Also advertising on that station are an assisted living facility and a company that lets people stay at home instead of going there.
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Markets With A 50s/60s Oldies Station
- Thread starter AM-FM-DXer
- Start date
We don’t have an oldies station here in the Bay Area unfortunately
It is unfortunate.
KABL was the last commercial station (that I know of) to play 50s and pre-Beatles 60s (in addition to Big Band, Great American Songbook and some Easy Listening hits). It flipped to talk in 2004 or so.
Even KFRC played some early 60s songs as recently as 2004 (610 AM flipped to religious KEAR, and the FM kind of came and went mostly un noticed before becoming a simulcast of KCBS in 2007). For example, I distinctly remember hearing The Tokens' When The Lion Sleeps Tonight (1961). Even then (1999-2005), however, 50s oldies —even late 50s — seemed pretty rare, if I remember correctly.
c
Huh?
KFRC-FM had been doing Oldies since March of 1991 and added the AM as a simulcast in August of 1993. By the Spring '94 book the stations were in 6th place with a 3.9 and had already chased KSFO/KYA-FM out of the format (KFRC-FM alone had beaten them by the Winter '93 book).
The last book before the sale of the AM (Spring 2004) was a 3.4 and ninth place. While the loss of the AM was more pronounced than I had thought (the FM alone slid to mid-2 shares), a lot of the post-AM erosion mirrored what was happening to Oldies formats around the country around 2005 (KRTH went Classic Hits, WCBS-FM went Jack and back).
And given that "as recently as 2004" is now 21 years..."some 60s songs" would logically now be "some 80s songs".
That timeline assumes an adequate catalog of new music with lasting appeal to supplant the old music that ages out... and unfortunately that is no longer the case.
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That timeline assumes an adequate catalog of new music with lasting appeal to supplant the old music that ages out... and unfortunately that is no longer the case.
It’s Not Our Imaginations…Modern Music Really Does Suck
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That argument has been made about Oldies/Classic Hits for the 25+ years I've been on this board---beginning with an argument that the 70s would never work because it was both The Partridge Family and Fleetwood Mac.
The same argument was made about 80s music.
I love "scientifically proven" (your first link). That doesn't matter. All that matters is finding 300-800 songs spread across a couple of decades that people in their mid-late 30s to their mid-late 40s love, like or won't push the button to tune out from.
The one thing all of us suck at is determining the taste and nostalgia of people significantly younger than us...and the runner-up is assessing our own generation (thinking we're individually respresentative of our group).
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Just for clarity:
KFRC(AM) became KEAR(AM) on April 30, 2005. The oldies format continued on KFRC-FM (99.7). The old KEAR (FM, 106.9) became KIFR, "Free FM", a male-oriented talk format that CBS had rolled out in a few other markets. It generally was a flop.
KFRC-FM (106.9) fired its air staff on October 20, 2008, continuing automated for a week (with hourly CBS Radio newscasts!) until beginning the simulcast with KCBS(AM) on October 27, 2008 at 7:40 am.
I'm writing this in a hurry, so I haven't nailed down exactly when the classic-hits format came to KFRC-FM (106.9). The call-letter record at fccdata.org gives an indication, though: the 99.7 calls changed to KMVQ and the 106.9 calls changed to KFRC-FM on May 22, 2007. As I recall, the "Movin'" format came to 99.7 around that time, with 106.9 becoming classic hits. The classic hits format moved to KFRC-FM-HD2 when the KCBS simulcast began, and continued for 13 more years until Audacy shut off most of its HD-2 channels. The KFRC call letters were revived (for a while) on AM at 1550 in 2009, carrying Scott Shannon's True Oldies Channel. This was not carried on KFRC-HD2.
It's also my recollection that the CBS executives of the time didn't have high expectations for "Movin'", viewing the format flip as something to prevent competing with themselves on the new KFRC-FM format. Unexpectedly, Movin' took off and was more successful than expected, becoming the direct ancestor to today's "99.7 Now" format.
May 17, 2007. It was a Thursday, and they began with a four-minute sound montage and narration that introduced the change. From then until Monday morning, it was all music and imaging, a thing they called the "Magical Mystery Tour".
The call letter swap lagged behind for five days, kicking in on Monday. The Legal ID (from the old "You" package) has a voice that says "KIFR, San Francisco" after the opening horn blast and before the "big" voice comes in with "The Magical Mystery Tour on Classic Hits 106-nine" and the singers come in with "KFRC".
To avoid a double ID, the jingle is trimmed so the singers don't do "San Francisco." The full "You" ID returned on Monday.
But the point does stand that the floodgates have been opened. We no longer have record labels curating and developing talented artists and putting the effort into producing their work, crafting it into radio-ready singles, and promoting it. Now anyone can record a song in their bedroom, throw a pre-packaged beat or AI-generated backing track on it, and release it to the entire world on social media. And all that record labels really do anymore is cherry-pick artists who have already gained traction on their own, lock them into restrictive contracts, and squeeze money out of them until their 15 minutes of fame is over.
