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Do you got a feeling that they will shake it off after Xmas?

D

DOB

WCBS FM finally added a special song they should have playing for a few years now, good move, and nothing crazy. Good for them!

Now the songs that have been playing that came out after 2010..... what's up?
This isn't "moves like" a big Audacity failure that hasn't been programmed correctly and has wasted potential for well over a decade.

This is a great radio station that's been smartly programmed in market 1.
Sure, we know Classic Hits next advancement can't just go 90s, the mass appeal music isn't there, so music after 2000 will be needed and going up to 2015 or so to cherry pick the strongest is smart.
It's going to be a format defined by what you play, not what you don't play.

This is all common sense, the question is, are they starting now, or is this just a temporary way to super serve those who don't want or want a break from Xmas?
 
Always said their "greatest hits" slogan was dumb since that implies newer greatest hits too which they werent playing.
 
Outside of smartly playing "Poison" as a regular rotation song, I think that anything out of place right now is not absolute until you hear it after the annual ownership of the market by the Xmas Lite.

Still, it's fact that the next evolution of Classic Hits cannot be handled by the 90s alone. Undoubtedly they will have to cherry pick the strongest, safe, mass appeal hits up to around 2015.

Outside of Scott playing different stuff during mornings, and maybe Fridays 5p to 6p CBS fm has not played songs after 2003 or so before, and these songs being more than 10 years newer, why would it not be worth a discussion? And yeah, the morning show is over at 9a, unless they are giving Scott extra time this week. If so then I stand corrected on that. Lol
 
In the seventies, CBS-FM used to play "Future Gold" twice an hour, songs that had been up and down the charts recently and were destined to be adds to their library. They were sprinkled into the normal rotation of 50's and 60's and earlier 70's hits. Songs were added to the rotation about a year after they'd been hits, and to the studio wall where music carts were stored. In theory this was to spice up the sound with occasional recurrents that fit the format and to attract younger listeners.

When Joe McCoy became PD in the early 80's, he got rid of the Future Golds and emphasized the Beatles era without eliminating the older stuff. Which kicked the ratings up into a higher orbit. Although by then, "the older stuff" was a quarter of a century old. (In the actual Beatles era, playing quarter century old oldies would've meant playing Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw. Today the "quarter century old" stuff means the Backstreet Boys and Mike and the Mechanics. U-2 and Madonna are even older. And the oldest of the oldies go back to the mid-fifties, which make them as much as 67 years old. Like playing Eddie Cantor songs on 60's-era Top 40.)
 
I think if they branded “greatest hits“, gives WCBS, the chance to play more newer music like your Taylor, Swift, and dare I say Maroon 5. Artists and bands that have been around for 10 to 15 years. Could actually steal audience away from 106.7. They wouldn’t be playing new music. They would just be playing the greatest hits of established contemporary artists.
 
DOB said:
WCBS FM finally added a special song they should have playing for a few years now, good move, and nothing crazy. Good for them!
Click to expand...
Perhaps those songs were not liked by a portion of the target audience. But as a few years went by, that group aged out of the target.
DOB said:
Now the songs that have been playing that came out after 2010..... what's up?
This isn't "moves like" a big Audacity failure that hasn't been programmed correctly and has wasted potential for well over a decade.
Click to expand...
No, it shows that the people who have aged into their core want something a little different than the ones who aged out wanted.
DOB said:
Sure, we know Classic Hits next advancement can't just go 90s, the mass appeal music isn't there, so music after 2000 will be needed and going up to 2015 or so to cherry pick the strongest is smart.
It's going to be a format defined by what you play, not what you don't play.
Click to expand...
BigA is correct in saying that people who listened to currents in the 90's will like many of those songs today.
 
leethalweapon said:
I think if they branded “greatest hits“, gives WCBS, the chance to play more newer music like your Taylor, Swift, and dare I say Maroon 5.
Click to expand...
So Taylor and Swift are different artists?
 
DavidEduardo said:
Perhaps those songs were not liked by a portion of the target audience. But as a few years went by, that group aged out of the target.
Click to expand...

The interesting thing going on in NYC is you have a CHR that has been playing 20-25 year old songs due to a shortage of currents, and that has the potential of eating into the WCBS core. On the surface it's hard to believe such a thing would happen. But that's the state of music right now. So it might be that WCBS is trying to be proactive here to claim these 90s and early 2000s as theirs now, rather than let them get used against them by Z-100.
 
WNEW is going back as far as Z100 is, and KTU even further.

Sorry to David, but it's just fact, there was major fragmentation that hit CHR really hard in the 90s, so there's not as many quality hits from the 90s as the previous decades offered for an Oldies station.
It's much better to find songs that are stronger from beyond the 90s.
Obviously there are outliers, and yes Oldies stations like CBS Fm did once even play one new song an hour. Lmfao

And I thought this was settled years ago.... maybe I missed the informer to tell me it smells like an achy breaky heart. Lol

Slowly more and more mass appeal songs will be added to compliment the current 80+ playlist and it will be all of the strongest testing pop songs from up until the late 2010s. 1027 will share songs with them, no big deal as they become less played on WNEW and CBS playing them more frequently.
Obviously some songs that sound hip hop become pop by their status as hits that a majority of 25 to 54 enjoy.
They get played, but moderately, which you already are seeing with the older crossovers.

