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Flip to Christmas Music
- Thread starter skiwest
- Start date
I haven't heard the David Bowie Bing Crosby song in awhile either.
Believe me, I do. And then when the season's done, there's a good chance I won't come back. But since I am out of their demo, they don't care.
Maybe I minimized the songs that were "bubbling under" the WABC top 14. It might be 10 or more. But they didn't rotate anywhere near as fast as the top 14. The WABC tribute website has access to all the weekly playlists. I think the cut off point on the chart was #14 because WABC didn't want to play a former hit song that had fallen beyond that point.
Let's take the first week of November 1971. The top 14 are listed. Then it lists 17, 18, 19 and 20. And also 35, 52 and 66, along with two "hot prospects" that I suppose had just been released. There were also seven album cuts but I don't think those got played outside of evening hours.
How far back did WABC go for it's "gold" file? Maybe I should have said "recent" instead of "recurrent". I don't think gold songs went back more than five years or so. It's not like some of today's Top 40 stations that will go back to the early 2000s. Playing gold was so infrequent that when WABC played gold it had jingles announcing it.
At least that's how I remember it from my own listening as a kid and hearing airchecks from that era.
Let's go back to the early 70s. Most stations in the Akron/Cleveland area were Top 40 or other formats of which "oldies" [say 50/60s music] was a non-entity. WDBN 94.9 Medina, OH. would sign off Sundays at Midnight for "transmitter maintenance". I was close enough to WDBNs tower that it pretty much wiped out listening on any adjacent channels. When they did sign off I was able to pick up the wonderful "Honey Radio" WHNE on 94.7 out of the Detroit area which had an all oldies format which was AWESOME to hear the music of the 50/60s that I had grown up with as a kid. Made dragging my ass out of bed for school on Mondays a nightmare because I'd be up most of the night with my headphones on listening. Eventually, in the future, WDBN no longer needed to turn their transmitter off for maintenance. Today, you can get 50/60s music anywhere online but it's still rather magical hearing it over the airwaves and if I'm out and about in my car on Saturday in NE Ohio, it's great hearing Cousin Brucie come wafting over the airwaves playing the music on WABC.
Side note.....if anyone knows: when the FCC finally got done twiddling their thumbs and approved AM Stereo, did WABC broadcast in AM stereo or was it too late by then? I know the FCC approved AM Stereo in 1982 and WABC dumped music sometime that year. I had an AM stereo unit in my car till someone broke in and stole it.
Side note.....if anyone knows: when the FCC finally got done twiddling their thumbs and approved AM Stereo, did WABC broadcast in AM stereo or was it too late by then? I know the FCC approved AM Stereo in 1982 and WABC dumped music sometime that year. I had an AM stereo unit in my car till someone broke in and stole it.
No, they play "All I want for Christmas is my two front teeth!"
I just wish that there was a better selection of Christmas music presented by these stations. It seems like the same 50 songs over and over again.
Sounds like WMJI is 'jingling-the-bells' already. Heard Celine Dion doing a washed-down version of John Lennon's "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)".
Heard the same John! My daughter said she just heard Christmas music on WMJI on the way home from work in Cleveland! And so it begins!
Yes, that one still comes up on the typical Christmas music log these days but I would not say it's one they put in a heavy rotation.
Christmas diversity? What might that look like? Well, playing a number of versions of popular Christmas songs may be the way to do it, kind of.
I've heard both the original "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)" and a version by Celine Dion (as chronicled above), but I also heard a female singer doing a so-so version of "Holly Jolly Christmas". Can't beat Burl Ives though, who I will hope to hear soon, too.
I've heard both the original "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)" and a version by Celine Dion (as chronicled above), but I also heard a female singer doing a so-so version of "Holly Jolly Christmas". Can't beat Burl Ives though, who I will hope to hear soon, too.
The day after Thanksgiving until December 31st would be good for me. And I agree stations play the same exact songs. We could use a little variety!!
In the 60's I used WABC as sort of a model for my own larger market Top 40 station. I monitored the playlist and on a number of occasions did actual rotation tallies over more than one day.
Like most of us, we divided our playlist into a number of levels. If we truly did have 40 currents, we had at least 4 or 5 categories, ranging from WABC's #1 song every 90 minutes to new adds coming in at, perhaps, every 3 hours or so. The concept was very much like gears in a watch, where the different categories always produced different "sets" or sequences of songs.
When WABC got into Top 40, there was no rock music that was older than 5 years (they began in late 1960) so, even were they to have added gold, it would have been very recent.
Generally, stations in the rock format (remember, we called CHR or Top 40 "rock" in the earlier years) did not start adding gold until the mid-60's years. The concept of recurrents was not understood, and most of us "rested" songs when the dropped out of the Top 40.
You'd have to listen to many days of music to get the rotations correctly.
For example, some stations had a "start point" each morning before AM drive, so that they had different sets in every hour. Others shuffled categories. Some of us even mixed the mid and low range songs every few days.
40 songs with a single category would repeat every two hours to 3 hours, depending on commercial loads and talk and news and other non-music quotas. With the biggest songs running less than every two hours, the lesser ones might run in a 3 to 4 hour rotation.
I "remember it" since I was a Top 40 PD in the 60's and 70's.
Are you a woman between about 33 and 55? That is who the Christmas format variant targets.
The FCC initially had a system aproved that could have had AM stereo on in 1978. But one of the non-approved system owners filed legal papers and held it back for roughly 4 years. Then, the FCC just told us to do whatever we wanted and chose no system.
Even 1979 was kind of late. By then, over half of all listening was to FM and about two-thirds of music listening had left AM.