Even the old American Top 40 countdowns (and I still listen to those retro countdowns every weekend) played more than just the top 40 songs. They regularly played extras, too, although some of them were what I called "just because" extras, because there didn't seem to be any rhyme or reason why those particular songs were inserted into a countdown, except to point out that chart history didn't just begin when I became a teenager, as many teenagers seem to believe now. It would have made more sense to play an extra in response to a "whatever happened to.." question, although I don't believe that they ever did that.
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- Thread starter RTGIV
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Some Top 40 songs can’t be played because they don’t fit into the CHR format. Then, there are those that aren’t good songs at all and are just riding the momentum of an artist or a past hit. And some songs don’t make the Top 40 but get played even sometimes after they fall out of the Top 100.
It's that "Top 40" has not really existed for three or four decades. There were programmers and consultants back in the 70's even telling us that "there are no more than 17 real hits at a time... ever" and doing playlists of less than 25 songs along with recurrents and recent gold.
That is one of the reasons (besides very intelligent marketing) that R&R renamed the format "Contemporary Hit Radio" because they knew that there were not 40 real hits, ever.
One of the reasons many if not most Top 40 stations played American Top 40 early on Sunday morning was that the early hours burnt off the mostly-stiffs under 25 ranked songs so that the higher audience hours at 8 AM or 9 AM got to play the biggies.
Stations that ran AT40 in the evening in rated markets saw that the daypart crashed. Few major stations did that. And a few that ran the show on Saturday morning or evening found that it did not yield benefits. The bottom 20 were either brand new and unfamiliar songs, songs that never got any higher (a definition of "stiff") or big tunes in their last chart week. The show was only saved from total destruction in those two hours by all the entertaining content from the host.
I fortunately had the opportunity to work with Tom Rounds for over 20 years and for a shorter period with Ron Jacobs, so I'm familiar with the scenario. I once asked why the show was four hours long and was given the understanding that four hours could run twice as many ads as two hours. (For those unfamiliar, TR and Jacobs created AT40.)
The first hour or two of vintage AT40 episodes can be an interesting resource for anyone exploring obscure music from the past. Not the sort of stuff any radio programmer would want to run nowadays, but if you occasionally want to wander far away from the beaten path, you’ll find a number of tunes “that you’ve forgotten that you’ve forgotten” and have been buried in your brain for all those years.
Some of the older extras, especially in the early years, were to help stations convince potential advertisers that AT40 wasn't "just a kids show'.
Once the show went to 4 hours, they starting recapping the previous week's top 3, which probably helped.
I guess we disagree that "hits" are the only songs worth playing. Some of the worst songs ever written were hits. TBH, i have 1450+ favorite songs. So i'm not the average listener. But i have to question if listeners who only like 17 songs out of the more than 100 current songs (not to mention, well... "recurrents & recent gold" + 1000s of other songs) are the ones who determine which songs are played.
In radio, "hits" is synonymous with "currents"... those songs that are very widely accepted and are, generally, from brand new to no more than a few months old.
In a variety of formats, I've never seen more than 20 to 22 hit currents at any given time.
In radio, a "good" song is one people give a high positive score to when asked, "how much would you like to hear that song today" after hearing a snippet of the song. We don't evaluate taste, we evaluate the playability of individual songs
I have nearly 2,000 in my MP3 library, with most duplicated on playlists with streamers. But I only have a few dozen, at most, of favorites. And that shows that each listener has slightly different tastes and preferences and radio, which is one-to-many, can only deal with the most broadly popular songs, old and new.
If you were to go back to the days of 45's, you'd see that there was a huge sales number for the top few songs, big numbers for the next 10 to 15 and then it fell off to about nothing by song #30 or so on national Billboard, Cash Box or Record World charts.
There were plenty of songs that a few people bought, but the inference was that the "rest" were not buying because they either did not like the song all that much or they actually disliked it.
When stations research current music, they are not looking to play songs that a third of the audience likes while 2/3 hates it... they want songs that "everybody" at least likes and which most "love".
