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Heritage stations that have almost no airchecks of them

B

bobdavcav

Let's consider heritage as anything launched in 2000 or before, which of these stations have very little or no airchecks of them that can be easily found? Here's a list to start with,
KFFM/Yakima, WA CHR since 1978 and at lease looking at aircheckdownloads.com there isn't anything there, nor have I seen anything on any of the other aircheck sites I look at occasionally. Same goes for WDAY-FM/Fargo, ND.
KKRZ/Portland has been around almost as long as its namesake, WHTZ in New York City. However, there are only 2 clips of it on aircheckdownloads.com as compared to 15 or so for WHTZ. Oh and one of those is one of the 4 or 5 I recorded this summer to attempt to close that gap.
WFLY/Albany, CHR since 1979, only aircheck I can find on aircheckdownloads is from June of this year.
KMPS/Seattle, has been country since at least 1978 but very little tape on it. I think there might be a couple clips from the early years of the station, but not much since then. There's one aircheck up there on aircheckdownloads.com, but it was one I recorded after realizing the harritage of KMPS and realizing that there was no tape on it at all that I could find.
WSPK, CHR since 1984 doesn't seem to have any tape on it either. I'm still also looking for KBKS from 2008, but there are enough clips overall of KBKS to not get a mention on this thread.
 
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I have a few of KKRZ in my collection. Another Z-100, though, that has almost no airchecks is the 1 in Eau Clair Wisconsin.
 
Of course, the reason so many heritage stations have little or no surviving airchecks is simple. The vast majority of radio listeners don't record off the air (except sometimes specific songs) ... never have, never will. It is a special subset that actually make the effort to preserve the history of personality radio.

This comes up all the time at ReelRadio, where several airchecks from my own collection reside. Subscribers post all the time "why isn't there more KXXX" or "could we have some WZZZ" and the answer is always the same: For the most part, they do not exist, and to make matters worse, there is some percentage of aircheck collectors who keep their collections private, for their own (and no one else's) entertainment, and none of us can know what gems they might have in their possession.

So may the powers from above, prodded by the many great air talents we have lost over the years, smile upon those of you who not only airchecked, but are willing to share them so more can hear what radio used to be like.
 
Some of those are smaller markets meaning fewer listeners with fewer chances to record.

>>>>WFLY/Albany, CHR since 1979, only aircheck I can find on aircheckdownloads is from June of this year.

There are a few WFLY airchecks from the '70s and '80s posted here......

http://northeastairchecks.com/

I've been looking for more WFLY for years as well but I haven't been that successful either.

Some WSPK exists but there's not much "floating around" out there.
It's in collectors hands so maybe you'd have to work out a trade with one of them.
 
Actually when I come to think about it, pretty much all the long-established stations in Portland have a very small number of airchecks. As far as I can tell though I only watch one site regularly plus the site I run, I'm the only recorder active in the market right now.
 
K.M. Richards said:
Of course, the reason so many heritage stations have little or no surviving airchecks is simple. The vast majority of radio listeners don't record off the air (except sometimes specific songs) ... never have, never will. It is a special subset that actually make the effort to preserve the history of personality radio.
Click to expand...

I have wondered why airchecks of Stevens and Pruett (the original Radio Gawds in Texas) never have been posted in many places...especially their 1st time as S&P (after being a Hudson and Harrigan team on 610 KILT before its flip to country) on 790 KULF Houston in the early 80s before Gannet bought the station and wiped the slate clean with John Lander and the Q ZOO, which took the AM back into the top 5 of music stations in Houston...before the FM was bought and simulcast...which then killed the AM...(but the AM in CQUAM sounded sooo much richer/fuller than the FM did)

I THINK I have found some cassettes with S&P doing their "Star Trots" bits (patterned after ST:TMP) where they took listener scripts and did them on the air, played a song then played back the listener calls (comments for the thespians!)...
I often recorded them as I was usually the only one using the 800 number to call in from outside the Houston market...(But CC now iHeart, stole a couple of my tapes when I was released in 2001....hell, took them 3 weeks to get my glasses back to me which I legally needed to drive..thank you very much).... I THINK I have found one or two of the tapes....out of almost a dozen....but as luck would have it, my only cassette deck (a portable) was stolen a few years back..last home deck I had went in the trash years ago after the swing doors broke..not bad for over 20 years of use though....I need to find/borrow a deck to digitize them and Jim Pruett, still alive and doing mornings on KCYB-LP in Houston area, wants copies of them..maybe to play them on Thursdays as TBT bits....and I plan to offer them to ReelRadio as well...

