Do You Really Care About Radio?

[michael hagerty]

btw, are you listening to WCBS right now? "Stiffs" galore...October 1980 top 25 countdown...

Which proves the point as to how few true hits there really are at an given time. A top 25 countdown with "stiffs galore".

 

[michael hagerty]

There's a difference between a specialty show on a Sunday night, when radio listening is at an all-week low, and incorporating it as part of a station's regular daily format.

But many stations won't even do specialties on Sundays or holidays.....I give CBS-FM kudos for this. So not all is lost here. Deep cuts get played after all in a major population center like NYC and the ones that dislike it, can tune out and the ones that enjoy it, can listen every week.

Ah, but the ones who tune out have their radio set on something other than CBS-FM come Monday morning...which is why an increasing number of stations are dumping specialty programs on the weekend.

 

[oldies76]

btw, are you listening to WCBS right now? "Stiffs" galore...October 1980 top 25 countdown...

Which proves the point as to how few true hits there really are at an given time. A top 25 countdown with "stiffs galore".

I am only calling them "stiffs" since you referenced lower charting songs that rarely get played, this term. My point I'm trying to make is that a major market station in a huge population area is playing these hits, weekly. So it's being heard, granted on a Sunday night.

Nearly 50 lost hits in 3 hours time, two different years featured weekly. You should take a listen some Sunday night. Might just take you back in time.........

 

[oldies76]

which is why an increasing number of stations are dumping specialty programs on the weekend.

Desperation time?? Radio is slowly dying......you are seeing it.

 

[TheBigA]

Desperation time?? Radio is slowly dying......you are seeing it.

Nope...these are among the highest rated radio stations in town.

Just because they don't do what you want doesn't mean they're dying.

 

[michael hagerty]

btw, are you listening to WCBS right now? "Stiffs" galore...October 1980 top 25 countdown...

Which proves the point as to how few true hits there really are at an given time. A top 25 countdown with "stiffs galore".

O
I am only calling them "stiffs" since you referenced lower charting songs that rarely get played, this term. My point I'm trying to make is that a major market station in a huge population area is playing these hits, weekly. So it's being heard, granted on a Sunday night.

Nearly 50 lost hits in 3 hours time, two different years featured weekly. You should take a listen some Sunday night. Might just take you back in time.........

Not having a New York playlist available, I went to Oldiesloon and looked at the KFI, Los Angeles playlist for the week of October 13, 1980. I know 'em all. Don't especially want to hear most of them again.

 

[michael hagerty]

which is why an increasing number of stations are dumping specialty programs on the weekend.

Desperation time?? Radio is slowly dying......you are seeing it.

Making sure what you do Sunday night doesn't negatively impact your Monday morning (and beyond, if the weekend tune outs decide they like the competition's weekday morning show) isn't desperation, it's smart business.

It's why Drake's "Million Dollar Weekends" and "Solid Gold Sundays" sounded like the rest of the week except for a higher percentage of Goldens. It's why they didn't do specialty shows on weekends (apart from events like The History of Rock and Roll, The Firecracker 500 on July 4th weekend and the Top 100 or Big 93 year-end countdown), and always were back to format by 5 PM Sundays, with public affairs programming held off until 11 PM or midnight...so the radios would be tuned to KFRC, KHJ, WRKO, WOR-FM or WHBQ for morning drive on Monday.

And that wasn't because radio was slowly dying between 1965 and 1973.

 

[davideduardo]

which is why an increasing number of stations are dumping specialty programs on the weekend.

Desperation time?? Radio is slowly dying......you are seeing it.

Nope. Specialty shows are a hold-out from the dairy days. Since it was widely believed that diarykeepers filled out their weekend listening after the weekend, specialty shows went a long way towards triggering the memory when it came down to memorializing listening.

As more and more programmers realize that only cume and TSL, not memory, count in the PPM, the use of specialty shows is being reduced as they don't showcase what the station is known for and can potentially be confusing.

The exception that endures in the PPM era is the long-weekend phenomenon, where the actual holiday day has horrible listening levels due to the breaks in persons' habits. So a 3-day "repackaging" of the normal content of a station may entice a person to keep listening. In this case, it is about keeping them tuned in, and not about having them remember what they actually did.

As evidence of all this, the PPM has shown much higher listening levels across the weekend dayparts than what the diary showed... reinforcing the belief that much listening did not get remembered and written.

 

[oldies76]

Not having a New York playlist available, I went to Oldiesloon and looked at the KFI, Los Angeles playlist for the week of October 13, 1980. I know 'em all. Don't especially want to hear most of them again.

It's past your prime-time for top 40 music. You'd have to be 16 or so in 1980 to remember and appreciate the top 20 for October 1980, aired today.

