Lkeller said:
We wanted back to back songs with less formatting, less commercials, and only mellow DJs who didn't talk so much. Top 40 was so mainstream, we didn't realize how much FUN those stations were. Now we realize it, in hindsight. So maybe the radio industry adapted to our wants, in a way - though we didn't get less commercials, they just started lumping them together into 7 minute blocks.
Llew:
As usual, you hit it right on the head. The industry has simply responded to what the listeners have been telling them they want...and they've been doing it for a long time.
In 1965, Disc Jockeys with tons of talent and longevity in the market were stopping after every record to play a commercial and talk over no music on KFWB and KRLA. Bill Drake took over your mom's favorite radio station, KHJ, reined in the jock talk, ran two and sometimes three comercials (two :30s and a :10) back-to-back, enabling a few two and three-record sweeps per hour...and was number one in six months...while playing the same songs KFWB and KRLA were...just fewer of them (30 instead of 50 currents).
The sad truth is that, outside of us radio freaks, the average listener doesn't care much about disc jockeys. They're there for the music. The more music, the better. So the single-spot cluster that evolved to a triple-spot 70 second break under Drake became a two-minute cluster in the 70s...so there could be three and four (and five and six) songs in a row.
The audience said "more"....and the clusters went to three, four and more minutes...allowing eight, nine and ten in a row.
And when you promise the audience "Forty minutes of non-stop music"....they believe that means no jingles, no IDs, no sweepers...they hear those as commercials...for the radio station. And the DJ is percieved as an interruption, too.
The truly great jocks (John Mack Flanagan is certainly one of them...Bobby Ocean, Dr. Don Rose and a large number of KFRC alum are others), broke through and are memorable because they made a connection with the segment of the audience that did care about the disc jockey, and surprisingly, with a few who didn't think they did, while the format still allowed it.
But true radio lovers are seriously outnumbered by everyday radio users. And on those rare occasions when they'll hear an old-school 60s or 70s presentation (on an oldies station, or XM, or through friends like you and me who have airchecks on CDs in the car), they'll have their "Oh, wow...that was fun." moment. But it's clearly yesterday. Leave them to their own devices and they'll tune away within the hour. They don't want it as a part of their daily life again any more than they want the haircut or clothes they had then. Now they've got jobs, kids, a cellphone that won't stop ringing and they want traffic every ten minutes on the nines, forty minutes of music (I know...can't have both...but they've been getting their way for 40 years now) and a jock who sounds "friendly" (definition: no lower register and a careless approach to enunciation), but never actually says anything they have to think about or react to. That's what
talk radio is for.
God, I miss KFRC and John Mack Flanagan.
---Michael Hagerty
