How Stations Reported Playlists to "The Trades" in the 70's

[DavidEduardo]

I posted this in another thread, but got some emails saying that this is a great illustration of how stations reported playlists to the radio trades before BDS and MediaBase. While many who have not been in radio think we used Billboard and Cash Box, most of us in larger markets did not even get those magazines..

So, as a reference to how stations reported to R&R, Hamilton, Gavin, FMQB and the others, here is a "real" report from a "reporting station" from 1976 to the Gavin sheet:

Note that a station that called itself "Rock" was playing Silver Convention, Tavares and ABBA. That points out, rather dramatically, that format names and even music classifications have changed and morphed over the years.

For actual issues of the magazines radio used, go to WorldRadioHistory: Radio Music Electronics Publications ALL FREE and scroll down to Radio and Music for many of them.

 

[TheBigA]

While many who have not been in radio think we used Billboard and Cash Box, most of us in larger markets did not even get those magazines..

Billboard and Cashbox were music industry magazines. not radio magazines. Radio was only a small part of them, and some radio people (even today) question their chart methodologies. We tend to forget the importance of record retail in the pre-digital era. Billboard, Cashbox and Record World were all useful in record retail. But as music format diversification exploded in the early 70s, there really was a need for a more detailed trade paper for radio, one that was by and for radio, and R&R filled that hole at the right time.

In the last ten years Billboard has had to reinvent itself in the digital age now that retail is gone. In doing so, they've made decisions that in my opinion are not always good for radio or records.

 

[TheBigA]

I just looked at the playlist above and had to laugh about "airmail to." I was going to say stations faxed these reports to the trades, but perhaps fax wasn't as common in 1976?

 

[DavidEduardo]

Billboard and Cashbox were music industry magazines. not radio magazines. Radio was only a small part of them, and some radio people (even today) question their chart methodologies.

And my point is that, over and over, participants in this forum think that those music industry trades are what radio stations used for charts and information on songs that influenced airplay. They did not (although we loved reading Claude Hall and Rollye James write about, mostly, jox in medium and smaller markets).

We tend to forget the importance of record retail in the pre-digital era. Billboard, Cashbox and Record World were all useful in record retail.

But the problem for radio is that retail covers purchase by everyone from the first grade to death, not the demos and preferences of each station's target audience.

But as music format diversification exploded in the early 70s, there really was a need for a more detailed trade paper for radio, one that was by and for radio, and R&R filled that hole at the right time.

But we already had... from the later 50's, all the music data that we needed from the tip sheets.

n the last ten years Billboard has had to reinvent itself in the digital age now that retail is gone. In doing so, they've made decisions that in my opinion are not always good for radio or records.

I just find it less valuable now to radio. And with two to three weeks between print issues and only partial data of interest to radio or even streamers in the intervening weeks, my opinion is justified, I think.

But they are trying to be an entertainment publication, with more on artist careers, tours and videos and less about actual individual songs. That may actually be where their future lies.

 

[DavidEduardo]

I just looked at the playlist above and had to laugh about "airmail to." I was going to say stations faxed these reports to the trades, but perhaps fax wasn't as common in 1976?

I recall talking to my station's owner in the later 80's about buying a fax machine... he was not convinced until we started getting buys by fax, saving sellers from having to pick the orders up in person... a two hour and a half trip in our city's traffic.

Local agencies started installing fax machines around 1987 to 1988. In less than 18 months, we went from no agency with one (including McCann, BBD&O, Foote Cone, Y&R, JWT, Saatchi & Saatchi and the rest) to every agency, including house shops, having one. Our market had over 120 agencies!

"The technology for fax machines was invented a long time. However, fax machines did not become popular with consumers until the 1980s."

The Fax Machine is Much Older Than You Think

The development of the fax machine was made possible by Alexander Bain, who was granted a patent for his creation back in 1843.

www.thoughtco.com

 

[TheBigA]

I was led to believe that before fax, PDs would phone in their playlists in order to meet publication deadlines.

 

[TexasTom]

Note that a station that called itself "Rock" was playing Silver Convention, Tavares and ABBA. That points out, rather dramatically, that format names and even music classifications have changed and morphed over the years.