For myself, 1983 would be the preferred year, so I would have less desire to know deeper cuts from the early 90's

I assume your target would be early to mid 70's, a far cry from 1980 music. CBS-FM aired October 1970, just before doing 1980.

 

[michael hagerty]

Not having a New York playlist available, I went to Oldiesloon and looked at the KFI, Los Angeles playlist for the week of October 13, 1980. I know 'em all. Don't especially want to hear most of them again.

It's past your prime-time for top 40 music. You'd have to be 16 or so in 1980 to remember and appreciate the top 20 for October 1980, aired today.

For myself, 1983 would be the preferred year, so I would have less desire to know deeper cuts from the early 90's

I assume your target would be early to mid 70's, a far cry from 1980 music. CBS-FM aired October 1970, just before doing 1980.

Assumptions are dangerous things. I was 24 in 1980, programming an Adult Contemporary station that played all but maybe 5 of the songs on the KFI playlist and played them myself from 7PM to midnight five nights a week.

Beyond that, I was a CHR listener until the early 90s and preferred the hits of the 80s to those of the 70s.

Peak Musical Awareness theory says we're most in tune with music from when we were ages 16 to 22. 23 to 29 would come second, 9 to 15 and above 30 are pretty much a tie. But there are exceptions. I'd been a Top 40 listener since age 11. To my ears, there was a huge drop in the quality of the music played on Top 40 stations in the 70s (probably why I gravitated to album rock in my personal listening that decade), and the 80s (especially '82-'85) were a huge improvement.

 

[TheRover]

I'm cursed, because, back in the day, I was exposed to Free-Form radio in Dallas on locally owned KNUS-FM, in the late sixties, and then, in Austin, on locally owned KLBJ-FM, from 1973-1977. Those were both commerical stations, with advertisers, and, a low overhead. And their DJ's had integrity about any song they played for their audience. The "Music" did the talking .... NOT the DJ ! It was "groove" that a music lover could listen to for ---hours---...

I can't ever shake how good that was. Like someone who once tasted real "Freedom", no amount of 'something else' will ever compare, no matter how it's packaged, or what it's called.

At the SAME time, there were, of course, several commercial 'Rock' stations that played ONLY the "Hits", with all the trappings: the contests, the over-the-top DJs, the obnoxious ads, etc.

Both "kinds" of commerical rock stations happily co-existed. The beer-drinking, superficial 'frat' boys listened to the 'hits', and the music lovers listened to KLBJ-FM.

I can't listen to non-commerical / college stations, because I am so put off by the SELF-Obsessed DJs.

 

[TheBigA]

I'm cursed, because, back in the day, I was exposed to Free-Form radio in Dallas on locally owned KNUS-FM, in the late sixties, and then, in Austin, on locally owned KLBJ-FM, from 1973-1977.

Wonderful story, but that was 40 years ago. FM was relatively new. That's like someone in the 70s who wished for a return of radio drama and vaudeville from the 1930s. Not gonna happen. Gas back then was less than a dollar a gallon. Those days are gone.

 

[oldies76]

Gas back then was less than a dollar a gallon. Those days are gone.

Gas went slightly under .99 cents a gallon at many stations after the 2001 attacks. And before George Bush left office in January 2009, gas was a low as $1.36 here in Colorado Springs. And we all know what has happened to the price of gas since.

So those days may not be gone.........

 

[TheRover]

Now that I have a Smart Phone, and Wi-Fi at home and at work, I am listening less to Rock Music terrestrial stations, and more to what I find on Tune In & I Heart custom stations.

I'm gradually going over to the "Internet" side of radio, and leaving terrestrial reception behind, when it comes to music, for now...

 

[HCochet]

Now that I have a Smart Phone, and Wi-Fi at home and at work, I am listening less to Rock Music terrestrial stations, and more to what I find on Tune In & I Heart custom stations.

I'm gradually going over to the "Internet" side of radio, and leaving terrestrial reception behind, when it comes to music, for now...

If Santa cooperates, I'll get one of those neat phones soon. If not, maybe mid-late 2013. And since there is no KGO anymore, I'm gonna for sure start using I Heart on that phone (if/when) I get one. Someone here told us about Portland 620 KPOJ. I tried it once (on my PC) and it was great. That will be one of the first stations I hope to tune into a lot.
I sure miss KGO. Especially Ray Taliaferro

 

[Goldilocks94941]

Guess you hadn't heard that Clear Channel dropped KPOJ's format a couple of days after the election - with no warning at all. It went from a very nice blend of progressive talk shows (and even the local breaks were good, and included news and info features). The station had a reasonably-size and fiercely loyal listener base, and appeared to be a decent option for an AM dial that seems to repel any real growth in listeners or programming. It's now yet another all-sports station.

I'm in Seattle, and our local progressive talk AM1090 will soon be switching to "all sports" (instead of just adding some play by play broadcasts of women's basketball and minor league hockey at night as they do now). This is in a market which already has 5 all-sports signals, plus play by play on a couple more.

