VODood said:
I stand corrected on The Contours tune. I was confused with the other black group, Isley's and "Shout", which is '59, and WMJI plays as well.
@Baylor. no way to know for sure whether those 50+ would equate The Contours tune from Dirty Dancing without asking directly. Those under 40? Perhaps. Even so, doesn't matter. It's still an early 60s tune.
80s aren't oldies. I'll debate that all day long. I don't care that they're old songs. "Oldies" is 50s, 60s, 70s. And no one in their 40s wants "their" music referred to as oldies (ne' classic hits). They just don't.
As for PPM 'saving the format". It wasn't dead. It was proclaimed "dead" by witless tools inside CC including a SRVP I worked with in the South who admitted to "not getting the format". It's always been a viable format. Oldies stations were being flipped in the Southern region but in the NE and West, not a one in that time span. Each SRVP treated his region as a fiefdom. MC was horrible as a SR Programmer. Entercom and CBS, for the most part, stayed the course. CBS made some mistakes with some flips or tweaks but realized they phucked up and righted things. PPM came along and proved what most of us knew all along. That the cume was there. The numbers and demos were there.
I'm 44. Can't stand most 80s tunes. I rarely listen to Lake.
Yes...younger people DO equate songs such as "Do You Love Me" as being from "Dirty Dancing". Same with Top Gun and "You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling" and Ghost with "Unchained Melody."
This is why you can play those songs even with today's pushed forward classic hits/oldies format.
I find it amusing that you say "oldies wasn't dying" when the facts are: stations were leaving the format as quickly as 2 or 3 a week. I worked for a station (not owned by CC) that actually was a hybrid (playing music from the 50's to the 80's) and very successfully so before its sale to a different company (not CC). The new owners brought the station back to a more typical 50's to early 70's format. While the ratings increased, the revenue did not. In fact, it went down...because advertisers were asking us, "When are you going to play the 80's again to get the "kids" and the "younger people"?
WCBS-FM left the format because its revenues were not what they wanted and CBS wanted to turn that around. Granted, the "Jack" format turned it around...just the wrong way. By pushing the format forward and returning the station to a "newer" oldies sound, they rocketed back into the top 5 and offered advertisers better and more salable overall demos.
Me? Personally, I like the "50's to 80's" concept. I have always said that there are a certain number of "timeless" songs that should be played by an oldies station, even if it's in a smaller proportion than before. And, a lot of people in radio can't get their arms around that.
But, I will admit...I also think the argument about "what are oldies" is a vain and selfish argument by people of my baby boomer generation. What right do we have to tell others what is an oldie? Top 40 stations in the 60's called them "oldies" when they were 2-3 years old. By the start of oldies stations, 20 years was said to the "starting point". By today, oldies stations should be playing 90's music...but the research doesn't work for that at this point. (And I get that, I personally have no nostalgia for Bell Biv DeVoe and Warrant...but I can accept that someone in their 30's and 40's just might.)
I have always said: every generation has its soundtrack. That's what made the oldies format work in the first place. I run an LP-FM in Ohio that is a "50's to 80's" oldies station. And we do have an audience, based on the well over 100% increase in underwriters since we started the format 3 years ago. But we have gotten not one complaint from a listener telling us we're not an oldies station because we're playing 80's music. I credit that to the fact that the 80's music is a component, but not the "meat" of the format...and that the folks who like the early rock music still hears Elvis and Chuck Berry, the Drifters and Leslie Gore, just to name a few.
PPM did show people would listen to oldies. But, PPM showed you could lower your demos a bit and still keep your station relevant to advertisers. The #1 cume station in the market, top heavy with 50 plus listeners will not get the big buys. And, ad money is everything in broadcasting, as you know. If the advertisers weren't there, the "oldies" would be gone.
We can all have our opinions, and that's fine. But, broadcasting is a business...and formats have to be upgraded or changed to fit the desire of advertisers, or we're all up a creek without a paddle. And, I'm just a realist. I don't see that changing.
