This is a format that has pretty much completely died (along with most of their audience!). I remember when WDOK and WQAL were both doing beautiful music and, of course, the legendary WDBN in Medina. If you want to re-live the format (or never heard it), here is a streaming station that reproduces that format and music perfectly. BEAUTIFUL INSTRUMENTALS BEAUTIFUL MUSIC RADIO
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Beautiful Music Radio
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When I was in Junior High around 1960, my second choice when doing my homework was WDBN and its instrumental music format long before it was called "Beautiful Music". My first choice was HJED, which I'd set my time to tape during the overnight show that day... but if reception made the tape unlistenable, WDBN was the choice.
In fact, when I built my own first Beautiful Music station about 6 years later, WDBN was the model I based it on!
It's amazing how many people around the area nowadays wonder how Tower rd got it's name. Have4 to explain to them that at one time WDBN radio had its tower there. [Still there and looks like it's owned by SBA Structures, LLC which has to do with wireless communication so I assume it's a cell tower now.
WDBN had such a big signal Art Vuolo used to include them in his radio guides for the Ann Arbor area (along with several other Cleveland metro stations). Which was interesting, because most Ann Arbor area listeners likely got what was then (c. 1971) WVIC East Lansing on 94.9.
I primarily used Beautiful Music radio (specifically 97.1 WJOI in Detroit, a Bonneville affiliate) to relax with at night, but I ended up becoming very fond of much of the music. Now I stream 98.9 WEMP out of Wisconsin, which plays a lot of the Bonneville library.
I primarily used Beautiful Music radio (specifically 97.1 WJOI in Detroit, a Bonneville affiliate) to relax with at night, but I ended up becoming very fond of much of the music. Now I stream 98.9 WEMP out of Wisconsin, which plays a lot of the Bonneville library.
A friend of mine recently posted a picture of the Cleveland radio guide either from the TV Guide or the newspaper from the mid-to-late 1970's on Facebook. I think it was around 1979, but don't hold me to that. Looked to me like most of the FM stations there were some form of easy listening or standards.
Due to aging demographics, stations moved away from beautiful music in droves around 1990. A few operators thought people were bailing on the format a little early, but they didn't last long. Granted, a lot of those stations were AM's and rimshot signals (including a handful of former AM simulcasts of FM beautiful music stations that went soft AC, like KEZK 590 in St. Louis and WEAZ 560 in Philadelphia), which meant they were already at a big disadvantage. Seems like WKY 930 in Oklahoma City aired beautiful music for about four years after KKNG 92.5 dropped it (and outlasted KKNG altogether), but, despite relatively solid numbers, it struggled to gain traction with advertisers.
Smooth jazz seemed to replace beautiful music with the younger crowd, but, like beautiful music, it only lasted about 20 years in total. The audience aged out of the money demos, and the format wasn't self-sustaining any longer.
One of Cleveland's first stand alone FMs, WNOB 107.9, debuted with a live home grown BM format in 1959 with DJs/Board Ops playing cuts from a wall full of easy listening instrumental LPs, one after another, 24/7. When the FCC mandated separate programming on AM/FM's, WERE 98.5, WHK 100.7 along with WDOK had taped automated BM, as did WBEA 107.3 and WAEZ 97.5. When WNCR 99.5 dropped AOR in 1970, it became WKSW with the syndicated Schulke format, also used by WKBN 98.9 and WREO 97.1. It was very successful.
The taped format was automated with a rube goldberg mechanical Schafer automation system consisting of at least 4 reel playback decks and several broadcast cart vertical "carousels" that rotated to slide a cart into a playback slot to air when the "brain" called for it. The first "brains" were programmed by setting little pins to determine what machine played next. The system required constant human attention, to set it up every day and to change the tapes and keep it working. It was a real pain! You people today with your station in a PC have no idea what your ancestors went through to get you there!
The taped format was automated with a rube goldberg mechanical Schafer automation system consisting of at least 4 reel playback decks and several broadcast cart vertical "carousels" that rotated to slide a cart into a playback slot to air when the "brain" called for it. The first "brains" were programmed by setting little pins to determine what machine played next. The system required constant human attention, to set it up every day and to change the tapes and keep it working. It was a real pain! You people today with your station in a PC have no idea what your ancestors went through to get you there!
IIRC in the late 60's and early 1970's WLAC FM, WSM FM, and the old WFMG (Gallatin TN) were close to beautiful music although there were some MOR songs that sometimes were played. Would an occasional vocal like Sinatra, Martin, Tony Bennett and the Ray Conniff singers "disqualify" a station from being a BM? If so than drop WLAC FM
WQAL stayed with the Beautiful Music format after WDOK flipped in 1987.
What was Easy 104 would last until 1990, when it became a Soft AC station.
It seemed that at one point, a lot of the FMs in Cleveland was playing Beautiful Music.
What was Easy 104 would last until 1990, when it became a Soft AC station.
It seemed that at one point, a lot of the FMs in Cleveland was playing Beautiful Music.
