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Classic MOR

C

Chuck

I just received a report from BIA Kelsey, who bill themselves as "Local Media and Advertising Experts." In the report, they listed a mind-boggling variety of formats which appears to be far more descriptive than the usual Arbitron pigeon-holes.

I'd always wondered what to call my station's format. It is almost Adult Standards, but at some parts of the day, it is almost Oldies. I usually tell people that it is a Hybrid Oldies/Standards format. BIA Kelsey has one that I think fits. They call it "Classic MOR." I kind of like that. Maybe that would be a better term for many stations. At least, it doesn't lead you to think that the only listeners are on life support.
 
Good question.

Oldies stations are typically restricted to songs played by Top 40 stations back in the day.

There was a fair amount of cross-over between MOR and Top 40 playlists in the 50s and 60s. Typically, Top 40 stations veered toward chicken rock during the day (targeting an adult audience) and more toward hard rock in the evening (targeting teens).

For the most part, Oldies stations today play only songs NOT played on MOR stations (i.e., hard rock) back then.

The preferred term is "adult standards" (maybe preferred euphemism). Some have tried to make standards cool by calling it something like martini music or lounge music (going for a rat pack association). Also original hits, Red, great American songbook and even "music of your life" as a generic label.

None of these really seem to capture the format. I'm not sure "MOR" means anything to listeners or to advertisers not of a certain age. Generally, I'd say format names used in the biz should not be used in on-air branding and major advertisers only care about numbers and demos of listeners (not what you play). Local advertisers often buy what they like (on the theory that everybody else likes it and listens, too), so the trick with them is to get them to sample the sound.

A lot of on-air promotion is devoted to telling listeners how good you are or what you play. It's a waste. They've listened; they already know. In diary markets just keep telling them what they should be writing down.
 
I agree. "MOR" was kind of an inside baseball term describing a format that blended singles and album cuts by mainstream adult artists. The term (and the format) was pretty well dead by the mid 70s, with only a handful of stations hanging in past that.
 
I worked in radio for about of third of my working years. The first half of the third (the math is getting deep here!) was on-the-air. Yes, I paid attention to industry terms to describe music formats. The second half of my broadcasting years were in sales and management and working some formats where "industry terms to describe music formats" was not center stage.

So, as a former "insider" I would pay more attention to reports from within the industry than most "civilians". I couldn't sit down and take a test on what records, what songs belong to what genre if my life depended on it! Yes, there are some "groupies" who never worked in the industry that eat, sleep, live and breath music-genre terms, but the vast majority of potential radio listeners would do much worse on a test of programming sub-sets than I would do.

On air chatter and promotions trying to explain (in industry terms) how your music is different than the music of the guy down the street at the other station is probably pretty useless.


Chuck is working what I think of as "non-metro" markets. He can play a train-wreck mix of music (well, that is what hip, professional self-anointed radio experts would call it!) and he can call the train-wreck mix anything he wants to call it. Who is going to sanction him for mis-labeling? NASCAR? The writers of golf rules? The Farm Bureau? The Governor's council on Physical Fitness?

Just make the max taste good, Chuck.
 
Not thinking about "sanctions from mis-labeling", but effective communication with audience and advertisers. Even at its peak, most listeners called MOR "Easy Listening" until MOR pretty much ceased to exist and then they started calling Beautiful Music "Easy Listening".

MOR meant something to insiders 40 years ago. There's probably a term that will serve his purposes better today.
 
Listeners know what they like and what they don't like.
What they like is "good" and what they don't like is "!@#$."

I worked for a station that local talk weekdays. The rest of the time the station had automated music with a playlist put together by the station music director. She had cuts from popular (top 40), country and standards (MOR, nostalgia) charts from the 50s through the 70s - basically the era of AM music radio. And everything she picked fit in with everything else. No matter what people listened to back in the day, they'd hear recordings they remember and they'd hear other stuff they could listen to (even like). She never tried to give it a name. Promotion was calls, frequency and slogan (which had nothing to do with the music).
 
FredLeonard said:
The preferred term is "adult standards" (maybe preferred euphemism). Some have tried to make standards cool by calling it something like martini music or lounge music (going for a rat pack association). Also original hits, Red, great American songbook and even "music of your life" as a generic label.

None of these really seem to capture the format. I'm not sure "MOR" means anything to listeners or to advertisers not of a certain age. Generally, I'd say format names used in the biz should not be used in on-air branding and major advertisers only care about numbers and demos of listeners (not what you play). Local advertisers often buy what they like (on the theory that everybody else likes it and listens, too), so the trick with them is to get them to sample the sound.
Click to expand...

I'm not sure "Adult Standards" should be the preferred term, even though a lot of people certainly use it. Somehow it has the stench of a poorly maintained nursing home attached to it. That's probably because so many of these stations are pretty bad, even if you happen to have an affinity for the music.

