"You Light Up My Lights!"
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K-Surf 1260 growing playlist
- Thread starter oldies76
- Start date
If 1260 plays "You Light Up My Life" on night pattern when nobody can hear it, does it make a sound?
A station does not put time into a weekend show if they knew "nobody" was going to listen, regardless of what songs were playing. Several thousand no doubt were listening, across the LA basin.
Are you saying listenership is restricted to the LA basin? Are you saying people who know the exact time a song played were listening off air?
If they're not listening off air, they're not counted in ratings, and their numbers aren't sold to advertisers who pay the bills.
At night, KSUR does not cover the LA Basin. It is pretty much a San Fernando Valley signal.
And, even if it makes the book in 7 PM-Midnight on a weekend, the 7 PM to midnight period is such a light listening time that nearly nobody listens.
Given the "value" of each PPM device, and looking at the numbers, there was one meter tuned in, and it was carried by a person over 65.
Of course not. I listen from 1100 miles away and others that lose the signal late nights in the basin, also tune in on their PC's or other means.. I believe the word has spread enough about the fantastic music KSUR is throwing out that a good number of people, especially over 60, are tuned in regularly. Remember, they are after former KRTH audiences....or better said, the audiences KRTH let go after the 50's thru 70's were dumped years ago.
Weekend listening is lower as David mentions, but people still tune in.
I really hope they continue for many years to come.
if you can lower your hopeful expectations to months instead of years, you probably won't be disappointed. Otherwise...
BDS and MediaBase don't monitor the station; too small a listenership and I don't think the location of their monitor receivers even can get the signal all day and night.
I started looking at the value of the transmitter site real estate, and came up with a valuation in the $5 million range... possibly higher if it is zoned lite commercial or industrial rather than excepted special use. That is much more than the station is worth. In fact, the property taxes probably exceed the net billings.
Well, that's easy. With hardly any ads and fuss, you're almost getting the maximum songs possible per hour.
They do play more longer 70's songs and extended versions, but many short 60's tunes to compensate. So that may be more around 16 songs per hour. Let's assume 16 per hour, multiply that by 24, then by 31, around 11,900 songs for every 31 days.
As for actual song titles, could easily be well over 1200 different titles, or to compare, K-Earth 1986.
The poster did not ask how many songs an hour they play. It is obvious the question was about library size.
In other words, you are guessing.
Did KRTH, or any other major-market oldies station at the dawn of the format, really rotate that many titles? Even in the mid-'80s, radio people knew that playing too many songs was only going to drive off listeners, didn't they? I sure don't remember WDRC-FM Hartford or WROR (and later WODS) Boston going anywhere near that deep in their early days.
Unless you're the station owner, PD or MD [if they even have one or the other] EVERYBODY'S guessing.
On this subject, the size of the played library of a station, one can be within a fraction of a percent if the station is monitored by MediaBase or BDS. A subscriber has the ability to look at playlists for a single week or period of days out to more than a year and back more than a decade.
So there is no guessing there.
The first AMT's (auditorium music tests) were done in the early 80's, so prior to that stations that played gold did so based on other factors, such as compatibility with the station sound and how high the song charted, local, airplay "back in the day" and the PD's feel about the song.
But stations and PDs had figured out that if you played too many secondary songs, the ratings went down.
And in the 70's, the oldest rock 'n roll era songs were only around 20 years old, and most of the biggies were post-64. It was not to hard to figure out the general depth and size of the library.
By the time AMT's became common, we knew that pushing it over 700 or so songs on a gold based station with no currents was risky.
KRTH at that time was coming off the experiment of placing currents with their older songs, which ended late in 1985. From 1986 through about 1988, they were strictly oldies gold and 70's music and a lot of them, many of them incorporated into their well-known weekend and holiday themes. While they stuck with and rotated a core group of songs that was in the hundreds on the weekdays, many additional songs were "on standby" (songs that were played, but not as frequent as their more popular ones) and those songs combined with the regular ones, totalled out over 1200, far more than what's done today on most large market stations.
I was an avid listener back then and have a great recollection of the music and song titles played as well as what they did on weekends. So when I tune into KSUR today, it takes me back to a better time in radio and the comparisons musically are strikingly similar.
Nine years as an adult contemporary that was 40% gold and so contemporary that Radio and Records, over RKO's protest, listed them as Top 40, is not an "experiment". KRTH changed format. And then, almost a decade later, changed back.
I think we've done this before, but what the heck. Fall Pulse, 1972-1974, Arbitron after that:
1972: Oldies. Tied for 4th with a 4.3
1973: Oldies. 13th with a 2.7.
1974: Oldies. 11th with a 3.1.
1975: Oldies. 15th with a 2.4.
1976: Oldies. 18th with a 1.9.
(format change to AC/Top 40)
1977: AC/Top 40: 10th with a 3.4.
1978: AC/Top 40: 11th with a 3.0.
1979: AC/Top 40: 8th with a 3.8.
1980: AC/Top 40: 10th with a 3.2.
1981: AC/Top 40: 8th with a 3.3.
1982: AC/Top 40: 13th with a 2.6.
1983: AC/Top 40: 14th with a 2.6.
1984: AC/Top 40: 11th with a 2.8.
(Format change back to Oldies)
1985: Oldies: 10th with a 3.3.
1986: Oldies: 6th with a 4.0.
1987: Oldies: 10th with a 3.7.
1988: Oldies: 10th with a 3.2.
1989: Oldies: 11th with a 3.1.
1990: Oldies: 21st with a 1.9.
(Bill Drake hired as consultant-Mike Phillips PD---music tightened)
1991: Oldies: 6th with a 4.0.
1992: Oldies: 4th with a 4.4.
And rather than do 27 more fall books, I'll just cut to the chase---here's the latest monthly, out this week:
2nd with a 5.2.
Consistently good numbers only came with a disciplined approach to the music. Otherwise, you had the first "oh wow" book, then a tailing off to the point where something had to be done. And that applied to their AC/Top 40 format as well.
Cool, thank you.....1986 was an uptick, currents gone. To complete this lifespan, would not mind seeing the 1993-2018 missing segment, if possible.
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https://www.americanradiohistory.com/Archive-Duncan-American-Radio/Duncan-1975-1992/Los Angeles.pdf
Here is the timeline from 75 to 2002
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