The president of Warner Music Group even admitted as such, in an interview where his advice to new artists was for them to do all the work on their own that record labels used to do for them:
Clearing up a few more things...amazing how easy it is to misremember what happened just 15-20 years ago...
Family Radio didn't switch over the KFRC calls to KEAR right away. The calls were retained while 610 continued to carry A's baseball for the 2005 season. Then they were finally switched to KEAR October 17, according to the FCC record. What happened to the KEAR calls between March and October is something I can't figure out from the records of the various stations. Family's 88.1 in Sacramento (now KEBR) became KEAR-FM, but that also appears to have happened on October 17.
KFRC-FM became classic hits on September 2, 2005, then became "rhythmic" "MOViN" on September 22, 2006. At that time, Dave Sholin, Sue Hall, and Celeste Perry lost their jobs. They were re-hired when KIFR became KFRC-FM the next year; then lost their jobs again the week before the KCBS simulcast started. The 99.7 calls didn't change until the 106.9 format change.
KFRC-FM continued to broadcast A's baseball for the 2007 and 2008 seasons. This was blamed in part for the relatively poor performance of the classic hits format on 106.9.
SFGate articles from the time are, amazingly, still available:
KFRC goes from oldies to classic hits (9/2/2005, article 9/5/2005)
KFRC becomes "Movin'" (9/22/2006, article 10/15/2006)
Family Radio didn't switch over the KFRC calls to KEAR right away. The calls were retained while 610 continued to carry A's baseball for the 2005 season. Then they were finally switched to KEAR October 17, according to the FCC record. What happened to the KEAR calls between March and October is something I can't figure out from the records of the various stations. Family's 88.1 in Sacramento (now KEBR) became KEAR-FM, but that also appears to have happened on October 17.
KFRC-FM became classic hits on September 2, 2005, then became "rhythmic" "MOViN" on September 22, 2006. At that time, Dave Sholin, Sue Hall, and Celeste Perry lost their jobs. They were re-hired when KIFR became KFRC-FM the next year; then lost their jobs again the week before the KCBS simulcast started. The 99.7 calls didn't change until the 106.9 format change.
KFRC-FM continued to broadcast A's baseball for the 2007 and 2008 seasons. This was blamed in part for the relatively poor performance of the classic hits format on 106.9.
SFGate articles from the time are, amazingly, still available:
KFRC goes from oldies to classic hits (9/2/2005, article 9/5/2005)
KFRC becomes "Movin'" (9/22/2006, article 10/15/2006)
Which says that music from the 2020s is going to be problematic for Classic Hits stations in 2040-2055. And I have NO idea if radio's even going to be a thing at that point. I'd probably bet against it.
One thing we do know. Anyone who watched "The Orville" knows that hundreds of years in the future, people were still listening to what we call oldies now.
Also "The 100" but the few people left after nuclear war destroyed pretty much everything didn't consider recording new music a priority, so when they sent guinea pigs (100 juvenile delinquents known as "The 100", hence the show's title) to see if the Earth was safe again, music from the 20th and maybe 21st century is what people listened to.
You do know that:
a) "The Orville" was fiction.
b) "The Orville" was a comedy.
c) The reason TV and movies use music we're familiar with in shows set hundreds of years in the future is that their familiar music hasn't been written or recorded by people who haven't been born yet.
Right?
Was. It became as serious as the original "Star Trek".
Anyway, even if it would be too hard to invent "new" music, this seems to be the era they choose. Who knows?
Which also got much more wrong about the future than it got right.
Perhaps. But the producers et al. did at least try to make a good faith effort to base much of the fictional "Star Trek" technology on science that was at least somewhat plausible theoretically. Of course, as time went on, many of those theories that were thought plausible in the 1960s were since either scientifically disproven altogether, or modified to take new knowledge into account. This happens, and it doesn't make Star Trek wrong. It's just the way science works.
c
Any run-of-the-mill oldies station can play a song 100 years old. Serenade Radio goes above and beyond playing a song from 1905!
K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
Personally, I was always impressed with the episodes in "Star Trek: The Next Generation" where the late Gene Roddenberry was able to explore plots involving humanity, ethics and compassion. It was far superior a series compared to the original, and many of those storylines have parallels in the real world today.
Did they mention if it was being played from a wax cylinder record? I have to admit it would be pretty cool if they have one of those old players in the studio, but most likely it was just a recording of it.
Yes.
From what I've read, he wanted the original series to go in depth like that, but the networks of the mid 60s were much more restrictive of such things, so he had to scale it back quite a bit to make the censors happy. Even at that, he managed to slip a few things in (oblique references to the Vietnam war, one of the first interracial kisses on TV, etc.)
However, pop culture and society moved on and technology advanced faster than anyone thought possible, but it's still quite a decent show for its time.
c
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