As I recall, Top 40 stations in 1976 were still generally considered to be "rock" stations, while what we would now call rock stations were considered to be "AOR" for "album oriented rock". But as the AOR stations gained in ratings in the late seventies, they started appropriating the rock image away from Top 40. So listeners increasingly associated the "rock" name with stations that played AC/DC, not stations that played ABBA.

But as an example of "rock" meaning Top 40 in this era, in 1976 the local AM Top 40 where I grew up actually had sung jingles proclaiming "85 KTAC, rock and roll!" I'm guessing that the same jingles ran on Top 40 stations in other markets.

Another example would be the TM Stereo Rock automated music format, which was a Top 40 format (with an adult lean), not an album rock format (although there was an option to add some album cuts). Several of these stations identified on-air with "rock" in their names -- ie, "Rock 102" in Buffalo, NY, "Rock 98" in Spokane, WA, and "Northwest Rock" in Bellingham, WA. That on-air identification apparently became a liability and disappeared -- in particular, I remember when "Rock 98" in Spokane switched to "Stereo 98" with updated liners and jingles (but the music didn't change, as it was still automated with TM Stereo Rock).
A few years later, the "rock" identifier reappeared in Spokane on AOR-formatted "Rock 106".

 

[michael hagerty]

I was led to believe that before fax, PDs would phone in their playlists in order to meet publication deadlines.

I always phoned the trades for the weekly report. But then, from Bishop, San Luis Obispo, Ukiah or Reno, "Air Mail" meant delivering the mail by truck to L.A. or San Francisco to be put on a plane---and Billboard and R&R were in L.A. and Gavin was in S.F.

I suppose if you were somewhere further away, with a GM who wouldn't approve the long-distance calls, air mail was your only alternative.

 

[gr8oldies]

I just looked at the playlist above and had to laugh about "airmail to." I was going to say stations faxed these reports to the trades, but perhaps fax wasn't as common in 1976?

I didn't see my first fax machine until the late 80s, especially in radio station use.

 

[DavidEduardo]

I didn't see my first fax machine until the late 80s, especially in radio station use.

As mentioned before, in market 14 (at the time) we went from no ad agency or station with a Fax to every single one in perhaps a year and a half around 1988. That meant that broadcast orders were faxed, instead of a seller having to drive to every shop for new or updated or revised orders.

Recorded materials were delivered by motorcycle messenger, unless the "copy" was the same as a prior flight.

In a city with definitely the worst traffic in the country, getting stuff by fax was an incredible time saving and let sellers do more selling and less messenger work.

 

[Mark Roberts]

I just looked at the playlist above and had to laugh about "airmail to." I was going to say stations faxed these reports to the trades, but perhaps fax wasn't as common in 1976?

Of course, there's a website for this! The History of Fax (from 1843 to Present Day) | Fax Authority - which reports there wasn't even a standard for facsimile communications until 1980! (I didn't know that, either.) Before that, faxes would work only if the sender and the receiver were using the same (proprietary) protocol.

 

[Mark Roberts]

"The technology for fax machines was invented a long time. However, fax machines did not become popular with consumers until the 1980s."

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch radio station, KSD (now KTRS), experimented with facsimile transmission over the air from 1 am to 6 am in 1937 and 1938. As an experiment, the newspaper transmitted a truncated version of the daily newspaper (8 to 9 pages) to staff members' homes. This was moved later to a "shortwave" station at 31.6 MHz, W9XPD, which allowed the transmissions to occur during the daytime. Post articles of the time indicated that newspapers in Des Moines, Newark (WOR), Cincinnati, and Detroit were conducting similar experiments. Later on, McClatchy conducted what it called "network facsimile" from KFBK Sacramento and KMJ Fresno (also as reported in the P-D).

 

[radiofan2023]

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch radio station, KSD (now KTRS), experimented with facsimile transmission over the air from 1 am to 6 am in 1937 and 1938. As an experiment, the newspaper transmitted a truncated version of the daily newspaper (8 to 9 pages) to staff members' homes. This was moved later to a "shortwave" station at 31.6 MHz, W9XPD, which allowed the transmissions to occur during the daytime. Post articles of the time indicated that newspapers in Des Moines, Newark (WOR), Cincinnati, and Detroit were conducting similar experiments. Later on, McClatchy conducted what it called "network facsimile" from KFBK Sacramento and KMJ Fresno (also as reported in the P-D).

