National Advertisers and 55+ radio audiences

[TheBigA]

I could use examples of currents to form a more complete opinion.

Here's a look at the Top 10 at WXPN Philadelphia. I suspect their typical listener is older than you.

This same station was one of the few that did a tribute to Sly Stone yesterday. They're also playing the new music from Springsteen.

lw TW Artist Title TW lw Move Aud

2 1 LORD HURON Nothing I Need 13 13 0.0844

46 2 PULP Spike Island 12 6 6 0.0812

21 3 WEDNESDAY Elderberry Wine 12 9 3 0.0787

16 4 WET LEG catch these fists 12 10 2 0.069

4 5 HAIM Relationships 11 12 -1 0.0745

5 6 LAUFEY Silver Lining 11 12 -1 0.068

27 7 LORDE What Was That 11 8 3 0.0581

268 8 TISBURYS The Anniversaries 11 1 10 0.0682

25 9 TUNDE ADEBIMPE God Knows 10 8 2 0.0612

49 10 ALEX G Afterlife 10 5 5 0.065

 

[K.M. Richards]

I don't recognize any of those artists, much less the songs.

And for the record, Mike Hagerty and I are about the same age, give or take a few months.

 

[TheBigA]

I don't recognize any of those artists, much less the songs.

And for the record, Mike Hagerty and I are about the same age, give or take a few months.

My point is that there are people your age and older who like new music. There's a lot being made for the 55+ demo. Artists are also touring later in life. Paul Simon is 82. He just released a new album, and is touring it this summer. The people who go to see him are mostly over 55. Yes he plays some hits, but half of the show is the new album, which he plays in its entirety.

 

[ted chittenden]

My point is that there are people your age and older who like new music. There's a lot being made for the 55+ demo. Artists are also touring later in life. Paul Simon is 82. He just released a new album, and is touring it this summer. The people who go to see him are mostly over 55. Yes he plays some hits, but half of the show is the new album, which he plays in its entirety.

Your response reminded me of the Traffic concert I attended in 1996. I took along a younger sighted friend who had never of the group or its music. The group began the show by playing selections from its latest album, and it wasn't until the show's end that they began playing some of their earlier work. On the way home from the concert, my sighted friend commented to me that watching the audience, he could tell that many people were bored with the new material but that everybody woke up when the old favorites came in to play.

If I'm reading my sighted friend's response correctly, Paul Simon might be served best on tour by intermingling both his new and old work throughout the entire show instead of parsing out his shows in to sections for new and older material.

 

[TheBigA]

Paul Simon might be served best on tour by intermingling both his new and old work throughout the entire show instead of parsing out his shows in to sections for new and older material.

When you say "best served," who are you talking about? He's doing these shows for himself. The new album a single piece of music, not a group of songs. So he starts the show with the new album, takes a break, then mixes in a few selected hits and older album cuts. I didn't see the Rolling Stones on this tour, but I looked at the setlist. They began with three classics and then did a new song. Two more classics, then a new song. So they mixed them up a bit. They also allowed the attendees to vote for which classics they did. Since this was a stadium tour, I'd imagine the ages of the audience was a bit more varied.

 

[radiofan2023]

And yet there are enough people who haven't "heard enough" and are the reason 80's-centric Classic Hits stations are still viable.

Personally, I find current-based stations annoyingly unlistenable. But no one forces me to listen to them any more than you are forced to listen to gold-based ones.

And I would rather lose a listener to the CHR stations than have to deal with a listener who wants me to play their personal favorite song that peaked at #67 in 1979.

That’s cool and I’ll check out your station. When is Freddy Snakeskin’s show on?

 

[K.M. Richards]

Flashback Weekend airs Friday and Saturday nights 7:00pm to midnight Mountain Time.

That's 6:00-11:00pm in Pacific (where I am), 8:00pm-1:00am Central, 9:00pm-2:00am Eastern.

Here's a link to the KRKE Stream.

 

[radiofan2023]

Flashback Weekend airs Friday and Saturday nights 7:00pm to midnight Mountain Time.

That's 6:00-11:00pm in Pacific (where I am), 8:00pm-1:00am Central, 9:00pm-2:00am Eastern.

