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1090 XEPRS Has Gone Back to Oldies Plus Wolfman - L.A. Daily News
- Thread starter Daryl Lynn L.A.
- Start date
Fair enough, but some listeners like Oldies and myself are not satisfied with the same tired 500 song rotation of completely burned to a crisp songs. I know you play what the public wants, and I don't begrudge that at all. You do what you gotta do. If I ran a station, I wouldn't do anything different myself (sorry Oldies!). It's not that I would just be all about the money, but...well, yes I would.
But in the meantime, I am always searching for other outlets that do serve my need for more variety. They are hard to find, but they do exist. One of the things I listen to a lot is the weekly Top 40 countdown on the Sirius 80s on 8 channel, especially when they play those overlooked early 80s years. The inflexibility of the format forces them to play the songs that were hits then (stiffs too!) but never see any airplay on other 80s channels or even on the 80s on 8 regular playlist . It's artists like Juice Newton and George Benson or an odd early New Wave track that give the format the flavor it definitely needs.
That's fine. That's why you have your own personal record collections, or you make your own personal playlist. We're not in that business.
There is no obligation on our part to play every song or serve every person. We're the free sample. Do the custom work yourself.
The point is that the options are available, you know where to go, so just go there. Don't feel this need to tell the cook how to do his job.
Once again, that's more of a musicological or historic thing than what radio does. In the case of Sirius, you're paying for that channel. In broadcast radio, you don't pay. It's just there. You either listen or you don't. It's very binary. When you're paying for a meal, I can understand why you might want to tell the cook how you want your eggs. Radio isn't in that business.
I'm 40, grew up in the 80's and the soft A/C station played Too Shy by Kajagoogoo, Drive by The Cars, etc. almost every day. Even though I'm familiar with those songs, I'd rather hear mid to late 80's stuff (Roxette, etc.) if I want to listen to 80's music now.
K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
I have access to research from 17 Classic Hits stations in the top-35 markets who do regular research on their gold libraries. I augment that with airplay monitors of top-rated CH stations in the top-60 markets,
And the songs that have dropped by the wayside did get airplay at one point in time. They only dropped as their popularity decreased in regular retesting. The world moves on, even if you don't want to.
You are dead wrong (why am I not surprised?) in thinking that more than a handful of titles from those early years in the decade are testing well.
FYI, our Flashback Weekend program is 100% classic New Wave and Modern Rock. Robbie Dupree, Diana Ross and the Doobie Brothers do not fit, so therefore you are (again) dead wrong.
We have some listeners who only tune in for Flashback Weekend, and KRKE's owner is a huge fan of the show himself. Try telling him the above and see how far you get.
If it were "ridiculous" then Premiere wouldn't be giving stations the option. You wouldn't last ten seconds trying to convince them that YOU* are right and THEY** are wrong.
(*-YOU: Someone who has never worked in the business, much less being currently active in it. **-THEY: The syndication arm of iHeart, with a ton of research to use in making decisions.)
Adding the last part of A's response to you:
If I can sum that up in a single sentence for you, Oldies:
THE EIGHTIES ARE WHATEVER THE AUDIENCE EXPECTS THEM TO BE.
You have been tagged many times on RD as an "outlier" (usually by David). That means your tastes and opinions are not indicative of those who are regular listeners to our stations and formats.
And that is why I am not going to let you try to tell me how to do my job programming a station/format that is making money,
I am also going to add a few of David's comments and highlight the key words and phrases so you can perhaps understand better ...
Next time you take an attitude of "I'm right and you're wrong" and repeat your babble ad hominem, I shall make a very pointed suggestion to the moderators about the insanity of circular arguments.
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Or you can just politely tell him his opinions are not supported by actual market place realities and move on. He was not being disrespectful to you.
K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
He has been told that over and over and over (and over). It doesn't sink in.
He is being disrespectful to every professional here, including me, with his attitude of challenging the marketplace realities (good choice of words, BTW, Flipper) after they have been cited in countless replies to his babble. I just chose to give a lengthy rebuttal.
Or just ignore and move on too. We also have to keep in mind there are listeners here who simply do not understand how the business works no matter how long we all try explaining.
I’d put him on Ignore
K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
Yeah, I know. I just keep hoping that sooner or later some actual understanding might seep in via osmosis.
He suffers from the combined love of music, history, and radio communications, with an emphasis on quality songs that were once popular that he believes deserve airplay and yet don't receive it. I know because I suffer from the exact same disease, especially when we are talking early 80s music, which was completely annihilated by the arrival of MTV.
The only difference is I stopped tilting at windmills a long time ago (decades ago, really) when I realized none of my friends, or hardly anyone I even knew really, agreed with my expanded taste in popular music. I realized if none of the people I know care about expanded variety and are quite content to hear the same 500 burned out songs, how can the collective taste of the listening public at large (even the subset that is interested in the particular genre we are discussing now) be any different? It only stands to reason that radio would cater to them and not me. Like Big A says, it was up to me to chart my own path, find alternative content providers and make my own playlists.
It is sad (to me) that it has to be this way, but it is. KRTH and other similar stations of the past that we long for will never again be what they were - not on the weekends, not overnights, not on Labor Day. Not happening, period.
