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Full Service/AC

Does anybody remember the format? If was more personality driven AC with some emphasis on news, traffic, weather, sports, and talk. I think 1190 KEX in Portland Oregon was the last major market Full Service/AC format in the nation. (August, 1999).
 
Does anybody remember the format? If was more personality driven AC with some emphasis on news, traffic, weather, sports, and talk. I think 1190 KEX in Portland Oregon was the last major market Full Service/AC format in the nation. (August, 1999).
Sure. It started in the late 70s as a way of differentiating the stations with more news, talk and sports than the more music-based AC's.

As it became clear that there wasn't much future in contemporary music on AM, even the music-based stations began adding those elements. By the mid to late 80s, most went talk. KEX held on a long time.
 
Where did that come from? Full Service AC evolved from MOR a lot earlier than the late 70s. There was the other type of AC, coming from the opposite direction, softening Top 40. KEX was actually out of music for awhile and then, back in.
 
600 WICC in Bridgeport, CT was Full Service AC (in C-Quam AM Stereo!) until 2002 when they went all-talk. I believe they may still play some music on weekends. So was 800 WLAD in Danbury, CT until a few years ago. I remember listening to them on a trip to CT in 2005, and I heard them play a Maroon 5 song. They have since gone all-talk as well.
 
Where did that come from? Full Service AC evolved from MOR a lot earlier than the late 70s. There was the other type of AC, coming from the opposite direction, softening Top 40.

They didn't have a name for it until the late 70s. They all got lumped in under the adult contemporary banner.

And the MORs, in a lot of cases (certainly for KEX, KVI Seattle, KSFO San Francisco and KMPC Los Angeles---all owned by Gene Autry's Golden West Broadcasters) didn't evolve from MOR, they just switched the music and left everything else alone.

The AC pioneers structured their formats like Top 40s...commercial limits in the 12 to 14 minute per hour range as opposed to 18, one newscast an hour instead of two and the barest minimum, if not an outright elimination of features from the network.

As a result, the WGARs and KFMBs were playing 14 or 15 records an hour while the KMPCs were playing six.
 
KMPC had Robert W. Morgan and Gary Owens, both of whom were so entertaining to listen to that we didn't really want to hear a lot of music. I have a lot of 1960s KMPC playlists. I picked one at random: In early April of 1966, the format was a mix of MOR and jazz. KMPC was playing (among others) Roger Williams, Johnny Mathis, Chet Baker, Lena Horne, Count Basie, Skitch Henderson, Ray Conniff, George Shearing, Tony Bennett, Harold Betters---Who?---Wes Montgomery, Billy Vaughn, Don Ho, Buddy Greco, Paul Horn, Arthur Prysock, Jack Jones, Jimmy Smith, Willie Bobo, Johnny Keating, Frank Sinatra, Henry Mancini, Nancy Wilson, and the Tijuana Brass. By the late 1970s, as Michael pointed out, KMPC had "switched the music." The format was soft rock and Wink Martindale had a top-20 countdown show on Friday afternoons. And KMPC was the first pop station to play The Gambler by Kenny Rogers. (A bad pun about KMPC eventually "folding" is being tastefully withheld.)
 
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KMPC had Robert W. Morgan and Gary Owens, both of whom were so entertaining to listen to that we didn't really want to hear a lot of music. I have a lot of 1960s KMPC playlists. I picked one at random: In early April of 1966, the format was a mix of MOR and jazz. KMPC was playing (among others) Roger Williams, Johnny Mathis, Chet Baker, Lena Horne, Count Basie, Skitch Henderson, Ray Conniff, George Shearing, Tony Bennett, Harold Betters---Who?---Wes Montgomery, Billy Vaughn, Don Ho, Buddy Greco, Paul Horn, Arthur Prysock, Jack Jones, Jimmy Smith, Willie Bobo, Johnny Keating, Frank Sinatra, Henry Mancini, Nancy Wilson, and the Tijuana Brass. By the late 1970s, as Michael pointed out, KMPC had "switched the music." The format was soft rock and Wink Martindale had a top-20 countdown show on Friday afternoons. And KMPC was the first pop station to play The Gambler by Kenny Rogers. (A bad pun about KMPC eventually "folding" is being tastefully withheld.)