Here's a link to the KRKE Stream.

Thanks!

 

[K.M. Richards]

My point is that there are people your age and older who like new music. There's a lot being made for the 55+ demo. Artists are also touring later in life. Paul Simon is 82. He just released a new album, and is touring it this summer. The people who go to see him are mostly over 55. Yes he plays some hits, but half of the show is the new album, which he plays in its entirety.

At least I admit that I don't recognize a lot of the current artists and songs. I have said for some time now that programmers who have managed to remain active at my age should not be programming current-based formats.

I have heard of Paul Simon though ... wasn't he part of a duo at some point? 😜

 

[Kemosabe]

I have heard of Paul Simon though ... wasn't he part of a duo at some point? 😜

Yes. He was paired with Richard B. Ogilvie. 😉

 

[K.M. Richards]

I have heard of Paul Simon though ... wasn't he part of a duo at some point? 😜

Yes. He was paired with Richard B. Ogilvie. 😉

I bet you didn't think I knew that the Lieutenant Governor of Illinois during Ogilvie's term as Governor also happened to be named Paul Simon, didja ...?

 

[CTListener]

I bet you didn't think I knew that the Lieutenant Governor of Illinois during Ogilvie's term as Governor also happened to be named Paul Simon, didja ...?

He ran for the Democratic nomination for president a time or two, never got past the primaries, obviously. His ears and bowtie were his calling cards.

 

[K.M. Richards]

He ran for the Democratic nomination for president a time or two, never got past the primaries, obviously. His ears and bowtie were his calling cards.

That, too ... but I know it was the connection to the governor's office that @Kemosabe was going for.

 

[vchimpanzee]

I don't understand some of these figures at all! The median age seems way too low. In the case of Oldies, most of these songs were before 58 years ago, meaning that you'd have to subtract eight to ten years from the playlist. For Adult Standards, it's virtually the entire playlist! It's hard to believe that a nostalgic format can bring in that many people who have no way of feeling nostalgic about it!

In my case, I was introduced to many of the songs in the 90s or later. I was just looking for an alternative to the AC stations which were getting worse. But the style of the music is similar to what I grew up with on TV and what makes me feel good at Christmas.

Even more songs or versions of them are new to me thanks to an online Internet-only station in England.

 

[vchimpanzee]

This is not something that happens rapidly; that sort of situation in radio is rare, such as the "instant death" of disco in 1980 where suddenly there were no real new hits in the genre and stations dropped the music very rapidly.

In Charlotte the disco FM evolved into what we would call rhythmic CHR today. Then "urban contemporary", which was a new term. The Black kids liked it, but I remember hearing "Jump" by Van Halen.

 

[vchimpanzee]

I don't recognize any of those artists, much less the songs.

And for the record, Mike Hagerty and I are about the same age, give or take a few months.

I have heard of Lorde and Haim, but that's about it.

 

[vchimpanzee]

My point is that there are people your age and older who like new music. There's a lot being made for the 55+ demo. Artists are also touring later in life. Paul Simon is 82. He just released a new album, and is touring it this summer. The people who go to see him are mostly over 55. Yes he plays some hits, but half of the show is the new album, which he plays in its entirety.

There is very little new music that interests me. New recordings of old songs are a different matter entirely, though a lot of them it turns out are now several decades old.

I like Paul Simon's music. With or without Garfunkel.

 

[michael hagerty]

Ok! I'm turning 62 a week from tomorrow. What that means in terms of "typical music" is that I went to high school between 1977 and 1981 so under what I've read, the music that most people remember the best is the music that they were listening to during their teenage years.

Sixteen to twenty-two. And not quite. Those are the ages that most people are most aware of the then-current music.

Let's see. That means that someone who is 55 years old now graduated from high school 7 years after I did, or in 1988. The music that person is most likely to remember the best is music that came out between 1984 and 1988 while he/she was in high school.

Actually, their peak awareness (and again, it's most people, not universal) would be 1986 to 1992.

As I've mentioned before, there is also fairly high awareness of music before and after (for most people up to 35 or older). 14 is so close to 16 that it's near-peak.

