.
And I managed to do it without insulting (actually, attempting...I don't insult easily) a fellow poster on this board.
I happen to like Nostalgia and Easy, Jeff (I'm listening to Nat Cole's "A Blossom Fell" as I write this). But it's on life support right now. And if more stations decide they need to change formats, odds are you'll like what they do a lot less than you would an evolution of music that makes them relevant to a mass audience under 70.
G
Groove1670
Guest
Michael. You speak truth. From my standpoint, old age is hell (I'm 46 3/4. In our industry that is old).
Last night I took a stroll down memory lane Via the Youtube thing. (that what we old folks call it) I played the spinners, Ray Goodman & Brown, B-52's, Honeymoon Suite (a MTV favorite when they played video), and the list goes on and on.
If I asked today's 30 year old to name some of their songs, they would say.... who?
The good thing is, our demo is going to be the largest growing in the next few years (what do you mean the money ran out for my social security check LOL,). Now you are hearing more specialty shows (Tom Kent sounds great). More "Classic Hits" stations are popping up, and we grew up on FM radio (FM will live a little longer, sadly..AM will not be so lucky).
Stations, research..etc. Will need to figure out how to target us. We will have the money (minus Social Security *sarcasm again*) but can we convince ad buyers we will spend it, and in turn stations will play my (our) music? Only time will tell.
Last night I took a stroll down memory lane Via the Youtube thing. (that what we old folks call it) I played the spinners, Ray Goodman & Brown, B-52's, Honeymoon Suite (a MTV favorite when they played video), and the list goes on and on.
If I asked today's 30 year old to name some of their songs, they would say.... who?
The good thing is, our demo is going to be the largest growing in the next few years (what do you mean the money ran out for my social security check LOL,). Now you are hearing more specialty shows (Tom Kent sounds great). More "Classic Hits" stations are popping up, and we grew up on FM radio (FM will live a little longer, sadly..AM will not be so lucky).
Stations, research..etc. Will need to figure out how to target us. We will have the money (minus Social Security *sarcasm again*) but can we convince ad buyers we will spend it, and in turn stations will play my (our) music? Only time will tell.
Michael, I want to respond but feel that I'm in the wrong place, to do so. I see a correlation however with this thread. Sometime back, an attempt was made to appeal to the kids of Standards fans, people around our age. How is that working out? Is there another generation for Sinatra et. al.?
Semoochie, if you're talking about the rash of "Retro Cool" stations that popped up in the middle of the last decade with names like "Red" and "Martini", they didn't last.
The problem is there aren't enough of us under 70 willing to listen long enough, often enough and at the same time to make a mark demographically.
And because of the music, it draws the 80+ listeners, who think it's for them, no matter how hipster the imaging. So the station ends up in no better shape than a traditional nostalgia station in terms of average listener age.
Even if there were more of us, it'd be an uphill battle in terms of average listening age because there are 100-year olds listening.
I love this music because it's what my dad listened to. If he were alive he'd be 96.
The Barry Manilow/Anne Murray/Carpenters AC hits will get you a lot of people in their 70s. And services like "America's Best Music" have been doing that for years.
To get the average listener age down to 65, and to get enough of those people to matter, I think you're probably talking about pre-1970 rock/pop oldies or maybe mid 1980s-90s soft AC.
The rock-pop oldies has the advantage of being fairly balanced in terms of gender and being music that audience likely heard on AM to begin with.
The 80s-90s soft AC would skew heavily female, and you'd be playing music that audience is used to hearing in FM stereo. But it would be a relatively natural progression from today's nostalgia format and would mirror what happened originally...the Sinatra/Patti Page MOR replaced by uptempo hit-oriented Adult Contemporary around 1973, which itself was replaced 9 or 10 years later with "Continuous Soft Hits".
None of it's a sure thing. Any move is going to carry huge risk. Which is what happens when you age with your audience and let a 50+ format become an 80+ format.
This has been an interesting thread, to say the least. Of the above titles that the mainstream AC (Mix 92.9) here in Nashville are playing, I put the "YES" in ALL-CAPS. Some of the other performers listed here they also play (like Michael Jackson, Huey Lewis, and Eurythmics), but instead opt for some of their bigger and better-known hits.
The only "soft-AC" station that I know about here in Nashville is WAMB, and I don't believe that they would play anything on the above list. Of course, I should point out that they are increasingly devoting their air time to talk shows, and those are usually of the health-related variety. And their overnight hours are leased out to a Hispanic broadcaster playing Spanish-language music. Just a sign of the times. They are an AM station, but have at least one FM translator.
Just a comment: that first one WAS played on soft rock stations back in the day. At least the ones I heard.
And it may have been on my Dial Global standards station, when it was ABC Memories. I never heard a station ID so I don't know whether it was late enough in the day for me to be hearing another station. At that time of day the owner's son was playing really off-the-wall stuff such as "Baker Street" and even "Don't Stop Believin'", "Caught Up in You", "Take It on the Run" and "China Grove". I'm surprised they didn't run him out of town when he filled in on the morning show. But that local afternoon show was gone soon after Dial Global replaced Memories (Timeless Favorites already had several area affiliates).
That second one was on the Muzak in my grocery store when they finally got rid of the instrumentals. And they had that junk turned up so loud I would call the company whenever I couldn't get the people to turn down the music. They had a manager who wasn't cooperative there, but after enough calls, he was gone and the music got turned down whenever I was in the store. And I was not being unreasonable. This music really bothered me at that volume, which they claimed was necessary to make sure the ads were heard.
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I was reminded while at the beach, listening to the station of this type there, that my radio station's local morning show actually played "Wild Thing", if I remember correctly.
The station at the beach was playing The Troggs, but the DJ said we'd be surprised to learn that they did a song that could be considered "relaxing".
The station at the beach was playing The Troggs, but the DJ said we'd be surprised to learn that they did a song that could be considered "relaxing".
Then it probably was "Love Is All Around", not "Wild Thing".
In case you need a memory flogger, here's "Love Is All Around":
In case you need a memory flogger, here's "Love Is All Around":
To correct what I posted earlier, the AC station here in Nastyville does indeed play "Here Comes the Rain Again" by Eurythmics.
Yeah, at the beach, it was "Love Is All Around". That station has a different philosophy than my Dial Global affiliate.
I heard "Ride Like the Wind" on the satellite not long after two actual standards in a row on either side of a commercial break. It could be appropriate but they really need to get rid of that guitar solo at the end.
"Levon" played on the satellite this morning. That still seems weird to me.
On the morning show, I heard "Secret Agent Man" and "See You Later, Alligator". In light of what Stardust was doing even before it became Timeless Favorites, and what Brian Setzer has done, that second one probably would fit. There's almost a big band sound there. I had a dream some years ago that Stardust changed to the music selected by a chimpanzee on my local affiliate during one month in 1997, and although I didn't hear this song in the real world, I did dream about it being played on Stardust.
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