OK, back to my Olivia Newton-John playlist!
K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that, if you are only expressing your own musical taste and not -- as @oldies76 apparently wants -- trying to change things back to the way they were.
If you can stand some mangled twisting of an old saying: The horse he wants back in the barn left long before the door was closed, and he apparently thinks reopening the door will coax the horse back inside.
You have the clarity and wisdom to come to that realization and take matters into your own hands in terms of your own personal satisfaction. That is the difference between you and him: You are a realist.
At least you can temper your sadness to some degree by being secure in the knowledge that you know why things will never be the same (not even Sundays with Spanky & Our Gang).
♫ If not for her ... er, you ...
If people want to hear the kind of radio that's more like what they remember, where the station takes chances on music, then listen to KIIS or the kinds of stations that play currents every now and then. I could NEVER listen to any classic format, because I know those songs in my sleep. I was tired of them when they were currents. Of course, even there, we're finding that people really don't want radio to take TOO many chances. They're starting to reign in the CHR stations. So CHR is playing more gold than it used to.
The funny part is that MTV didn't add songs because of the music, but because of the video. If a great song was released, but it didn't have a video, they didn't play it. There were lots of songs like that. Meanwhile, songs with great videos got moved into heavy rotation, and that started to affect radio airplay. R&R also included the MTV charts with their other information. Programmers would look at the MTV chart, and they'd know what their listeners were seeing. Duran Duran became much bigger than they really were because of their videos on MTV. It's been a long time since MTV played videos, so now those songs exist without the video fortification, and we discover they're a lot less impactful without the videos.
The funny part is that MTV didn't add songs because of the music, but because of the video. If a great song was released, but it didn't have a video, they didn't play it. There were lots of songs like that. Meanwhile, songs with great videos got moved into heavy rotation, and that started to affect radio airplay. R&R also included the MTV charts with their other information. Programmers would look at the MTV chart, and they'd know what their listeners were seeing. Duran Duran became much bigger than they really were because of their videos on MTV. It's been a long time since MTV played videos, so now those songs exist without the video fortification, and we discover they're a lot less impactful without the videos.
K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
Wait ... you mean they still make music videos? 😝
For the core listeners, those songs are not burnt and are the ones they most want to hear the most often.
That is the issue. On a number of cases I have been in a direct format competition and always cut the playlist. And that, coupled with research, always won. The station with the bigger list lost in direct proportion to the number of lower rated songs they played.
In the earlier 80’s I was GM of the sister station to Y-100 which was dramatically #1. I listened a lot to Tanner and The Madam and Kramer and Cox on the Radio and Mark in the Dark and followed the music closely.
But if I hear an AT40 from 1980, 1981 or 1982 way over half the songs are not familiar. I listened to Y-100 and they had a tight playlist. Many songs on AT40 were never played there. So I do not know them, nor do most people who lived in the market then. Those songs are like roadkill…unattractive and stinky to most people.
They do! In fact a huge chunk of people use YouTube for music discovery. I'm one of those people. There are a lot of artists who are more about creating music videos than music alone. Between YouTube and TikTok, music is more visual. I've heard some people criticize certain artists about their music, but they're missing the visual aspect. The song sounds different when that part of the presentation isn't included. But once again, they don't need a VJ to tell them about the music, because all the information is already out there. So the need for video channels went away 20 years ago. All of these changes have affected how people use radio.
This argument at the core of this discussion is just like the “why” of the bullfights I used to watch on TV in Mexico City: I knew what was going to happen to the bull, but watching how it happened made up the mystery of the event. Oldies76 is this thread’s bull.
Otherwise, we would not waste our time.
Otherwise, we would not waste our time.
K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
And that is the case in more markets than just Miami. In fact, those stations that carry the 80's version of AT40 have the option of only playing the last three hours*, because of the higher probability of "stiffs" that went nowhere ... and likely got little airplay as currents. Those songs are also going to be unfamiliar to Classic Hits listeners today, as are the A/C crossovers that populated the CHR charts in 1980-81-82. (Take my word for it ... I get to see the cue sheets every week.)
And while that first hour (#40 to #31) also has some "stiffs", I have found that a good percentage of the songs in that hour -- provided it's from 1983 forward -- are songs that moved up the charts from there, rather than "debut this week, drop off next week", which happened a lot in those earlier years. So I still play all four hours (besides, it sounds weird to call a show "American Top 40" and then start with #30).
[*- And again, proof that Premiere knows all this perfectly well is the fact that not only do they offer the option of dropping the first hour, they sell no national commercials in it.]
Jeez, what did I do to ruffle your feathers? I was not disrespectful. Relax! Thank you Flipper for the feedback.
They're taken out of context. Those shows were written for that time using the information they had at the time. They weren't even meant to be repeated a month or a year later, much less 40 years later. They don't even have interview bites. Casey didn't begin to use interviews until he started Casey's Top 40 in 1988. Even in the 80s, most CHR stations rarely played songs below the Top 20. So the shows are playing songs now that only a small number of stations played when they were currents. Some songs managed to grow into bigger hits through increased airplay and promotion. But the majority died horrible deaths in the thirties or lower. If the people didn't like them then, why should they like them now, especially when they're taken out of the context of their time?
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