With most music stations on full or nearly full autopilots on the weekends, I feel like running a show like AT40 is a conscious decision. It's not like it's there to give the live part timers a break. If you're on autopilot anyway (as nearly every iHeart Classic Hits station is on the weekends), it's a deliberate choice to air AT40 (or any other syndicated show), so it must be doing something right.
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KCKC FM - Large Playlist Success ?
- Thread starter kfbkfb
- Start date
Another problem is that the "bottom 20" most weeks was full of stiffs that were not hits then and a not memorable today.
Yes, true, but that's what some are looking to hear when they tune in.
Very few. Back when AT40 was still on some big stations with the actual week shows, we could look at the hour by hour ratings and see that each successive hour improved. That's why lots of stations started it early on Sunday morning to have the final two hours in 10 to noon or even 8 to 10.
In each local market, there were always quite a few songs at the bottom of AT 40 that the station did not have on its playlist. The problem was using a national sales chart as the basis, while most radio stations did not even look at those charts.
The biggest fight Bill Drake had, first with Ron Jacobs at KHJ, then with Tom Rounds at KFRC (both of whom later founded Watermark, which produced AT40), was over the idea of a weekly Top 30 countdown.
Drake let them both do it, but made it clear he thought it was madness to play, as he put it, “your 20 worst records in a row, followed by your ten best all at once.“. And, he pointed out—-in the hour immediately following the countdown, you probably can’t touch the top ten.
Which is what led to all of the features...allowing them to mix in previous #1s during those first few hours. Those long distance dedications were a way to play a few hits among the dogs.
But some of those "dogs" were future top 10 hits (usually including at least one future No. 1) as well as recent top 10s slipping down the chart. I would think those, as well as the dedication songs, would somewhat balance out the songs that either weren't being played on your station or were going to be dropped after their second week, right?
The point is; reliving dead dogs that never made notable hit status equals tune-out. Especially true for thirty or forty year old dogs.
Yes, but that was years after Drake told them (1965 and 1966) as local PDs (KHJ and KFRC) that the concept of a countdown caused problems.
Buzz Bennett used to say there were only seven real hits at any given time. The other stuff on the chart either was past its peak or was stuff that hadn’t really hit yet and might or might not.
So, you’re still playing two hours of songs that, as of that week’s countdown (no one at the time ever imagined replays decades later), were not your strongest songs, followed by your strongest all at once, followed for an hour or more after the countdown ended by none of your strongest songs, because you just played them.
And, initially, the concept of AT40 was to allow smaller market stations to have quality fill programming at times like Sunday morning when there was a real problem in finding anyone to even run the board.
It was only after the show proved itself so valuable due to Casey's content that larger market / major stations jumped on board.
And that is why starting it any later than 9 AM on Sunday was a bad idea. Some even played it at 6 PM Sunday, meaning an hour or so of mostly stiffs in what was actually a peak listening time.
But we are talking here about the 15 to even 20 songs that never made it into the top 15... many of which were not even being played on the local station that carried the show.
Very, very few songs that did not make it into a station's top 20 back then became memorable, lasting hits.
Bruce Bradley was doing a weekly countdown -- Tuesday nights, IIRC -- on Westinghouse's WBZ in 1966. I forget, though, whether it was a top 30 or top 20. Anyway, it was gone the next year when 'BZ went chicken rock after WNAC became CHR WRKO. I do remember hearing AT40 on WBZ in the early '80s, though, before music was dropped.
Almost the biggest with Rounds. TR and Drake eventually "broke up" because Drake could not accept that San Francisco back then truly wanted a bit harder sound than LA and San Diego.
Also worth noting that forward-thinking PDs like Buzz dumped the weekly countdowns of their own playlist (which often were 6-9 pm on a weeknight, whichever day of the week the new chart came out) for either a “Telephone Top 10” countdown of the most-requested songs which would invariably involve recurrents and gold in addition to top 5 currents, or just dumped the countdown concept entirely and stayed in format.
I remember the "Big 30 Preview" on Tuesday nights on CKLW. It was interspersed with "Goldens" throughout, probably to balance out the dead dogs at the bottom of the chart
Back in late '64 on my first Top 40 which, in KFWB style was "Channel 57" (570 AM), we did the "5 plus 7 of the day" which were the 5 top songs and the 7 "fastest growing songs". That meant that in we only spent 40 minutes on the pseudo-countdown and also played 7 songs that could be very new but by big artists, ones that were truly "right after" the top 5 or whatever we wanted to get variety.
As we averaged 20 songs an hour, the feature was not even an hour long (we had 10 minutes of commercial time only). So there were really only 5 songs that could not be played for the surrounding 90 minutes before and after, and every day one or two of the top 5 wobbled in or out, giving day to day variety.
We felt that being "the authority" in the market on what was or was not a hit was important, so we did this for many many years.
They were right. The other thing that saved the concept was Casey himself. People listened for him. They put up with the music because they loved HIM. There are lots of other DJs who've had that impact. Anyone can talk on the radio. It takes someone special to get people to listen.
When I go to the mountains and return home on Saturday, which I did not do this year, the classic country station in the Charlotte NC area has been doing a countdown of the top songs on the date in some year from the 70s, and it's amazing how many of them didn't sound familiar. I think it's a national program.
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