I heard Sirius/XM has a new online only beautiful music channel which focuses more on contemporary recordings than Escape.
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New Sirius/XM beautiful music channel
- Thread starter vchimpanzee
- Start date
Listening right now and I'm hearing "Midnight Train to Georgia" arranged by Nick Ingman. The song is 50 years old, the recording at least 40. How is this "contemporary"? Next up, another moldy oldie, "Till" from a 1969 album by Manuel. AFAIK, nobody is recording this sort of music now, and hasn't been for many years. Let me know if you hear a sleepy version of anything from the past 25 years, OK?I heard Sirius/XM has a new online only beautiful music channel which focuses more on contemporary recordings than Escape.
Isn't Elevations the SiriusXM Xtra channel for more current beautiful music covers?
I thought Elevations was more New Age-ish than beautiful music. I'll have to give it another listen.
No idea. I'm not listening to any radio tonight. Maybe tomorrow, or someone else can do the research on this.
I'm just telling you what I was told in the Facebook group, and since one has to be a member to read their posts, it's not like I can link. Let me go back there and see what exact wording was used.
I don't think I should quote anyone who posted in the group but there are three posts about this channel describing it as more contemporary than Escape. One says 60s through 80s rather than going all the way back to 30s and 40s like Escape sometimes does. Another says 60s through 80s. A third, by the man who founded the group, just says more contemporary.
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I'm listening to "The Elevator" now. I've heard in the last 20 minutes...
Mantovani -- Tie A Yellow Ribbon
Anthony Ventura -- What A Wonderful World (Louis Armstrong song)
Hagood Hardy -- The Homecoming
John Fox -- Those Were The Days (Mary Hopkins song)
BBC Concert Orchestra -- Smoke Gets in Your Eyes
Cyril Stapeton -- Love This Is My Song (Petula Clark song)
And there are skits between every two songs about being on an elevator. Similar to Yacht Rock Radio.
"I am your A.I. elevator. What floor please?" "I want the 29th Floor." "Are you sure? The 24th Floor is nicer."
"This is The Elevator. We're on the 13th Floor. Bad luck. Really bad luck. Hit the close door button, even if it really doesn't do anything."
"Step into The Elevator. Don't mind if others are crowded around you."
"This is The Elevator. Taking you to a new level."
Mantovani -- Tie A Yellow Ribbon
Anthony Ventura -- What A Wonderful World (Louis Armstrong song)
Hagood Hardy -- The Homecoming
John Fox -- Those Were The Days (Mary Hopkins song)
BBC Concert Orchestra -- Smoke Gets in Your Eyes
Cyril Stapeton -- Love This Is My Song (Petula Clark song)
And there are skits between every two songs about being on an elevator. Similar to Yacht Rock Radio.
"I am your A.I. elevator. What floor please?" "I want the 29th Floor." "Are you sure? The 24th Floor is nicer."
"This is The Elevator. We're on the 13th Floor. Bad luck. Really bad luck. Hit the close door button, even if it really doesn't do anything."
"Step into The Elevator. Don't mind if others are crowded around you."
"This is The Elevator. Taking you to a new level."
Nothing remotely "contemporary" about any of those songs unless you're at least 50 years old, and yes, I know a movie gave the Armstrong song a big push into public consciousness again, but that was in 1987!
Judging by some old airchecks I've listened to, this would seem to represent an average early 80s BM/Easy Listening station, which is anything but contemporary.
Unless by "contemporary" they mean most people alive over the age of 30 have heard at least some of it in passing at least once or twice?
For example, I used to hear some traditional Easy Listening at the dentist's office when I was 15; that was back in 2004, so it was actually fairly recent, and thus could possibly qualify as contemporary (nowadays, they play a blah mainstream AC mix with a fair number of currents or almost-currents).
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There was a sort of dividing point in the mid to late 60's on what was "contemporary" Beautiful Music.
In that period, we started to get things like the Hollyridge Strings doing covers of the Beatles and the Beach Boys and the like, which the older instrumental stuff was more of interpretations of older Big Band songs, crooner melodies and the like done with full orchestras and not those Glenn Miller style dance bands.
So Beautiful Music syndicators either started moving more into covers of Beatles and John Denver songs and away from the pre-60's tunes. Some syndicators, like my own company which programmed for Latin America, did not include any "traditional" songs, even if in more modern versioins.
Of course, this is where we started seeing instrumental versions of Inn-A-Gadda-Da-Vida and Janis Joplin songs, which, of course, the Beautiful Music listeners had never heard at all.
So "contemporary" Beautiful Music formats and songs are based on the "Rock and Roll" era, while the more traditional ones include covers of a lot of 40's and 50's songs. "Fly Me to the Moon" vs. "Yesterday".
But is any orchestra still recording BM versions of recent pop (or maybe country) hits? Anything in the 2020s? 2010s? 2020s? I don't think so. And that makes the description of Elevator as being "more contemporary" than Escape a lie. Both channels are equally contemporary: not at all.
A lot of the stuff recorded in the 80's was done by the BBC studio orchestras under contract to American syndicators. There was still an Asian market for instrumentals and Europe created stars like Richard Clayderman and others on the Delphine label and they sold well into the 90's.
So, to put a fine point on it, you know of no BM-style recordings of popular songs having been made this century? Twenty-five years into said century, I think we can safely remove "contemporary" from any description of the Clayderman and others' discs. My only remaining question is what Clayderman's orchestra was playing on those '90s recordings. Syrupy string versions of '90s hits? Or the '70s and early '80s songs that the last American BM stations were playing in the '80s before changing format?
For the European market, Clayderman and Jean Claude Borelly and the others recorded original songs; the owners of Delphine composed many of them. An example is the huge hit, Ballade Pour Adeline...
But for international markets, they covered past hits and a few more recent ones that were adaptable. In Japan, Clayderman did versions of Japanese pop songs of the 80's and 90's too.
Another very big hit was "Lady Di" which is here...
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