It all comes down to who pays for it. it's not about music or music fans, it's about paying for the service. If the people pay subscription for the music, it doesn't matter how old it is. If advertisers pay for it, then they get to determine who the audience is. I really believe a time will come when all music will be subscription-driven, because the audience is being carved up into smaller and smaller bits. Advertising is about reaching mass audiences, and music is becoming less about the mass, and more about the individual. There are fewer formats that attract the kinds of numbers that advertisers want. Will people pay to hear their music on the radio? We'll find out.
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Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen
- Thread starter MarcB
- Start date
It all comes down to who pays for it. it's not about music or music fans, it's about paying for the service. If the people pay subscription for the music, it doesn't matter how old it is. If advertisers pay for it, then they get to determine who the audience is. I really believe a time will come when all music will be subscription-driven, because the audience is being carved up into smaller and smaller bits. Advertising is about reaching mass audiences, and music is becoming less about the mass, and more about the individual. There are fewer formats that attract the kinds of numbers that advertisers want. Will people pay to hear their music on the radio? We'll find out.
Once again, stations in the 70's did not play music that was that old, due to sound quality issues and a distinct and obvious differences in the musical era. Music from the 20's, 30's and 40's is not rock and roll. Stations playing R&R in the 70's, would not mix in music from the swing era. Stations today playing oldies and classic hits, a song from the mid 60's would fit right in, including the Beatles catalog. You can have the Beatles and Queen on the same station, both are classic rock acts. Rock and roll is not Swing, not Big Band, not Vaudeville. You cannot mix & match them.
The Beatles were a pop band, not a rock band. So no, they don't get played on the same stations. Very different stuff. I don't know any classic rock stations that play Beatles. Even Classic Hits have dropped them. If you want to hold to format purity, then you can't have Beatles & Queen on the same station.
1964 in diapers, 1970 1st grade, in grade school
Rock & Roll, British Rock......I've heard "Hey Jude", "Come Together" and "Let it Be" on classic rock stations before. It just depends on the song.
When you say "before," when do you mean? Twenty years ago?
We even have an all -Beatles station here in town. So yes, their catalog is certainly playable.
https://radioinsight.com/headlines/116496/all-beatles-890-yesterday-launches-in-colorado-springs/
And still going today.
Thanks for making my point, +/- one year.
Since music taste formation is generally based on the couple of year's window surrounding the start of adolescence, those songs to anyone under 55 or even 60 are not a strong part of their personal history. They heard them "after the fact" as gold on stations they may have listened to, but they were not part of the Beatles experience.
And remember that we are a country with increasing numbers of immigrants and the popularity of the Beatles was by no means universal; in Latin America CCR sold many more records than the Beatles did! Stations program for today's audiences, not for a "Happy Days" flashback.
Classic Hits is well defined today as a smattering of later 70's songs, a few early 90's tunes and mostly 80's material from the pop genre. It includes rock crossovers, too.
Classic rock is generally harder rock everywhere from the earlier 70's onward and which is not current. Because the music across several decades is compatible, younger listeners have always heard the older songs and older listeners were in the audience of stations like WMMS and KSHE and KLOS so there is not a big "it's too old" issue for much of the music.
The 80's songs are the core of classic hits stations. Most of them play about 75% to 80% 80's songs, with just a few tunes on the upper and lower fringes.
Actually, 55 is the cut-off for transactional radio business. But outside the top 20 markets, most stations sell more local direct than transactional business, so there is a fade-out in advertiser interest in specific demographics. Stations appealing to 45-64 do quite well in all but the largest markets. And that is why you hear a higher percentage of 70's in the smaller markets as agency business is not as important.
But in classic hits, as a rule, stations want to target 35-54 if they can. That means focusing on the 80's because even the younger 35-54's will have heard the 80's stuff as "gold" on CHR stations... remembering that CHR in the 90's had some rough periods due to product quality and the split into hip-hop and pop factions... causing a number of stations to rely on the gold library more than usual, thus making 80's songs quire viable for, let's say, a 45-year-old today.
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That was absolutely not the case everywhere. In fact, I doubt it was the case anywhere, at least not until the mid 1980s.
I was in Chicago in 1976, and Beatles music was played, to one extent or another, on all their major rock stations, AM and FM. Not only that, but they had one hit single, Got To Get You Into My Life, that hit #7 on the Billboard Hot 100 that year. It coincided with the release of their Rock And Roll Music compilation LP that year. It was a hit record and got lots of airplay accordingly.
