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Do kids really like oldies?

kevtronics said:
This is the kind of crap that got into the Top 20 in the late '80s, and which you've absolutely never heard played again since then:

<-- "Pop Goes The World" - Men Without Hats
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I have news for you. That song still gets the occasional play on Alternative stations which still have 80's titles in their libraries. I even play it on Flashback Weekend from time to time (the last such spin was only a couple of weeks ago, in fact).

I am pointing this out because some songs which you would properly deride in terms of consideration for Classic Hits may still be viable "oh wow" accents in other formats. Context is everything.

I would like to put in my claim against your apparent guarantee, please.
 
kevtronics said:
I think dead air gets played more often than it.
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Ah, but you said "you've absolutely never heard played again" which I have demonstrated to be an erroneous presumption on your part. You didn't compare it to anything -- much less dead air -- when you said that in post #279.
 
vchimpanzee said:
Is it true that album rock or alternative stations played four minutes of silence? Or was the station in each case just having problems?
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Ladies and gentlemen, the unanswerable question.

Chimp, I'm sure somewhere, some time some album station went to dead air for four minutes (jock passed out, jock "occupied" in either the restroom or the DJ lounge), or a technical issue. Was it part of the format? No.

It also happened at other stations---including, in the 80s, at KFRC, San Francisco, where the legendary Bobby Ocean, working weekends and fill-ins, pulled an overnight shift and fell asleep while on the air (this was after the stations dumped the board engineers and the jocks were in control). It triggered silence alarms, which alerted transmitter engineers, who couldn't get anyone to answer at the station. By the time they could get to the station, KFRC had been dead air for about 30 minutes.

Bobby was let go, but the upside is that he credits that experience with his sobriety, and KFRC actually re-hired him at least three times after.
 
michael hagerty said:
Ladies and gentlemen, the unanswerable question.

Chimp, I'm sure somewhere, some time some album station went to dead air for four minutes (jock passed out, jock "occupied" in either the restroom or the DJ lounge), or a technical issue. Was it part of the format? No.

It also happened at other stations---including, in the 80s, at KFRC, San Francisco, where the legendary Bobby Ocean, working weekends and fill-ins, pulled an overnight shift and fell asleep while on the air (this was after the stations dumped the board engineers and the jocks were in control). It triggered silence alarms, which alerted transmitter engineers, who couldn't get anyone to answer at the station. By the time they could get to the station, KFRC had been dead air for about 30 minutes.

Bobby was let go, but the upside is that he credits that experience with his sobriety, and KFRC actually re-hired him at least three times after.
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en.wikipedia.org

4′33″ - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org

This may be what I was thinking of, but apparently it wasn't on a rock album.
 
vchimpanzee said:
en.wikipedia.org

4′33″ - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org

This may be what I was thinking of, but apparently it wasn't on a rock album.
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Ah, I think that's kind of Avant-garde for most rock and classic hits stations (or indeed, any station on any band).

It's pretty much a live-event kind of thing that can't really be recorded (filmed, maybe?), because there's nothing being played that could be recorded (my understanding of 4'33" is that the orchestra members go on stage with their instruments and pose as if they're ready to play something, but for four minutes and thirty three seconds, they play nothing; what makes the piece isn't what the orchestra does or doesn't play, but rather the sounds of the impatient audience quietly fidgeting and mumbling amongst themselves; I suppose you could record that, but it probably would probably be almost indistinguishable from dead air because it would be mostly buried in the noise).

So, not very radio friendly. I doubt you'll hear it anywhere 😆

c
 
kevtronics said:
Not the entire decade. Really just the last few years of it. And people already knew it at the time, because radio stations and record companies started re-releasing music from the early '80s (or even older) to make up for the lack of quality new music.
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I always attributed that wave of late '80s reissues due to record companies servicing up to half a dozen singles from the same albums, so those albums were a YEAR old by then! Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, Def Leppard, INXS (even though I liked them!), and a few others that don't come to mind right now. Of course, this had already happened earlier in the decade, but never with so many albums at the same time. And I would further point out that the reason why some of these didn't really become hits that first time is that many of these had their earlier runs in the '82-'83-'84 time frame, when they simply got CRUSHED by the Michael Jackson Thriller juggernaut, which had been so big at the time. (Although I would wager that a few of these, like "What About Me" SHOULDN'T have been reissued, as they had had a better run their FIRST time!)
 
kevtronics said:
Same thing with Peter Gabriel's "In Your Eyes". #26 in 1986, then #41 in 1989.
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To be expected. If the labels were re-releasing non-rhythmic, non-grunge material from the early and mid-'80s at a time when the music and many CHR stations (and their listeners) were leaning rhythmic or grunge, songs issued before the sea change in CHR would always have trouble charting as well as they had the first time around. If they'd waited until the mid-'90s to trot out "In Your Eyes" for another shot at radio, it would have been shunned by CHR stations completely. Maybe some AC success, but those stations were probably playing it already as gold.
 
kevtronics said:
Same thing with Peter Gabriel's "In Your Eyes". #26 in 1986, then #41 in 1989.
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Which was reissued not to fill a gap in quality music at the moment, but because it was used twice---including a key scene---in the hit movie "Say Anything". The label saw an opportunity.

Trouble is that by 1989, it was really hard to own just a single song (nobody really liked cassette singles, which were on their way out, and nobody ever achieved a realistic pricing scale for the CD single). They might have moved a few more copies of "So" (the album).

Even a year later with The Righteous Brothers "Unchained Melody" (an incredibly faithful re-recording) because of the film "Ghost", they took a #1 record from 1965 and got it to #19.
 


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