If I remember correctly, WQAL was owned by ML Media (and the ML stood for "Merrill Lynch"). It owned a handful of stations in the late 80's, most of which were B/EZ, and started selling them off around 1990. Seems like ML Media also owned KBEZ 92.9 Tulsa, WXTZ 103.3 Indianapolis, and KRVR 106.5 Davenport, IA. It might've had a few more B/EZ stations, but those are the main ones I remember in addition to WQAL. It also owned KHAK 98.1 in Cedar Rapids, which I seem to remember ran a "continuous country" format, before selling it to Stoner a few years before it sold the B/EZ stations. A year or two later, Stoner later worked out a somewhat complicated for the time deal to sell/swap KHAK to its general manager, Mary Quass.
"Continuous Country" was essentially a softer-focused country format with less emphasis on twang and a beautiful music presentation. Seems like it was based around the urban cowboy craze. A handful of beautiful music stations that bailed on the format in the late 70's/early 80's went continuous country and had a great deal of success with it.
True.
I worked with a Harris automation system with the carrousels. As long as the traffic person didn't try to play 2 carts from the same carrousel in a row it worked OK.
When we had carts rewonded I always specified 35 or 65 sec lengths so if the carrousel had to go all the way around it would do so in about 24 seconds.
The PC systems did away with carts, record cueing, turntables, reel to reel and CD machines. I doubt the twenty and thirty something folks would like "old school" radio
I recall that the Beautiful Music on 99.5 FM didn't last that all that long. Unless my memory is faulty, WKSW came sometime after 99.5 FM dropped the AOR/Progressive Rock of WNCR.
I have a distinct memory of, in the mid to late 1960s, a next door neighbor (two houses away) talking to my mother and mentioning that she liked "FM music" best. It seemed to me that Beautiful Music was the only thing, or the only worthy thing, to hear on FM radio.
At the time, FM usage wasn't very high. Beautiful music was easy because it could be automated, and the AM rock jock could periodically change the reels or rotate the carts.
FM didn't even become standard in vehicles until either the 1982 or '83 model year.
The "standard" beautiful music format was a quarter hour set with one vocal as cut #2 or #3 in the middle. The vocals tended to be more Roger Whittaker and Ray Conniff than old crooners, though.
The "Beautiful Music" name came into broad use around 1969 or 1970. Before that, going back well into the late 60's, there were a variety of terms used. IIRC, McLendon's KABL in San Francisco debuted around 1959 and referred to "good music" as their positioner.
Before syndicators like Shulke and Bonneville standardized the format in the 1968-1972 period, there were some stations that played all instrumentals and some that added vocals. There were differences in whether the instrumentals were adaptations of "standards" or covers of more recent pop songs such as the covers of Beatles songs and the like.
FM programming was rather diverse at that time, at least here in NE Ohio. In addition to "beautiful music", there were 2 nationality stations - WZAK and WXEN. Also, WCUY 92.3 was jazz, WCLV was classical and WCRF was religious. Attached is FM radio guide for Cleveland which I believe is from 1970. Kind of funny that so many stations are listed as "popular music".
Attachments
But in many cases the FM had higher ratings than the AM. Cecil Heftel's 13-Q in Pittsburgh was often beaten by the FM which had the Shulke service.
In the larger markets, Shulke required live announcers to say things like "All day (pause, pause) All Night (pause) all nice! The Bay Eff Emm One Oh Six point Seven".
But by 1975, half of all music listening was to FM, and by 1977 half of all listening was to FM. In that period, only about a third of all total radio listening was in cars, whether AM or FM.
I bought a "well equipped" Mustang in 1973 and it had FM. The Buick my company gave me in 1976 had standard FM, as did the Fiat I bought my wife that same year.
The figure of 1/3 of listening being in cars remained fairly constant until recently. It certainly wasn't the majority of listening, but it was significant. Your options are still limited when 1/3 of listening can never be to you. Growing up, we had a home stereo with FM, but we didn't have a car that came with FM until 1986.
I'll grant you my dad was always somewhere between frugal and outright cheap. He supported our family and my mother's, which was dirt poor. So, we always lived well below his means. Other than air conditioning, which was absolutely essential in the summer months in Texas and Oklahoma, he would not pay for any extra options, period. If we'd lived in St. Louis instead of Tulsa or Dallas, he wouldn't have sprung for A/C either! We didn't have a car with power windows until I was in college, and, even then, it was because that car's lowest priced model included power windows. Prior to 1986, we had a 1978 and 1981 model cars that had only AM. I inherited the 1981 when I turned 16. Dad broke down and put an FM converter in it when we bought the 1986 Chrysler (which we bought in Spring '86 when the dealerships were blowing out '86 models to make room for the 87's), but it didn't work well. It was FM that sounded like AM: in glorious mono and with pops and cracks all over the place. The only difference was that the station didn't fade when you went under a bridge. I remember my high school girlfriend exclaiming, "Hit a railroad track, and it changes stations!"
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