There were also wirephotos, which started in the 1920s:

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/107769904802500204

 

[TheBigA]

"Air Mail" meant delivering the mail by truck to L.A. or San Francisco to be put on a plane---and Billboard and R&R were in L.A. and Gavin was in S.F.

Even then, we're talking about a delay in sending the data, and then there's a delay in receiving the magazine, also by mail. Which meant the charts were at least a full week or maybe two weeks old by the time readers saw them. That made them only useful for historic or statistical purposes. It certainly didn't help measuring song trends. Which I guess brings us back to the tip sheets.

To me, the fax machine had to be a game changer for trade publications. Not only did they use fax for receiving playlists, but they used fax to distribute information quicker to subscribers. The R&R HotFax brought news to stations in real time. Only to be replaced ten or so years later by email distribution.

 

[vchimpanzee]

I posted this in another thread, but got some emails saying that this is a great illustration of how stations reported playlists to the radio trades before BDS and MediaBase. While many who have not been in radio think we used Billboard and Cash Box, most of us in larger markets did not even get those magazines..

So, as a reference to how stations reported to R&R, Hamilton, Gavin, FMQB and the others, here is a "real" report from a "reporting station" from 1976 to the Gavin sheet:

I like the songs on this list.

Note that a station that called itself "Rock" was playing Silver Convention, Tavares and ABBA. That points out, rather dramatically, that format names and even music classifications have changed and morphed over the years.

WBCY in Charlotte called itself "Charlotte's Best Rock" and was listed as "AOR" in Broadcasting Yearbook even though it was playing some songs (but not those artists) that I wouldn't have thought of as rock, and only WROQ fit that description.

 

[Mark Roberts]

There were also wirephotos, which started in the 1920s:

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/107769904802500204

That still required photographic development, and was a closed system, as were most facsimile systems until the 1980 standard opened things up.

The AP and UPI had extensive telecommunications departments; they had to, the wires were their bread and butter. Whenever I had trouble with the AP teletype, which could be rather often, the call to the Kansas City bureau was always transferred to the telecommunications specialists in the bureau.

 

[CTListener]

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch radio station, KSD (now KTRS), experimented with facsimile transmission over the air from 1 am to 6 am in 1937 and 1938. As an experiment, the newspaper transmitted a truncated version of the daily newspaper (8 to 9 pages) to staff members' homes. This was moved later to a "shortwave" station at 31.6 MHz, W9XPD, which allowed the transmissions to occur during the daytime. Post articles of the time indicated that newspapers in Des Moines, Newark (WOR), Cincinnati, and Detroit were conducting similar experiments. Later on, McClatchy conducted what it called "network facsimile" from KFBK Sacramento and KMJ Fresno (also as reported in the P-D).

I remember reading a fascinating article on the fax newspaper experiment in either Popular Communications or Monitoring Times, two excellent radio hobby magazines of 20+ years ago. David has both of these magazines on his excellent site, but I have no idea which issue -- or even which year -- contained the story.

 

[DavidEduardo]

I remember reading a fascinating article on the fax newspaper experiment in either Popular Communications or Monitoring Times, two excellent radio hobby magazines of 20+ years ago. David has both of these magazines on his excellent site, but I have no idea which issue -- or even which year -- contained the story.

Both magazines are searchable.

 

[tvnut]

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch radio station, KSD (now KTRS), experimented with facsimile transmission over the air from 1 am to 6 am in 1937 and 1938. As an experiment, the newspaper transmitted a truncated version of the daily newspaper (8 to 9 pages) to staff members' homes. This was moved later to a "shortwave" station at 31.6 MHz, W9XPD, which allowed the transmissions to occur during the daytime. Post articles of the time indicated that newspapers in Des Moines, Newark (WOR), Cincinnati, and Detroit were conducting similar experiments. Later on, McClatchy conducted what it called "network facsimile" from KFBK Sacramento and KMJ Fresno (also as reported in the P-D).

WGN, owned by the Chicago Tribune, did this as well. It was one of the pet projects of the owner, Col. Robert McCormick, who dropped it eventually in favor of adding television to the Tribune empire.