And I am old enough to remember 1965, as well as 1976. And I do have most of their catalog in one form or another, so I really don't have to hear them on radio. But at least on Sunday mornings on classic rock KSLX, they're still there.
That song was already ten years old when it was released to promote the hits album. It definitely was not played on rock stations, because it was from their pop era. It was what we call a turntable hit that got no recurrent or gold airplay after the short promotion.
No, but it was played on the Top 40/CHR stations (WLS, WDHF/WMET). Like it or not, it was a hit record in 1976 and it got lots of airplay, despite being recorded a decade earlier.
It was also #9 on the Billboard Adult Contemporary chart, so those stations played it as well.
It's the exception to the rule. And gets NO airplay now.
Jeff Lynne produced Free As a Bird in the 90s using an old Lennon cassette. That got some airplay too. Not many people could name that song if they had to.
Just did a 24-hour playlist check of WPLR New Haven, WAQY Springfield and WDRC-FM Hartford: No Beatles on the first one, "Hello Goodbye" in the 2 a.m. hour on the second one, "A Day in the Life" in the 5 a.m. hour on the last one. So the Fab Four are barely hanging on here with solitary spins when hardly anyone is listening.
The fact that it was one of their weakest hits doesn't help. Earth, Wind, and Fire did a much better version on a much worse album (the "Sgt. Pepper" movie soundtrack).
Let's just not go there. File this under "WTF was George Harrison thinking?" He'd been buddies with Lynne for years, between Lynne producing his records and their time in the Traveling Willburys. But despite his admitted attempt to be a producer with a style similar to George Martin's, Lynne was no George Martin. He was Jeff Lynne, who made everybody he produced sound like ELO. That's great, if you happen to be Jeff Lynne and/or ELO, but bad for the Beatles.
Free As A Bird and Real Love were weak Lennon demos to begin with. Grafting the other (aging) Beatles onto them didn't help, and Lynne's production made matters that much worse. Martin cited "hearing problems" at the time he turned the job down, but did return to produce their Anthology series. Somehow, I have a feeling that Martin thought they sucked but didn't want to hurt their feelings.
They get little to no airplay now because they just weren't very good, hit records or not. They were The Beatles going out with a whimper, not a bang.
I don't mind the Beatles, even though they broke up years before my parents met. There is a fair slice of other 60s music I am OK with too. But darn it, I hate Paul McCartney's solo career!
The problem with the Beatles on modern radio is all of their contemporary bands are long gone from the playlists. No matter how well listeners age 40 and up like the Beatles, its hard to squeeze them into a playlist when the rest of the music on the list is 10-25 years newer.
The problem with the Beatles on modern radio is all of their contemporary bands are long gone from the playlists. No matter how well listeners age 40 and up like the Beatles, its hard to squeeze them into a playlist when the rest of the music on the list is 10-25 years newer.
Sir Paul was considered a laughingstock for his first couple of years as a solo artist. That changed a bit when he formed Wings. To paraphrase Liberace, he cried all the way to the bank.
Funny, but many radio stations still find room for The Oldest... er, I mean Greatest Rock & Roll Band In the World, aka The Rolling Stones. Satisfaction, Brown Sugar, Start Me Up, and a few others are still played, despite being 35-50+ years old.
Although some personnel have changed, they never broke up and have never stopped touring. They also kept having hits right through the end of the '80s -- nearly 20 years after the last new Beatles song. Why on earth should any classic rock station be thinking of putting them on the shelf? Oh, and all the tracks you mention rock harder than anything the Beatles ever recorded.
Wrong.! Ever heard of "Helter Skelter", "Revolution", "Hey Bulldog", "I Want You (She's So Heavy)", "Tomorrow Never Knows", "Taxman"... I could go on & on.
Some of the "experts" on here simply don't like The Beatles. That's fine, but it doesn't diminish their popularity. Almost every musician will mention the Beatles as an influence...
Wrong! It has nothing to do with "like or don't like." This is a radio discussion board, not a music discussion board, and the Beatles hits are 50 years old. Might as well play George Gershwin or Cole Porter. Yes they're an influence. That doesn't mean we have to play them on the radio. Spend a few bucks and order up some CDs.
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