I certainly agree that none of the common names really capture the format. Since I've wandered off the "path well traveled" by doing a hybrid that seems to resonate with the people in my area, figuring out what to call it gets even more confusing. It may be less of an issue for me, but that wasn't always the case. When first launched, I'd ask people if they listened, and they usually replied "Oh, what do you play?" Now it is more common to have them say "Oh, I listen to that," but there are still plenty of people who never heard of it.

Life is easier when people know who you are and sponsors say their ads actually worked. But it didn't start out that way. Anybody wanting to adopt this format (whatever you want to call it) needs to be in it for the long haul. It is not an overnight success. I think they would find it helpful to find some way to describe it to potential listeners and sponsors. Not everybody buys strictly on numbers, especially when you are talking to other local small businesses.

Goat is correct, my station is in an under 150 market that consists of two smaller than 100,000 cities and several small towns. There are also a lot of cows and trees. The format is probably easier to pull off here because the cost of entry wasn't that great. If I'd paid $10,000,000 for the station in a metro market, I'd be out of my mind to do this.

I recently added a second station, a small town AM that I was able to pair off with a couple of FM translators. It launched as a 60's, 70's and 80" Classic Hit's station. The response has been MUCH quicker to materialize than the original Standards station. There is probably a reality lesson there....
 
Chuck, it sounds like you're playing what NBC's Monitor would play in the late 1960s and 1970s. Music you could hum along to. Hey, a slogan for you!
 
Upon first seeing that description, I thought to myself, "Nah, it wouldn't work," basically for the same reasons cited by previous posters. MOR is a term whose time has long since passed. For one thing, the music on both sides of that bridge forming the middle ground is gone, particularly on the softer, easier side.

But the more I think about it, I actually think it's a rather good term. I hear the songs played on Chuck's station and "Classic MOR" describes them perfectly. The only thing meaningful to the listener would be the "classic" part. Everybody knows what that means. MOR means nothing to listeners, but listeners never refer to a radio station as "Adult Standards" or "AC" either. Those are industry terms—and there've been plenty of discussions about the fallacy of using those terms.

The MOR part is for the industry insiders. Those of a certain age know exactly what MOR is. Younger ones who don't might be intrigued by the novelty of something different.
 
My perception of Classic MOR is based on my first radio deejay job at a true MOR station in the late 1960's, which I truly enjoyed -- Mostly album cuts from the following:

Peggy Lee
Nat King Cole
Nancy Wilson
Sinatra
Vic Damone
George Shearing
Astrud Gilberto, Tom Jobim, Sergio Mendes and other Bossa Nova artists
Ella Fitzgerald
Sarah Vaughn
Andy Williams
Dave Brubeck
Julie London
Tony Bennett
etc etc -- Very Classy American Songbook kind of music.

Wish I could find a station like that today without the Soft AC, Manilow, Carpenters, etc, etc.
 
everydayguy said:
My perception of Classic MOR is based on my first radio deejay job at a true MOR station in the late 1960's, which I truly enjoyed -- Mostly album cuts from the following:

Peggy Lee
Nat King Cole
Nancy Wilson
Sinatra
Vic Damone
George Shearing
Astrud Gilberto, Tom Jobim, Sergio Mendes and other Bossa Nova artists
Ella Fitzgerald
Sarah Vaughn
Andy Williams
Dave Brubeck
Julie London
Tony Bennett
etc etc -- Very Classy American Songbook kind of music.

Wish I could find a station like that today without the Soft AC, Manilow, Carpenters, etc, etc.
Click to expand...

If you can read this and post here you have a computer, tablet or smartphone.
If you have a computer, tablet or smartphone you can find dozens (maybe hundreds) of stations like that today.
You can even go to Pandora or Last.FM and create your own playlist.
 
everydayguy said:
My perception of Classic MOR is based on my first radio deejay job at a true MOR station in the late 1960's, which I truly enjoyed -- Mostly album cuts from the following:

Peggy Lee
Nat King Cole
Nancy Wilson
Sinatra
Vic Damone
George Shearing
Astrud Gilberto, Tom Jobim, Sergio Mendes and other Bossa Nova artists
Ella Fitzgerald
Sarah Vaughn
Andy Williams
Dave Brubeck
Julie London
Tony Bennett
etc etc -- Very Classy American Songbook kind of music.

Wish I could find a station like that today without the Soft AC, Manilow, Carpenters, etc, etc.
Click to expand...

That is pretty much what we play at night. In the daytime, we add a lot of 50's oldies and even some newer songs because people seem to like it that way. www.qx-fm.com
 
Radio 25 said:
Chuck I like what you are programming. I like website show show the DJ's with a Bio. Are your jocks all local?
Click to expand...

No, our only jock is named "Dell." He is a computer. It's automated, with no apologies. With the exceptions of Jeff Laurence, who is our imaging guy, And Dr. Dr. Thayer, our weather guy, the rest of the voices are local. By doing it this way, our small staff can wear many hats, which is something we need to do. We actually run two stations out of here. The other, KDOK, is a Classic Hits of the 60's, 70's and 80's station. Sorry, it doesn't stream
 
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