The format called Classic Hits is defined more by what you play, not what you don't play.
 
DOB said:
WNEW is going back as far as Z100 is, and KTU even further.

Sorry to David, but it's just fact, there was major fragmentation that hit CHR really hard in the 90s, so there's not as many quality hits from the 90s as the previous decades offered for an Oldies station.
Click to expand...
Quality is subjective. What the '90s lack are consensus hits.
 
DOB said:
WNEW is going back as far as Z100 is, and KTU even further.

Sorry to David, but it's just fact, there was major fragmentation that hit CHR really hard in the 90s, so there's not as many quality hits from the 90s as the previous decades offered for an Oldies station.
It's much better to find songs that are stronger from beyond the 90s.
Click to expand...
You are missing the way programming works: we have a target audience for each station and format. We research with listeners in the target and find out what they like and dislike. Then we play that music.

If there are fewer songs from a period that work today, that is not something we have not seen before. "Oldies" stations hit a brick wall with 1965-1970 music as so much was disco and most of that did not test. So we hung with 65-75, and then added early 80s.

The same will happen if there is not enough 90's material. We will play what works, use some earlier 00's, and still rely on a lot of 80's.
DOB said:
Obviously there are outliers, and yes Oldies stations like CBS FM did once even play one new song an hour.
Click to expand...
That was in an early era of the format and it did work for a while... in essence, it was like Hot AC with deeper gold.
DOB said:
Slowly more and more mass appeal songs will be added to compliment the current 80+ playlist and it will be all of the strongest testing pop songs from up until the late 2010s. 1027 will share songs with them, no big deal as they become less played on WNEW and CBS playing them more frequently.
Click to expand...
Additionally, there is a way of solving the problem: smaller libraries. KRTH in LA is getting along with the highest numbers in its history by doing that.
DOB said:
The format called Classic Hits is defined more by what you play, not what you don't play.
Click to expand...
No format is strictly defined by its music... it is defined by today's taste of people who liked certain songs of a certain kind when they were later teens to earlier 30's. If we find they all overwhelmingly and strongly like "Ballad of the Green Berets" then we play it.
 
Part of the reason for fragmentation of pop in the 90s was FM. Before the 80s, AM was king and there were only a few pop stations in each market. FM allowed for different stations to have different niches.
 
NickD said:
Part of the reason for fragmentation of pop in the 90s was FM. Before the 80s, AM was king and there were only a few pop stations in each market. FM allowed for different stations to have different niches.
Click to expand...
FM album rock stations began in the late 60's and started getting decent ratings by 1970. Top 40 made it to FM other than by simulcasts like WPGC around 1972, and some like WMYQ, WHYI, WDRQ, KSLQ were leading their markets in a year or two.

By 1976, more than half of all music listening was on FM, and it was mostly led by Beautiful Music, Rock and Top 40 stations.

And don't forget that disco shot an FM to #1 in New York City by the later 70's.

Look at each market here and you can see how big FM was in 1976: https://worldradiohistory.com/Archive-Duncan-American-Radio/Duncan-1976-Spring.pdf
 
NickD said:
Part of the reason for fragmentation of pop in the 90s was FM. Before the 80s, AM was king and there were only a few pop stations in each market. FM allowed for different stations to have different niches.
Click to expand...

If you want to understand the fragmentation of music, you need to look at the music business. By the late 80s, radio was losing control of what people listened to. It began with MTV, but even MTV lost control of the music. The best example was grunge music. Radio was not on the forefront of grunge. It followed the trend. That started to happen more and more. Popular tastes were being driven by the diversity of sources people had for music, and some of it was completely off the grid. The reason why pop radio in the 90s was such a mess was because it was trying to follow all of the trends happening, from rap to grunge to boy bands to divas to the new traditionalists in country. It was all happening at the same time, and pop was trying to include all of it.

Radio was spending more time and effort trying to figure out what people were listening to. More research, more consultants, more studies, more information was all pouring into radio like never before. They started to realize that music didn't fit into narrow formats any more. Maybe we need more formats. Country music was too big for one format. We need Young Country and Outlaw country and other sub-genres. All of this was driving the thinking at XM Radio. They hadn't launched yet, but they already knew they needed to offer more than what was available on traditional radio. This is what led to HD Radio.

On the business side, by the 90s, the two biggest record companies were no longer controlled by American media companies. RCA sold its record label to the German BMG, and CBS sold Columbia to Sony. Then in the early 90s, MCA Universal sold its music division to the French Vivendi company, and so music was now an international business, bigger than the US or American radio.

So fragmentation of music wasn't caused by radio. It was caused by fragmentation of personal tastes and the ability of people to get what they wanted outside of the traditional places.
 
TheBigA said:
The interesting thing going on in NYC is you have a CHR that has been playing 20-25 year old songs due to a shortage of currents, and that has the potential of eating into the WCBS core. On the surface it's hard to believe such a thing would happen. But that's the state of music right now. So it might be that WCBS is trying to be proactive here to claim these 90s and early 2000s as theirs now, rather than let them get used against them by Z-100.
Click to expand...
Since I do not listen to Holiday music I put Z-100 on and was pleasantly surprised by the older music and I am 70.
 
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