Absolutely right, Steve. When I listened to KMPC, I really didn't care what the records were, except in Johnny Magnus' 10PM-1AM show, because he played very tasty jazz. It was about the personalities. Same for Lohman and Barkley on KFI.

But we were by no means the majority. A lot of people thought those guys needed to shut up and play the music. Thankfully, there were enough of us then for them to make a profit doing what they did.
 
By the way, the music changed at KMPC very abruptly one week in 1973...sometime before June.

And Wink's countdown "Music Scene USA" was 30 records spread over his Thursday and Friday show. It was actually a syndicated show and Wink added bonus material and extras to customize it for KMPC.
 
They didn't have a name for it until the late 70s. They all got lumped in under the adult contemporary banner.

And the MORs, in a lot of cases (certainly for KEX, KVI Seattle, KSFO San Francisco and KMPC Los Angeles---all owned by Gene Autry's Golden West Broadcasters) didn't evolve from MOR, they just switched the music and left everything else alone.

The AC pioneers structured their formats like Top 40s...commercial limits in the 12 to 14 minute per hour range as opposed to 18, one newscast an hour instead of two and the barest minimum, if not an outright elimination of features from the network.

As a result, the WGARs and KFMBs were playing 14 or 15 records an hour while the KMPCs were playing six.
I see what you mean. They didn't need a hyphenated name until a more music based AC came on the scene.
 
I see what you mean. They didn't need a hyphenated name until a more music based AC came on the scene.

Almost. Let's take San Francisco as an example.

With the exception of a 60-day attempt at Top 40 in '65 or '66, KNBR had been MOR for years. So had KSFO.

In 1968, KPEN became KIOI (K-101), and was a very music-intensive AC, songs usually played in blocks of 2, 3 or more without jock talk. In 1973, KNBR and KSFO abandoned the MOR artists and went AC with their music, but didn't touch their formatics. KNBR's music was considerably more uptempo than KSFO's.

They all got lumped together as Adult Contemporary. Which ultimately led to a lot of confusion nationwide, because there were also stations like WGAR and KFMB and the ones that I programmed that were structured like Top 40, with (slightly) toned-down jocks, 80% of Top 40's music and oldies from 50s and 60s Top 40....which was the original Adult Contemporary.

You'd call the trades or meet someone at a convention and say you programmed Adult Contemporary and they'd ask "what kind?". So, around 1977/78, the term "Full Service" started getting some currency.
 
In Portland, there were attempts made in 1975 by an AM and another in '77 on FM but neither was particularly successful. I don't think it was until the early 80s, when Top 40 softened nearly to the level of an AC, when such stations just evolved to AC that it really began to take off. Honestly, for awhile, "Foreigner" was about the only current hit artist not being played on AC!
 
I am surprised that the traditional "Full Service" Adult Contemporary format (with plenty of newscasts, traffic reports, weather forecasts, etc.) never took off on FM.

I still think such a format could work if there are enough truly talented air personalities and a first-rate news department working at such a station.
 
KDAL-AM in Duluth was full service personality radio before the term was coined, and stayed that way thru several ownership changes...until the most recent one. The station's owner the past 10 years is a GOP honcho who has stated he intends to use his stations to "turn people's thinking around" in this area, and doesn't mind losing money in the process. He already owned WDSM, a typical rightwing talker, but turned KDAL into a watered-down version of same. Current lineup includes a morning show heavy on CBS features, an old newspaper fart doing a sports show in the AM, a Minneapolis talk host relayed afternoons, Dennis Miller's smirkfest in the evening, and the conspiracy oogum-boogum of Clyde Lewis and George Noory at night. (The station went spastic a few weeks ago when America's Radio News tanked; they'd been leaning heavy on them.) As for the personality guys who all got canned, one is more or less retired, another I believe runs a small station in Iowa, another is a loan officer with a bank, one went into the wedding-DJ biz, and one sells furniture.
 
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