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Beautiful Music Radio

Radio Bob said:
People in our town loved it and a whole bunch of businesses jumped on but seven eight months later they started complaining that even though everybody like the music they didn't get results for their advertising so they cancelled saying " I guess radio just doesn't work".
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You just summed up the downside of the format. It was so background, the audience didn't listen to the commercials. In fact, most syndicators had a requirement that commercials be down about 6dB from the music level. Even the highest-rated stations had trouble keeping advertisers, because as far as the listeners were concerned, their spots didn't even exist.
 
K.M. Richards said:
You just summed up the downside of the format. It was so background, the audience didn't listen to the commercials. In fact, most syndicators had a requirement that commercials be down about 6dB from the music level. Even the highest-rated stations had trouble keeping advertisers, because as far as the listeners were concerned, their spots didn't even exist.
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Pretty sure you're right. I listened to WDBN a lot and I cannot for the life of me remember a single advertiser on that station. Mostly listened to it on Sunday evenings just to wait for it to sign off at midnight for "transmtter maintenance" so I could pick up an oldies station out of Michigan. Since oldies weren't really a "thing" yet it was awesome hearing those 50/60s tunes pumping out of the ether, which to me was the real "beautiful music". [Actual frequency was 94.7 but WDBN was strong enough to bleed over and kill it.]

And from Wikipedia:
In 1972, WHFI shifted to a syndicated oldies format provided by Draper-Blore called "Olde Golde." The programming was automated with no DJs. It featured hits of the 1950s and 1960s, similar to Drake-Chenault's "Solid Gold" format except without the softer current hits that the Solid Gold format played.

In July 1973, Greater Media bought the station. The "Olde Golde" format evolved the following year into all-oldies. The call letters were changed to WHNE, "Honey Radio." Sister station 560 WQTE changed its call sign to WHND and began shadowcasting the format in 1974. WQTE continued as "Honey Radio" until 1994, by which time 94.7 FM had gone through several changes. Honey Radio was originally automated using Drake-Chenault's "Classic Gold" format, but transitioned to live personalities (on AM 560 only) around 1980.
 
Radio Bob said:
People in our town loved it and a whole bunch of businesses jumped on. But seven or eight months later they started complaining that even though everybody like the music they didn't get results for their advertising. So they cancelled saying " I guess radio just doesn't work". At that point I had learned my lesson and switched to straight Top Forty.
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Yes, I've heard that too. I guess that's true for any background format.

But background formats are easier and cheaper to run. Many Beautiful Music stations were automated around the clock. Some only had a morning host who also read a few news headlines and weather briefs. Then he switched on the automation at 10 a.m.

You might have fewer people paying attention to the commercials than on a Top 40 or Rock station. But some Beautiful Music fans will remember the spots. If they're listening most hours of their work week, the spots will sink in. And your costs will be so much lower than a station with upbeat, foreground DJs and contests.

I wonder if it was the advertisers' own tastes that weren't fulfilled by mostly instrumentals. If the ratings were good,
 
Gregg. said:
Yes, I've heard that too. I guess that's true for any background format.

But background formats are easier and cheaper to run. Many Beautiful Music stations were automated around the clock. Some only had a morning host who also read a few news headlines and weather briefs. Then he switched on the automation at 10 a.m.

You might have fewer people paying attention to the commercials than on a Top 40 or Rock station. But some Beautiful Music fans will remember the spots. If they're listening most hours of their work week, the spots will sink in. And your costs will be so much lower than a station with upbeat, foreground DJs and contests.

I wonder if it was the advertisers' own tastes that weren't fulfilled by mostly instrumentals. If the ratings were good,
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I think in the end the advertisers wanted a response from their advertising dollars but at the same time believed that they would get it because they assumed everyone loved beautiful music. Of course it's comforting to think your favorite beliefs are held by everybody else but deep inside we know that isn't true. Rather than think about how their thoughts about their favorite music might be wrong they found it more soothing to just say that radio didn't work. When the top forty format became a source of much talk in town they changed their tune because they wanted to make money and needed advertising on the top forty station to do that.
 
