âœ‚ï¸ WKRP You’re Having Our Baby
15 seconds · Clipped by Chris Ellis · Original video "WKRP Dr. Johnny Fever Awakens From The Dead" by SindyCozzi
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Why are big hits "lost?"
- Thread starter tall_guy1
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And 1975 was the approximate year that PDs in Phoenix and San Diego developed call-out research in its most primitive pre-minicomputer era where pages were torn out of the phone book and high-school kids did calls to "every 5th number" and tabulation was done by hand.
This was done because it was realized that record sales at the single level had become and inaccurate representation of popularity. For those of us who had stations with 18+ appeal, we had to look at albums and decide what was making them sell and use our preferred "tip sheet" (Hamilton, FMQB, Gavin) to guide us.
If you think of it, when we hum a song (but not when we play our magnificent Air Guitar) we are often doing a Shulke version in our mind. A lot of those rock or rock-ish songs have a strong hook and a good melody line and made surprisingly good Beautiful Music tunes.
A classic. But my all-time cringe moment is a real record. Played in the final hour of beautiful music on KFOG, San Francisco, before they went rock.âœ‚ï¸ WKRP You’re Having Our Baby
15 seconds · Clipped by Chris Ellis · Original video "WKRP Dr. Johnny Fever Awakens From The Dead" by SindyCozzi
This is the time when Ray Conniff (and his singers) said "Let's take a song about a guy who's about to leap to his death from the sadness he feels over the deaths of his parents and his being jilted at the altar----and sing it like it's a f***ing toothpaste commercial!"
Im talking more about chr/hot ac stations.
Same point. A couple of years after it was a hit, current sounds have changed enough that it may or may not be compatible on-air. Most songs that disappear from the air do so within three to five years of when they first hit.
I believe we have to look at the social environment outside of radio to answer that question. We can see that the Vietnam conflict flavored Top 40 and built an environment for free-form album rock. I'm not a sociologist, other than that having been my split major in college, but I see environmental issues that made the country ripe for disco... and then set it up for a big crash five years later when to many people REO Speedwagon was the epitome of rock.
It's tough to separate personal tastes and preferences in any area of art evaluation, so I just toss "the national social trends" into the ring as a factor that also defined hit songs and even hit genres.
And, of course, the rise of FM made listeners in every metro of a few hundred thousand or more "suddenly" have three times as many station choices; at the same time stations were positioning themselves more specifically and formats were fragmenting.
We shouldn't ignore the role that record labels have in this. The reason a CHR station is playing a current song 100 times a week is because that song's label is going for #1, and there's a push to get it there. The relationship between radio & records is a partnership. They provide the content, we provide the exposure. So when they're going for #1, our role is to help. The current situation is more complicated than it used to be because of streaming. While this is going on, as the song works its way up the chart, the radio station or its ownership or its consultant or maybe even all three are doing research on how people are reacting to that song. That research feeds the drive to get it to #1. After that goal is reached, the songs that inspired the most passion continue to research well, so those are the ones that get re-current play. And the recurrents that continue to research well, even after 5 or 6 years, go into gold. All the rest go POOF.
Remember, "CHR" is just a "new" term for Top 40, created by R&R after the 70's were over to differentiate their playlist from the lists in Billboard, Cash Box, Record world and the existing "Tip Sheets" of the time.
And "Hot AC" is simply the current version of what we called "Chicken Rock" in the 70's... Top 40 with slower rotations and a lot more gold. And that earliest movement gave us AC, soft AC, Hot AC and lots of variants that were market and regionally based, such as R&B or Country. Further, there were markets where larger ethnic populations flavored any format that played current music... making Miami and Minneapolis rather different.
KMET DJ Jim Ladd's perspective was the suits at Metromedia micromanagement of the station did it in. His story is fascinating:
https://worldradiohistory.com/BOOKSHELF-ARH/Biography/Radio-Waves-on-the-FM-Dial-Ladd-1991.pdf
IMHO, KMET could have went more "Full Spectrum" rock and leaned a bit more toward classic rock while adding alternative rock into the mix without ignoring new songs and new rock artists.
Except that from March, 1986 on, that would have had them scrapping with the re-born KNX-FM, which didn't get much traction from that approach.
I mean, fundamentally, you have to look at what KMET did in becoming KTWV and acknowledge a success. It's been here for 36 years next month. KMET got 19 out of album rock. And so what if they had become the album rock survivor? Look what KLOS has been through in that time and where they are now.
It seems like I've heard the chainsmokers and halsey song "closer" continuously in some form since it came out in 2016 (pretty good song though, IMO.)
That means so far, it's made the cut. Maybe it'll still be getting play five years from now. Maybe not. It's going to depend on things that haven't happened yet.
On some canadian stations I've streamed, hideaway by kiesza and several tegan and sara songs are in rotation still, but theres a mandate for a certain number of canadian artists there per hour.
A different set of circumstances in a different country that (by law) has some different hits.
It's a little more complicated in Canada: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_content
What do you mean by "continuously?" Do gold songs go into regular rotation? Of course. Maybe for one spin a day.
And some nations, even with a common language, have different hits and even different hit artists. Good example: Cliff Richard who was huge in the UK yet had minimal impact in the US.
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