Totally ridiculous. Song that both B 101 and TDY likely play. Same with Adele, Same with Rihanna. Not on a Classic Hits station in 2025. Maybe in 2030 or 2035
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Big 98.1
- Thread starter AM/FMRAINMAN
- Start date
They play songs that 98.1 don’t play.
As Miguelito stated, there are no rules. Each station decides what their target is and decides if they want to aim a little older or a bit younger than the "national average" for a format. A great deal may have to do, also, with whether a market is highly ethnic or whether it has lots of transplants from other parts of the country.
Again, depends on the target listener the station has decided on, often dependent on what the competition is for different age ranges.
That is a station decision. You can balance the music to lean older or younger, more male or more female, more or less ethnic. It is the choice and decision of each station.
Yeah, tell that to iHeart with CHR, Hot AC and AC, all leaning very female, in LA. Those three stations are among the highest billing in the whole country.
If the market is highly ethnic, that is not a true statement.
I disagree. Much of the appeal of Classic Hits is, we will know all the songs the station is playing. We don't have to adapt to something we're unfamiliar with. If the song is too new, it isn't classic hits.
Some folks still debate, what if a classic artist comes out with a new release? Or a newer artist releases a song that sounds like a throw-back to an earlier era? Do you play that? The answer is no.
I love orange juice. But when I turn on the kitchen sink, I don't want orange juice coming out of the faucet when I'm expecting water. Add to that the fact that WOGL coexists with WBEB. If we want a mix of old and new, that's where we will go to find it. Audacy already owns a station doing that.
It's not like Classic Hits is a new concept and we have to test it to see its limits and what the audience expects. Its been around for years playing songs from several decades ago. The audience expects reliability.
The “we” is changing. The station is phasing in songs for the next “we.”
Everyone needs to get away from the whole year/decade thing. SiriusXM divides its oldies/classic hits channels by decade, which means problems for artists whose hit-making years bridged two decades. Two groups I like to bring up as illustrations of how stupid this is are the Grass Roots and Three Dog Night. There's no reason for "One" and "Joy to the World" to be on different channels, nor does separating "Midnight Confessions" and "Sooner or Later" make any sense.
I think there's nothing wrong with a classic hits station in 2025 playing Adele's or the Lumineers' early-2010s hits. Where stations that are still playing pre-hip-hop and pre-boy-band music now need to tread carefully is adding hip-hop and boy bands, although some hip-hop could work in a city like Philadelphia.
I think there's nothing wrong with a classic hits station in 2025 playing Adele's or the Lumineers' early-2010s hits. Where stations that are still playing pre-hip-hop and pre-boy-band music now need to tread carefully is adding hip-hop and boy bands, although some hip-hop could work in a city like Philadelphia.
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If you don’t like it, just listen to something else.
WOGL added “Jumpin’ Jumpin’” by Destiny’s Child in the recent revamp.
As someone who spent most of their life in Latin America where decades are not such a culturally defining quality, I would allow considerable overlap between decades channels on Sirius. On the "60s Channel" if there are a few 1958 and 1959 songs that "fit" or some 1970 and 1971 songs that do the same, I would pay a lot of attention to what you say: artists that overlap the decades.
I don't think that there are any listeners that carry around a Whitburn to check if every "60's Channel" song was really from that decade. And fewer who care, particularly if the music were well researched.
For some reason, both companies started out with the idea that they could "beat" terrestrial radio by having deeper playlists. I found that all that we got was a lot of pseudo-stiffs and secondary cuts. It still seems that there is a prevailing attitude at Sirius/XM that they have to play deeper. I'd rather have the real hits played a bit more often, maybe with some additions from a year or two prior to and after the decade or style in question, than having to hear cuts I remember as "we heard that song and decided not to play it" when those tunes were currents!
That's nothing. They also played this today:
| 7:45 PM | EVANESCENCE | Bring Me To Life | 2003 | G |
In between Prince and Michael Jackson. Did the earth fall off it's axis? And then Paula Abdul Straight Up.
Let me add one more fact that hasn't been mentioned: The PD of WOGL is also the PD of WBEB. How about them apples?
So they know what they're doing. They know where one station ends and the other one begins. This is all coordinated. It's not an accident.
Classic Hits stations should not be playing very much from the 2000s.....yet. I truly believe you are not meeting listener expectations...P1 Classic Hits listeners when you are playing music less than 25 years old. Let's watch the ratings over the next several months and see.