K.M. Richards said:
You just summed up the downside of the format. It was so background, the audience didn't listen to the commercials. In fact, most syndicators had a requirement that commercials be down about 6dB from the music level. Even the highest-rated stations had trouble keeping advertisers, because as far as the listeners were concerned, their spots didn't even exist.
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I am surprised that a previous poster mentioned that WDBN tried to lure them into doing sales. From my fuzzy memory, most of the breaks at :15, :30 and :45 consisted of back-announcing the last set of songs, a brief time and weather check, one or "maybe" two :60 spots, then a liner going into the next musical set -- all with 2-4 seconds of 'dead air' between elements. Top of the hour breaks usually included a news headline and extended weather segment which was usually "sponsored" by one of their advertisers.

I really don't see how they would need many salespeople to fill those spots on a decent-rated radio station, compared to all the spotloads that stations crank out now with a fraction of the ratings/audience.

There were a few long-time WDBN sponsors I remember: Old Phoenix National Bank, Maibaugh's Furniture in Sterling (south of Seville), The Westfield (Insurance) Company, and Walker Oldsmobile/GMC, which was just around the corner from WDBN's studio located on Gateway Drive.
 
Most beautiful music stations were automated with the on duty announcer providing about 90 seconds of news and weather at :58 and perhaps the weather at :30. Liners, generally the voice of the station, bookended all breaks. Breaks were: 2 commercials at :15, 2 at :30 with weather; 2 at :45 and 1 at :58. The beautiful music station that back announced was a very rare one. I know in Dallas/Fort Worth, we had about half a dozen and none of them back announced.

Competitively speaking, WBAP FM 96.3 then, started each hour with 30 minutes of music with only a liner at :15 to plug that again. I'm not sure it did much more them.

KFWD 102.1 then was beautiful music with jingles. They had only a few commercials at the time but it was a very good sounding station that opted to be the first quad station in the Metroplex. If my memory is correct, the DJs got to ID the station and give the time or temperature at breaks.

When I first got in radio there was a lush beautiful music station (zero vocals and some lite classical mixed in) in a county of about 40,000-45,000. They did weather on the hour. The commercial load was not to exceed 1 commercial per quarter hour. They buried lots of news and PSAs between Midnight at 6am (I think 10 minutes of news and 8 PSAs). Surprisingly, they remained in the format until the late 1980s or maybe 1990 and really didn't modernize. I thought they might have been homebrew music library versus subscribing to the various reel to reel libraries available from all those syndicators. After the minimum percentages stopped in 1981, they had a local newscast 4 times a day. In the 1990s they were country.
 
Things tended to vary, station to station, market to market. IIRC, in Cincinnati, WCKY was basically a beautiful music station through most of the 1970s, but did backsells with some personality from the air talent. Post top 40 WCFL Chicago had a TM produced jingle package. I'd guess CFL used TM's music. Perhaps the oddest was Don Burden's WIFE-FM Indianapolis. Waiting on final word from the FCC on the Burden stations having to go dark, WIFE-FM for a brief time would come out of NBC news each hour with a hit record straight from their AM's top 40 playlist. Then back to the beautiful music for the remainder of the hour.
 
One of the Cleveland beautiful music stations used the slogan "All day, all night, all nice". I can't remember which one. Was it WQAL?
 
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skiwest said:
One of the Cleveland beautiful music stations used the slogan "All day, all night, all nice". I can't remember which one. Was it WQAL?
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That, and variations on same, were fairly common in that format. The BM station I worked for briefly in 1978 used "all day, all night, all beautiful".
 
thenetwork said:
I am surprised that a previous poster mentioned that WDBN tried to lure them into doing sales. From my fuzzy memory, most of the breaks at :15, :30 and :45 consisted of back-announcing the last set of songs, a brief time and weather check, one or "maybe" two :60 spots, then a liner going into the next musical set -- all with 2-4 seconds of 'dead air' between elements. Top of the hour breaks usually included a news headline and extended weather segment which was usually "sponsored" by one of their advertisers.