Putting this in radio terms, stations focused on 1980s music (either as an 80s station, a classic hits station, or an adult hits station) should be doing well.

There is a difference between music you were aware of at the time and music that is still memorable today.

There is also a difference between music you liked in those years and music that you'd want to hear on the radio today. Or may be a difference, anyway,

In my case, there are many songs I can think of that came out in my 30s that I'd infinitely rather hear than a hit from when I was 19.

I saw recently where KRTH was going to drop the 1970s songs from its playlist but nothing was said about dropping the 1980s entries.

KRTH (and most successful stations) does not make decisions about what to play and not play based on calendar dates. They research the appeal of the records TODAY among their target audience (which, to hit the 25-49 demo target, should be someone in their late 30s-early 40s, not their mid-50s).

Put another way, those people who are 55 today are still being well-served by radio as The BigA noted above. It really isn't until you get to the 65-years and older (and for nutcases like me who most prefer the music of the late 1960s and early 1970s) that you see radio turning away because of ad agencies no longer showing interest.

Yeah, but they're not really trying to serve us (I'm seven years older than you, Ted). It's just our good fortune that exposure in TV, movies, commercials and online have exposed and preserved popularity for some of "our" music among a group of people 25-30 years younger.



(EDIT: Ted, somehow I zoned the fact that I actually replied to your post last week, making many of those points. Oops! Meantime, that puts us closer to your birthday, so---Happy Birthday!")

 

[Delete My Account]

Given that I'm in this business, I'm something of an outlier, but I find it more appealing to hear either music before those prime years typically considered the ones where one's taste primarily develops and that I am supposed to have nostalgia for or new music.

For instance, classic KROQ (pre-grunge) or current KCRW is far more interesting to me than either 98.7 or 106.7 in Los Angeles. A part of it is, I suppose, being heavily interested in radio and as radio became more consolidated, playlists did become more conservative and uniform, and over time, alternative for instance crossed over to pop, became more "new rock" oriented, and there was also Modern AC which had a fairly short playlist and shared a lot of those tracks.

To me, 80s music and even 70s is still refreshing when I'm in the mood for it, or I'll sample an independent or non-commercial station and hear something new. So when I'm listening to classic hits radio, hearing stuff from the years where supposedly I'd "fondly" remember those songs, for the most part doesn't. It wasn't an era of my life I have great nostalgia for outside of music, so it doesn't evoke much in me that's positive, and I've heard the songs so much that even the ones I like I only need to hear very occasionally.

I say none of this to suggest I'm a typical listener. Merely to suggest that a factor may be that music from earlier eras holds on longer because it can evoke positive response in a wider range of demographics in a way later more polarized songs don't.

 

[semoochie]

Sixteen to twenty-two. And not quite. Those are the ages that most people are most aware of the then-current music.




Actually, their peak awareness (and again, it's most people, not universal) would be 1986 to 1992.

As I've mentioned before, there is also fairly high awareness of music before and after (for most people up to 35 or older). 14 is so close to 16 that it's near-peak.



There is a difference between music you were aware of at the time and music that is still memorable today.

There is also a difference between music you liked in those years and music that you'd want to hear on the radio today. Or may be a difference, anyway,

In my case, there are many songs I can think of that came out in my 30s that I'd infinitely rather hear than a hit from when I was 19.





KRTH (and most successful stations) does not make decisions about what to play and not play based on calendar dates. They research the appeal of the records TODAY among their target audience (which, to hit the 25-49 demo target, should be someone in their late 30s-early 40s, not their mid-50s).




Yeah, but they're not really trying to serve us (I'm seven years older than you, Ted). It's just our good fortune that exposure in TV, movies, commercials and online have exposed and preserved popularity for some of "our" music among a group of people 25-30 years younger.



(EDIT: Ted, somehow I zoned the fact that I actually replied to your post last week, making many of those points. Oops! Meantime, that puts us closer to your birthday, so---Happy Birthday!")

I'd be hard pressed to be a bigger Beatles fan if I had been 16-22 instead of ten! I used to date a girl two years younger who had the same experience! It could be that we're both outliers OR the music explosion in the 1960s was just so vital for anyone young!