So keep looking for streaming of Stephanie Miller, Thom Hartmann, Randi Rhodes, et al elsewhere. Maybe WCPT Chicago. I'll be joining you once I figure out which kind of smartphone and internet radio device will be easiest to operate at home and in the car. (I find webstreaming on the laptop computer to be a bit of a bother, compared to the "instant switch" of a tabletop or in-dash radio.) The programmning, and even the shrill, highly processed audio quality, of nearly all of the terresterial signals I get in Seattle leave me cold. So I hope I can find some streaming stations I like with decent bandwidth and light compression on the audio

 

[HCochet]

Guess you hadn't heard that Clear Channel dropped KPOJ's format a couple of days after the election - with no warning at all. It went from a very nice blend of progressive talk shows (and even the local breaks were good, and included news and info features). The station had a reasonably-size and fiercely loyal listener base, and appeared to be a decent option for an AM dial that seems to repel any real growth in listeners or programming. It's now yet another all-sports station............

what a bummer. That really sucks. But thanks for letting us know.

 

[DavidKaye]

Both "kinds" of commerical rock stations happily co-existed. The beer-drinking, superficial 'frat' boys listened to the 'hits', and the music lovers listened to KLBJ-FM.

The only reason they happily co-existed between 1973 and 1977 was because FM was still not yet considered viable to the group owners until about 1980. Basically, they ran the FMs with whatever format seemed to be low-hassle until the billings of the AM dropped low enough, and then they switched the format to the FM as FM was rising.

 

[LKellerIII]

Both "kinds" of commerical rock stations happily co-existed. The beer-drinking, superficial 'frat' boys listened to the 'hits', and the music lovers listened to KLBJ-FM.

The only reason they happily co-existed between 1973 and 1977 was because FM was still not yet considered viable to the group owners until about 1980. Basically, they ran the FMs with whatever format seemed to be low-hassle until the billings of the AM dropped low enough, and then they switched the format to the FM as FM was rising.

I was a resident of LA during the "Free Form" era, and I think David is actually being generous with his estimate. In my memory, "free form" started as a part-time format about 1968 on a couple of money losing FMs, then got briefly big, but was long gone by 1972. KMET (owned by Metromedia which also owned KSAN in the Bay Area) remained "album rock" until sometime in the 80s, but was formatted with a play list by 1972. And the big ratings leader in LA by 1972 was "Rock 'N Stereo" KLOS (ABC), which was a heavily formatted Top 40-Album rock hybrid. KLOS mostly just played the hits with a few album cuts mixed in. Gathering from the ratings, that's what listeners wanted to hear.

So as soon as the rock became financially viable on FM, the "free form" was gone. There were a few isolated exceptions like KTIM-FM in Marin, which stayed free form throughout the 70s, but their signal was almost entirely local, and they really didn't compete with most Bay Area stations. KTIM eventually went into banktruptcy shortly after they tried (and failed) with a Smooth Jazz format.

 

[TheRover]

Both "kinds" of commerical rock stations happily co-existed. The beer-drinking, superficial 'frat' boys listened to the 'hits', and the music lovers listened to KLBJ-FM.

The only reason they happily co-existed between 1973 and 1977 was because FM was still not yet considered viable to the group owners until about 1980. Basically, they ran the FMs with whatever format seemed to be low-hassle until the billings of the AM dropped low enough, and then they switched the format to the FM as FM was rising.

So as soon as the rock became financially viable on FM, the "free form" was gone. There were a few isolated exceptions like KTIM-FM in Marin, which stayed free form throughout the 70s, but their signal was almost entirely local, and they really didn't compete with most Bay Area stations. KTIM eventually went into banktruptcy shortly after they tried (and failed) with a Smooth Jazz format.

KLBJ-FM in Austin was, in the 70's, was privately owned, I believe.
It had a strong signal, and pretty much ignored any commercial rock "hits". For example, they did not play "Walk This Way", but they did play Aerosmith's "Train Kept A Rollin'". KLBJ introduced me to Al Stewart's "Roads To Moscow" and to Frank Zappa's "Montana", and to Roy Harper and Bonnie Raitt, and Joni Mitchell, and Shawn Phillips.

They played good music, and they didn't force commercial hits down your throats. Those commercial "hits" were easily found on other stations.

KLBJ's music was not so eclectic that they played music that you had to "acquire a taste for". If you already appreciated good rock music, which I did, then anything they might play, would not offend, and would most times enlighten.

There was not a loud, boisterious, or "famous" DJ to "push" the station and the music they were playing. Really, it was all low key, and the music they played is what 'sold' the station.

I know that time has past for terrestrial rock radio.

But, like anyone, I like to look fondly back on my "Golden Age" of FM Rock Radio.