If you're looking for radio that doesn't focus on hits, then listen to WNXP or WMOT. They live for people just like you.
No limits on their playlists, and no commercials. Perfect for you.
If you aren't looking for hits, and you have access to the internet, why bother with radio at all?
Convenience, cool curated playlist, free, no need for user name and password, etc.
Some of the extras in those really early countdowns were album tracks only, at the time that they were played. Some of them later became singles, but some of them never did. They got away from playing album tracks rather quickly.
I always got the impression that stations that "buried" the countdown were somehow embarrassed by it. But they shouldn't have been. The only problem that I saw with the countdowns vs. regular programming was that the countdowns were often very HEAVY with commercials, as opposed to their random everyday programming. The other issue that I saw was that as a teenager, it was tough enough to get up that early on a weekend morning, even just to listen to a countdown. But teenagers, as opposed to us old farts, were always far more receptive to new music, so why not go ahead and introduce it to them? I was starting to age out of top 40 by the time that the stations really started burying the countdowns in early weekend mornings, so I didn't really care, anyway. And I figured that I would get the chance to hear them later, anyway.
When I was a kid, the local station aired the countdown on Sunday afternoons, so easy for me to listen to it. I was in my later teens, and 20s when they started airing the countdowns early, but by then, I often had to go work at my (then) dead-end job, anyway.
Personally would prefer FEWER heavily-edited current songs, thus eliminating most of the need for unnecessary extras. Watermark did that back in the day, and Premiere does it now.
Fill time yes, but also to make the countdown more "adult". That also went for a few of the special shows, especially July 4, 1976 (number one songs of the past 50 years...starting in 1937. The short K-Tel versions of songs seemed to end after the 4-hour format began.
I liked that '76 countdown, strange though it was, and saved (printed) the cue sheets for it, so I could go back and listen to those songs again. Not likely that they would have gone back to 1977 for a similar countdown (40th anniversary of that first one) in 2016. So it made for an interesting listen. Some butchered songs still existed after the four-hour version began, mainly because they still wanted to cram too much extraneous stuff into them, particularly in the '80s, when some songs started getting even longer.
Spotify gives that after the initial login. It is $10 per month or so, but as a listener to music outside of the mainstream, it serves me well.
Firepoint, indeed AT40 was designed to keep the music flowing and the music was edited, cut and Casey’s precision was tight. You may note Casey was IN the music vs overpowering it, which for the time was actually fairly revolutionary.
It was believed that since everyone knew the hits being played, the music was second to what Casey was saying and the audience accepted literal snippets of the music in favor of energy and moving toward the number one song “faster.”
That kept listenership higher for the show and over the years.
Additionally, remember there were/are national spots and local spots so maybe Atlanta would have a larger local adv load than say Pittsburg, so each market would have different timing.
Today’s AT40 (on Hippie and nationally) is from 1979. You may also notice an extra from Prince which was literally released two months before this week back in 79 and hit number 11 two months from now before becoming number 1. So that “fill” is a good example of keeping the extras within the time frame, but not yet on the charts.
Notice how the segments are dissected and often the intended breaks become back to back segments without a commercial.
That may sound completely different in various markets and is designed that way.
Now on with the countdown. LOL.
It was believed that since everyone knew the hits being played, the music was second to what Casey was saying and the audience accepted literal snippets of the music in favor of energy and moving toward the number one song “faster.”
That kept listenership higher for the show and over the years.
Additionally, remember there were/are national spots and local spots so maybe Atlanta would have a larger local adv load than say Pittsburg, so each market would have different timing.
Today’s AT40 (on Hippie and nationally) is from 1979. You may also notice an extra from Prince which was literally released two months before this week back in 79 and hit number 11 two months from now before becoming number 1. So that “fill” is a good example of keeping the extras within the time frame, but not yet on the charts.
Notice how the segments are dissected and often the intended breaks become back to back segments without a commercial.
That may sound completely different in various markets and is designed that way.
Now on with the countdown. LOL.
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