The good ole days of Personality Radio!!!
 
Most younger people didn't have decent tape recorders until the late 1960s, and then you would have to patch in a radio for decent audio with it. The microphone jack was too sensitive for audio from a radio earphone jack. So you had to do something to bring the level down. When people got the cassette tape recorder/radio combinations, that was the golden age of scoped and unscoped airchecks, best if accidental and including the DJ. Then those tapes would have to be somehow saved and preserved all those years.

It's the same thing as with ARSA, the Large Market station Surveys are more likely to have been published and saved than Smaller Market stations. If you had some good pack rats saving the airchecks and surveys, it's better. Local pack rats are better. Radio people move too often, and tend to live in small places where they have to pare down belongings. They should have outlawed bulk tape erasers. One man's Pack Rat is another man's Historical Archiver!
 
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Right, but none of the stations I mentioned were on in the 60s. KFFM was 78, WDAY and KKRZ were 83, and WSPK, which I actually have found a couple clips of from the late 90s was 84, so the only point of your post that stands up is te last sentence. Another station that's been around a while though it's in a very small market, is KMNT, though from 2000 to 2005 it had a strong signal into the Seattle market. Btw, what was so uninteresting about radio in the mid 2000s? Of the 15,000 or so licensed facilities in the country, let's just say that an average of 150 of them a year are airchecked. In 2007 however, there were just 2 airchecks the entire year that I can find, excluding a number of legals on Tophour, and 2008 didn't seem to do much better.
 
bobdavcav said:
Btw, what was so uninteresting about radio in the mid 2000s? Of the 15,000 or so licensed facilities in the country, let's just say that an average of 150 of them a year are airchecked. In 2007 however, there were just 2 airchecks the entire year that I can find, excluding a number of legals on Tophour, and 2008 didn't seem to do much better.
Click to expand...

For the most part, the airchecks we have of stations past were recorded on tape, often by people who did it for the music. As technology has progressed, plus the Internet, no one needs to do that anymore. Only us old farts care anymore, and yeah, we find modern radio fairly uninteresting.
 
bobdavcav said:
That makes sense, but why are the number of airchecks going up again?
Click to expand...

This is only a guess on my part, but maybe the technology mismatch made it more difficult for a few years as people found it difficult to interface an off-air receiver to a computer for recording, and streaming eliminated that barrier.
 
When I think of heritage stations, I think of AMs with three call letters and the others that came on at that time. I think of stations in the 1960s that were Top 40, and researched their own playlists, and played recordings by local talent. By 1980, and certainly by 1990 at the LATEST, as far as most people are concerned that are older, radio became nationalized with very small playlists dictated by a very small number of programmers, who dictated very tight restrictions on personalities. All you have to do is look at Joel Whitburn's publications and you know how few recordings charted compared to earlier eras. To talk about stations in the 1990s and 2000s as "heritage stations" seems a misnomer. So I guess that I am out of touch with what this section is turning into. I will steer clear of this section for at least the time being.
 
Schroedingers Cat said:
To talk about stations in the 1990s and 2000s as "heritage stations" seems a misnomer. So I guess that I am out of touch with what this section is turning into.
Click to expand...

Well, it's the OP who is steering the thread in a different direction. Maybe a list of "harritage" (sic) stations includes newer ones.
 
To me, an aircheck is most valuable if it is 40 or more years old. To listen to WBBM-FM and WHYT, which I did, when they changed to Hot Hits in 1982, not only were they both on 96.3, it was like listening the same station. And from that point forward, aside from the fun of DXing, there was little difference from one market to another in like formatted stations. I don't even blame Mike Joseph for it, because radio had just changed.
 
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Re: definition of heritage
It's clear to me that when WHTS, which had only been on the air since 1987 signed off it had a lot of support behind it. While I understand your sentiment, it's not always going to be that way for everyone. I for one am not old enough to remember those days you speak of, I wouldn't come into the world until 10 years later, which means that, unless we count a frequency move as the start of a new station, the majority if not every one of the stations mentioned in this thread are older than me. One that went CHR around the time I was born that hasn't gotten a mention here is KMXV, another one that has little tape on it. Also getting a little newer here, KXXM, or really most of San Antonio doesn't have much tape.
Re: number of airchecks.
You could be right, but I don't think you're entirely accurate there, as I still hear more off-air clips than just the ones I record.
 
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