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Lee Abrams

This is the same man, along with Burkhart, who paved the way for FM ROCK radio today. They took "Free Form" djs and applied the same crappy top 40 approach to rock formatics. "stick to the hits" shut up, liners only etc...etc. The clip was interesting, and thanks for the link by the way, but Mr. Abrams charm of pidgeon hole style radio is what we have been complaining about for years.

Wikipedia, for what it's worth, has a nice piece on A.O.R. history

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Album-oriented_rock


As soon as he is done playing with this new project, he will have something else touted as the next best thing to peanut butter.
 
True but if he hadn't done it somebody else would have. I think he redeemed himself with the variety that used to be on XM some of which survives to this day.

The success of free form album rock in a way did itself in as soon as the suits found out they could make money with it. Then the race for ratings and programming for the masses.

I think Lee Abrams summed up the listeners and the formats quite well.
 
And as a result..The music world we have today. Pitch your voice with a device until you are in key, tune your guitar to an open key and strum like a maniac and throw out any ideas of instrumentals. Just look good kid, give me one hit per lp release and the executives and consultants will take care of the rest.

Then he starts the satellite biz and touts it as an alternative to the bland, stale life of terrestrial radio.
Don't get me wrong, I love my sirius/xm subscription. And maybe we should thank Lee for spearheading the sat system. After a long and painful stroll through the cookie cutter playlist at work, I ride home in the blissful comfort of "b" sides and deep playlists. A heartfelt Thank you Mr. Abrams!

The clip shows he still has his "king Of Consultants" chops......It's time to feed the sheep Lee! ;)
 
Yes, there I am, that is me with all my friends, in that corner over there.
I force myself to tolerate a few of the folks in the box next door when they have money for me, but is it really necessary to allow that kind of DNA in the opposite quarter to waste my precious oxygen.

For me, that channel loyalty happend right away, as I found myself telling everyone that when the music stops and the announcer comes in, the volume goes UP. I never want to miss what the announcers have to say and that quality has pretty much survived.

And yes, I have tried to listen to the channels that play music I used to enjoy, but I just can not do it, they are so different from my life now.

Sadly, many of those early channels are history.
 
I don't fit in any of Lee Abrams Boxes but that's just me. First of all I do crank up the volume on Watercolors and 60 on 6 is often my musical comfort food when I feel like something safe and predictable. I listen to some of the album rock channels, country, and BBC-1 when I'm feeling adventurous.

I think when it comes to the masses he's got it right though. My feeling about the masses changed one day when I was going through my music with a friend who had been a radio engineer. I thought he would have a deeper wider range of music he liked but wow was I ever wrong. There were 100% hits that he had no knowledge of.

So I guess the masses get what the masses want and that's who everybody programs for. If we like something that falls outside the norm well then we either start our own station or buy the songs for ourselves!

XM still does a better job than the free FM stations, that's why I subscribe.
 
The worst thing that Abrams and his ilk did with AOR was encouraging the pigeonholing of listeners by age and race. The beauty of top 40 radio in the '60s was its diversity. Jimi Hendrix and Frank Sinatra and James Brown and Johnny Cash and the Archies and Ray Stevens and Mary Hopkin and Wilson Pickett and the New Vaudeville Band and Lee Dorsey and Peggy Lee, all on the same station! But when Abrams distilled the old "progressive" format into researched-into-the-ground AOR and threw out all those old R&B and blues records and replaced them with Yes and Emerson, Lake & Palmer because that's what the research told them most of the suburban kids liked most, and the ratings and ad billing jumped, well, it was only a matter of time before top 40 got the same idea.

Sirius XM, of course, is pigeonholed radio taken to an extreme. You're still not going to hear country, MOR, rock and soul on the same channels. Its saving grace is that you can jump from one pigeonhole to another any time you want with your remote. No, it's not 1966 and you're not hearing "Strangers in the Night," "Snoopy Vs. the Red Baron" and "Standing in the Shadows of Love" in the same music set, but that's probably asking too much, as fewer and fewer people remember how radio used to be and the voices calling for the clock to be turned back grow fainter.
 
CT I agree 100% and have a tape to prove it. Powerhouse WKBW Buffalo from February 1964. There is Jan & Dean mixed with Bobby Bare, Sammy Davis Jr, Nat King Cole, Elvis, Wayne Newton, and that new group The Beatles! For the most part oldies stations have never quite recaptured what it was actually like. Time moves on and programmers decide you really don't like all the adult sounds....The trouble is, I like many of them!
 
CTListener said:
The worst thing that Abrams and his ilk did with AOR was encouraging the pigeonholing of listeners by age and race. The beauty of top 40 radio in the '60s was its diversity. Jimi Hendrix and Frank Sinatra and James Brown and Johnny Cash and the Archies and Ray Stevens and Mary Hopkin and Wilson Pickett and the New Vaudeville Band and Lee Dorsey and Peggy Lee, all on the same station! But when Abrams distilled the old "progressive" format into researched-into-the-ground AOR and threw out all those old R&B and blues records and replaced them with Yes and Emerson, Lake & Palmer because that's what the research told them most of the suburban kids liked most, and the ratings and ad billing jumped, well, it was only a matter of time before top 40 got the same idea.

Sirius XM, of course, is pigeonholed radio taken to an extreme. You're still not going to hear country, MOR, rock and soul on the same channels. Its saving grace is that you can jump from one pigeonhole to another any time you want with your remote. No, it's not 1966 and you're not hearing "Strangers in the Night," "Snoopy Vs. the Red Baron" and "Standing in the Shadows of Love" in the same music set, but that's probably asking too much, as fewer and fewer people remember how radio used to be and the voices calling for the clock to be turned back grow fainter.
Click to expand...

Oh, please! It was inevitable once the FCC required non-duplication on FM that niche formats were going to spring up. Lee Abrams didn't dream that up; market economics did. The mid-70s saw not only the rise of commercial AOR, but also Urban and modern AC -- and, after the 80/90 docket -- even more narrow offshoots of each of those. Radio used to be what it was in the 60s because there were just a few stations competing for the audience. As more stations started competing, it just made sense that they would each want to dominate one segment of the audience rather than wrestle with each other for a piece of the whole pie.
In the old days, everybody watched Ed Sullivan, too. You had the Dave Clark 5, Beverly Sills and Topo Gigo on the same show. Everybody watched it because there were only two other channels available. Everybody read Reader's Digest and shopped at Woolworth's, too. The point is that mass media, not just mass appeal radio, was marginalized by economics. The industry learned it was better to super serve a smaller audience. Lee Abrams understood that, but he sure as hell didn't invent it.
 
When did Hank's Place became Willie's Place?
Lee indicated that it had been a recent change when this promotion was made.

BTW...stations in the top right box recently ran a c :'( ntest for some classical and jazz at Lincoln Center event..
 
I've only been a subscriber for about two years but XM was definitely more like Abrams' vision before the merger, for example there used to be 3 or 4 different types of jazz channels. I don't even think there's a DJ on Willie's place anymore so there's no right wing krap on it. The decades channel used to play stuff you didn't hear everyday, now they largely just sound like conventional oldies channels.
I think the main reason I've stuck with XM is because of Little Steven's Underground Garage, they have great DJ's who do their shows with their own style. Every DJ I've heard on there plays his own style of music.

I'm also grateful to have grown up on 60's AM radio when they did indeed play The Beatles, then Frank Sinatra then some hit country tune all in the same 10 minutes. I got exposed to a lot of different styles of popular music as a result of that.
 
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