I really don't see how they would need many salespeople to fill those spots on a decent-rated radio station, compared to all the spotloads that stations crank out now with a fraction of the ratings/audience.

There were a few long-time WDBN sponsors I remember: Old Phoenix National Bank, Maibaugh's Furniture in Sterling (south of Seville), The Westfield (Insurance) Company, and Walker Oldsmobile/GMC, which was just around the corner from WDBN's studio located on Gateway Drive.
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somewhere in my vast stores of meaningless crap I've held on to over the years is the sales info stuff that, whomever it was at WDBN, gave to me. Not going to try and locate it, probably would die of old age before I could anyways. someone would probably find my skeleton face down on a pile of old radio stuff and wonder "What is this thing called 'radio' that he was looking at?" However I do have and know where every joke I've ever written for various morning DJs are located. And I haven't been on Gateway Dr. since that day back in the mid/late 70s.
 
I have to disagree with others who have said that Beautiful Music stations were bad for advertisers. In the NYC area, we had four Beautiful stations for many years. Two always made the Top 10 in the ratings, WRFM 105.1, owned by Bonneville and WPAT 930 AM and 93.1 FM, owned by Park. In the 60s and early 70s, WPAT AM beat the FM. But at that point, the FM overtook the AM. They used the same music tapes but to avoid FCC simulcast prohibitions, they usually didn't play the same songs at the same time, apart from AM and PM drive time.

We also had two lesser-rated BM stations, WTFM 103.5, based in Queens and Long Island, and WVNJ-FM 100.3, based in NJ and the station that later became Z100. There were also times when WPIX 101.9 and WNBC-FM 97.1 tried Easy Listening formats but those were short-lived.

I don't think any of the four long-time stations ever had difficulty keeping customers. Some had regular clients, year after year. My mom was a Beautiful Music fan and I heard quite a few sponsors repeatedly while my mom had the radio on. They must have been getting results.

I believe all four stations had live announcers 24/7, unlike BM stations in most markets. WRFM told you most of the song titles and sometimes the artist. WPAT mainly used their announcers for news and weather updates or to say something cheerful but not usually song titles. Was having live announcers the reason these stations had no problem, as far as I know, selling spots?
 
I do know this.....when WDBN changed formats they kept the overnight guy on [at least I think he was the one kept on]. You could tell he was stressing out and was really flustered and don't think he lasted very long because of all the new changes and music he didn't know a thing about.
 
Yabadabado1 said:
I do know this.....when WDBN changed formats they kept the overnight guy on [at least I think he was the one kept on]. You could tell he was stressing out and was really flustered and don't think he lasted very long because of all the new changes and music he didn't know a thing about.
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Was that when WDBN first became WQMX and moved to W. Market in Fairlawn across from the cemetery? I remember WQMX first being an AC format with an Oldies show at night (with Bob Lewis) before they went country.
 
Gregg. said:
. WPAT mainly used their announcers for news and weather updates or to say something cheerful but not usually song titles. Was having live announcers the reason these stations had no problem, as far as I know, selling spots?
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In the 1980s to around 1993, WPAT was playing a mix of instrumentals and vocals. The jocks would start a song sweep with a vocal and continue it with instrumentals. Vocals had their artist names mentioned as well as title. Instrumentals was just the title of the song.

Listened to it nightly during my teenage years while doing homework.
 
radiofollower said:
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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I stumbled across another one and I thought I would share it.

Similar name but different website.

Beautiful Instrumentals Channel

Playing Beautiful Instrumentals For Home Or Office.
www.beautifulinstrumentalschannel.com www.beautifulinstrumentalschannel.com

Cheers! Bob F. :)
 
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When I lived in Illinois, I could sometimes receive 106.3 WGCY from Gibson City, IL. The station still plays Beautiful Music, along with news and local sports. They used to stream and it’s a shame they no longer do.


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WGCY - Wikipedia

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WGCY Radio 106.3 | Gibson City IL

WGCY Radio 106.3, Gibson City, Illinois. 4,211 likes · 21 talking about this · 75 were here. The home of beautiful music, local news, weather, sports, and much more!
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