Favorite Detroit radio years/decades

[Jasonthegreat]

What are your favorite years and/or decades of Detroit radio?

 

[new_friends_gr]

I'd say I'm partial to the years from, say, 1984 to 2000 or so. (I was born in '79, so I was between the ages of 4 and 21 during this time frame.) Detroit had lots of great stations and music over those years when I was a kid!

 

[ruger22com]

any year prior to 1980, when the FCC destroyed thousands of radio jobs via deregulation.

 

[Media_Maven]

What are your favorite years and/or decades of Detroit radio?

FM Radio in Metro-Detroit sounded pretty good from 1984-1990, especially with the big-sounding professional Top 40/CHR jocks & jingles on WCZY ('All Hits' Z95.5), WHYT ('Hot Hits'/96-HYT/Power 96), WDTX (99DTX), and CJOM (88.7 'The Mix') out of Windsor, which featured 30% Canadian Hits Content (adding to the variety of hit music heard in the area). Also, the variety of formats during the mid-late 80s was superior to anything on-air today, with stations like WVAE (92.3 'The Wave') - Detroit's first NAC/SJ station; WJZZ (Jazz 106); WQRS (Classical 105.1), and others. I miss that kind of variety.

 

[MsMusicRadio]

The Sixties with CKLW. For those who did not live in metro Detroit, CKLW was Detroit

 

[SarasotaJim]

any year prior to 1980, when the FCC destroyed thousands of radio jobs via deregulation.

Sorry, it wasn't "deregulation" that cost a lot of radio jobs. It was the dying gasps of Jimmy Carter's FCC that dreamed up a crapper full of social engineering called "Docket 80-90." It opened up thousands of FM frequencies to non-broadcasters. They, of course, went belly-up in record time and ended up selling to real broadcasters. That added to the real competition in most markets. Read that as 'more stations having to share the same amount of revenue.'

Eventually, to keep the signals on the air, the FCC had to loosen its ownership rules so that a single owner could operate multiple stations with one manager, one news department, one sales department...you get the drift.

If you really want to bame the correct cause for what is going on in the business you need look no further than the Jimmy Carter administration's social experimentation.

 

[ruger22com]

nope, deregulation eliminated engineering and broadcaster licenses allowing any bozo to get a job, and also went from restricting a company to having no more than 7-am 7-fm 7-tv stations NATIONWIDE and no more than 1-fm 1-am and 1-tv in ANY SINGLE MARKET. when that happened, giant (junk bond driven) companies like cumulas started buying up thousands of stations, and in most major markets ended up splitting control of all the stations in the market between two or three companies (instead of 20 network and independant companies as before deregulation). this eliminated competition as the big companies sold group buys, and jobs as they also no longer needed full staffs at each station. that is what killed radio, not the added freqs.