They really aren't. If you look at their complete playlist, there may be 10 songs total that each get played once or twice.
Why not? Classic Hits stations are targeted to listeners 35-64. A 35 year old graduated high school in 2007.
What a lot of folks don't factor in is that a song must "fit" the format it is played in. In research, we often find songs that are well liked, but which just don't fit the format. One thing is "variety" and another is the equivalent of selling fishing rods in a perfume store.
Stations that have cluster / factor analysis done on test results can see elements of polarization if they know how to analyze data. A good PD is conscious of fit.
There can be all kinds of reasons why a song actually belongs even if it does not fit the "rulebook". Things like being in a video game, or as theme of a TV show, or even used by a presidential candidate in a campaign can make a song that is too old, too new or too different actually belong on the playlist.
Sure, but you also have to move with the times. It has been 18 years since WOGL flipped to Classic Hits. Back then, the music library was centered around 1974 or 1975, with 10-12 years on either side of that center. In a nutshell, nothing before the Beatles and nothing after Michael Jackson.
If you simply advance that by 18 years, WOGL would be playing songs from about 1982 to 2005 with about half the songs newer than 1993.
So let's compare that idea to reality:
Between 10:00p ET and 11:20p this evening, WOGL played 2 songs newer than 1993. The exact years were:
2000; Dr. Dre feat. Eminem - Forgot about Dre
1995: Montell Jordan - This is How We Do It
There were 14 other songs: 2 from the early 90s, 3 from the late 70s and 9 from the 80s.
Earlier in this thread, Gregg, you said classic hits stations "play songs that are 25-35 years old". Even with this playlist update, WOGL remains quite a bit older than that. The median song in my sampling was 39 years old.
Age is, of course, not the most important factor in whether songs get played on the radio. But it is a factor, and it is easy to look up.
They might know, but how would you (or anyone) describe it? Broadly speaking, IMO WBEB probably wouldn't play Kendrick Lamar, you probably won't hear Stevie Nicks on WTDY, and WOGL is still probably your best bet to hear the Rolling Stones. But what's the breakdown here, musically and/or demographically? The "oldies" format musically became incredibly familiar by the time it was on its way out, and while "classic hits" is essentially the modern version of the format, Evanescence and Destiny's Child feel like two sides of two totally different coins. While I believe the blend of genres is probably similar to how it was in, say, 1999, growing up with these songs and artists fragmented into their genres makes me feel like WOGL is an iPod on shuffle. I'm not saying they're wrong or that it shouldn't be, I'm just trying to understand that programming mindset
They already do. The '50s channel includes Doo-Wop hits from the early '60s. The '70s channel includes some music from 1969 like "Sweet Caroline". And the '80s channel includes some New Wave music from the late '70s like "Video Killed the Radio Star", "Train in Vain", and "Heart of Glass", as well as some early '90s music like "King of Wishful Thinking" and "I Can't Dance".
In only tiny amounts
Which also charted in 1970. In fact, a most of the Sirus/XM songs that have possible ties to an earlier or later decade were "crossover" songs that got airplay and, often, chart activity across two years.
Once again I feel the need to remind what the true purpose of all commercial radio formats are: to sell advertising to certain demographics.
WOGL is targeting adults 35-64 of certain economic demos. Anything it does is to perform in a cluster that also includes WBEB going for a more female focused 25-54 audience, WTDY-FM skewing women 18-44, WPHT 45+ male, and WIP 25-54 men. The music chosen is simply done so because of that purpose.
Typically the way a user describes something is "I like this," or "I like that." When people make music lists, they're typically not genre exclusive, even when we talk about a format as specific as country. Because a country listener will know Sweet Home Alabama, and that was never a country song. I predicted this ten years ago. I said then that there will be a time when genres and format distinctions would disappear, because of the way people were using music. We're into that time now. It will get even less distinct as we move along and classic hits moves more into the 90s and 2000s. A lot of it was caused by the way the music industry changed in the late 80s.
This isn't unique to Philadelphia. I'm seeing the same comments right now on the Cleveland board. Someone there was shocked to hear hiphop on their local Adult Hits station. I've seen comments similar to these about KRTH or WCBS. So genres are starting to merge and eras are overlapping. What makes each station unique is its presentation, its personalities, its imaging, and perhaps the percentage of music from an era. All aimed to deliver specific demographics.