OK, what we now call Adult Contemporary is really something else, a format for 35-54, that shows splashes of "contemporary" but largely, not so much. It came into existence by aging with its AC audience, so as not to lose those baby boomers. Hot AC is really AC. What I expect to happen is for AC to take on the characteristics of what Hot AC and AC before it, used to be, less gold based and overall, more contemporary, which is after all, its name. I'm a little confused about the 1968 timeline. Full Service/AC was Progressive MOR, when I was in college. It seems like the Adult Contemporary name came shortly thereafter and I think that Progressive MOR still had elements of MOR that FS/AC didn't carry on.
I think it depends on where you grew up. And it got called a lot of things...Uptempo MOR, Progressive MOR, Chicken Rock, Adult Contemporary.
But the first pioneers (among them WGAR, Cleveland and WBT, Charlotte) really got started in 1968 by taking the Top 40 and subtracting a few records from it instead of the MOR approach of adding the 3 or 4 softest Top 40 songs (in very light rotation) to their Al Hirt, Ed Ames and Patti Page records.
Another thing that set early AC apart was that the gold was 5-10 year old Top 40 stuff...not old MOR. They'd play "Witch Doctor" before they played "Witchcraft".
Some AC programmers were more brave than others when it came to music. Chuck Blore's KIIS-AM in Los Angeles tended to be fairly mellow. Jack Woods' KFMB-AM in San Diego, morphing out of a failed attempt at Top 40 and in a town where the dominant Top 40 was 48 RPM records with Shotgun Tom and Rich Brother Robbin screaming up the intros, could go a lot further and still be considered a "grownup" station by comparison.
Generally, the braver ones did better because they sounded fresher and took audience from Top 40.
Full Service came later in the 70s, as MORs that changed to ACs musically but didn't change their spot loads, news and sports commitments or personality talk time realized there was only so much time left for music on AM and it might be a bridge to the future to play up what the station did between the records instead of trying to hide it.
KFMB went at it from the opposite direction, adding Padres baseball in 1976 and gradually adding non-music elements until they were more Full Service than AC.
Most of those stations ended up becoming talk stations, because, for the most part, Baby Boomers raised on 15 songs an hour and short stopsets were never going to embrace 10 minutes of news, 18 commercial minutes, plus features and maybe six records an hour.
And...most of the elements added in Full Service tended to skew male in their appeal. In fact, even the music-oriented ACs tended to be more oriented toward guys, from the tempo to the DJ talk to sports. But it was the least objectionable alternative to adult women at the time, who were a good 10 years too young for beautiful music.
So when Jhani Kaye took a full-signal FM and put 48 minutes of contemporary yet soft love songs on it, it was a home run with 40-year old women. And what had been AM AC just crumbled.
But again, that was 30 years ago. Those women are 70 now. The women of the Class of 1991 want something different than the women of the class of 1961. And the only surprise is that that is a surprise to anyone.
