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New Ratings are Out for the Fall Book

I just want to make one thing clear:

1. I don't listen to K-Rock becuase I'm not a rock music type
2. I can't stand Howard Stern or anything that has to do with him
3. I have never listened to DLR, O & A, Kidd Chris, Paulson's night show on 'DVE, or Loveline so I have no opinion on their content

Man, give it up. Lawrence Welk, Guy Lombardo and Glenn Miller Orchestra have all passed on, live for the new millenium. I suggest you start with the Delilah show.

(Ok, I'm just trying to add some humor here, nothing personal my friend).
 
SteelRocker said:
I just want to make one thing clear:

1. I don't listen to K-Rock becuase I'm not a rock music type
2. I can't stand Howard Stern or anything that has to do with him
3. I have never listened to DLR, O & A, Kidd Chris, Paulson's night show on 'DVE, or Loveline so I have no opinion on their content

Man, give it up. Lawrence Welk, Guy Lombardo and Glenn Miller Orchestra have all passed on, live for the new millenium. I suggest you start with the Delilah show.

(Ok, I'm just trying to add some humor here, nothing personal my friend).

Gee, I don't see any reason to take that personal...LOL!!!

My point being that my opinions of this station don't deal with the content, simply the numbers (however the remainder of my post is strangely missing). A station located in metro Pittsburgh cannot survive the numbers that it has put up.

Unfortunately Dave (already let go), Bob (unknown if he left or was shown the door), Nick, and Megan have suffered or will be suffering the results of those numbers. That's the tragedy of this whole thing...
 
IO- And I know what you're saying.

But let me ask you this. You have a station.

It's not doing well. So I put in new programming. It does even WORSE!

Where is the logic to then go with the programming that has taken the 2.1 to a 1.5 (or whatever it is)?

And yes, I know that's the overall audience, but I cannot believe that the target audiences went UP if the overall ratings went down during this period of time.
 
Pratte4Life said:
What sold me on K-Rock was when I listened to it early on and heard "Round and Round" by Ratt. Maybe that's your cup of tea and maybe it's not- but it was No. 12 at its peak on the POP charts and an MTV staple 23 years ago- the very definition of what should be played on a classic rock station.

As an added bonus- the drummer is from Pittsburgh.

So where is it in the WDVE rotation?

"Oh, we can't play that. We have to instead make fun of that era with 'Mullet Talk.'"

I am currently looking at the last 10 songs played by WDVE according to their website. EIGHT of them are 29 years or older.

The only two that are within the last 20 years are Steve Earle's "Copperhead Road" from 1988, which hardly made a blip on the radar screen that year, and 1991's "Enter Sandman" by Metallica- which I could probably get on The X if I wanted to.

Is this WDVE or 3WS?

With the demise of K-Rock it is very likely that the music of every 30something Pittsburgher's youth will no longer be heard on the radio. They call us "Yinzer Mullets" but then we can't hear the soundtrack of our lives.

To trade that away for John McIntire and Chris Kidd (or is it Kidd Chris?) is simply not a positive.

In the immortal words of Cameron Diaz, "Ratt is the ------!!" Pratte, call me the next time you have KRock on - maybe it only sucks [EDIT] when I tune in and we're tuning in at opposite times. Ha ha.

I agree with you about 30-somethings losing our music on the radio. I had to go out and buy "War" by U2. I never had before because I thought "hey, I'll ALWAYS be able to hear that on DVE." Then one day "Surrender" was on the Electric Lunch - and I realized how damn long it had been since I'd heard it on there.

More than anything, I miss Channel 97. They had a good thing going IMO and if something had to turn into BOB I wish it would have been one of the soccer-mom stations.

Just to put this all in perspective, though - a friend of mine who's a Pgh native now living in Virginia Beach told me that when they're driving up here and can start picking up DVE, they jump up and down in happiness because the radio sucks so bad down there.


[EDIT-offensive content]
 
At the risk of sounding like my friend Realist, who would look something like this up-

I am looking at the Classic Rock station in Virginia Beach, 100.5 MAX-FM. I can't find their playlist, but they have this "Tune in to Hear" icon on the top of their website and they roll the bands they play.

Here's what I see

Motley Crue
Van Halen
Nirvana
Greenday
Shinedown
Aerosmith
Pink Floyd
AC/DC
Ozzy Osbourne
Pearl Jam
Hendrix
Nickelback
Metallica
Staind
Led Zepplin
Linkin Park

Now, this is a much more recent playlist than what you would hear on WDVE. I'm going to guess your friends aren't really into modern rock and prefer the songs of the 70s.

Which is fine. That's what WDVE does. And no city holds on to the 70s like Pittsburgh does, and there is undeniably a LOT of great music from that era.

So we can brush this off and say WDVE is No. 1 and they shouldn't change a thing and Pittsburgh has spoken and they want the 70s songs and K-Rock had ratings in negative numbers and if you compare what WDVE gets to an 80s intensive classic rock station like 105 in Jacksonville, the Jacksonville station doesn't come close to WDVE in the ratings.

But the last I looked WDVE's average listener age was 39.

And with the playlist they have now, it's not going to get any younger.

And if it doesn't change, then the 30 somethings like me who went to country in the early 90s when rock went from being a party to a downer are going to make WDSY No. 1.

So yeah, I want my K-Rock.

For the same reasons that 20 years ago I said I wanted my MTV.
 
WDVE will undoubtedly have demographic problems in the future. But they don't have them now. They're making tons of money. The management people who are in place now aren't worried about what happens 10 years from now, because they won't be there. They'll be further up the ladder because of the success they've had at DVE.

BTW, a list of bands we play isn't indicative of a station's sound because it doesn't address the rotation of the music. You can play music from a certain band, but you might only play it once a week.
 
Now, this is a much more recent playlist than what you would hear on WDVE. I'm going to guess your friends aren't really into modern rock and prefer the songs of the 70s.

The problem is you're listing artists (bands) and not songs. Some of those artists had careers that spanned several decades.

Aerosmith had their first hits in the 1970's
Ozzy Osbourne first gained fame as the lead singer of Black Sabbath in the 70's
Hendrix hit the scene in 1967, and died in 1970!
Led Zepplin's first two albums were before 1970

The thing is, without knowing which songs from those artists get the most rotation, that list doesn't tell us how old or recent their playlist is. The other thing, which I keep trying to remind everyone, is that once a song gets more than fifteen or twenty years old, listeners don't really remember with great precision when they first heard it. They also don't care when they heard it.

By way of illustration, some of the guys in the church praise band I play in are in their 20's. Some of their favorite music is stuff that was 10, 15, 20 or more years old the first time they ever heard it. They don't care. They like music they like because they like the sound of it.

It's music, it ain't wine. The vintage year doesn't matter nearly as much as whether or not the audience likes the sound. I realize it makes programming radio stations easier to use song release date as a criteria instead of sound, because release date is so easy to look up. You don't need to know music or to have any musical taste yourself to look up the date a song came out.

Frankly, DVE's biggest worry isn't that new listeners who grow up won't like the songs they play because the songs are too old. They won't like 'DVE because 'DVE has burned out the small sampling of songs they play.
 
Realist, and Boss- I think you're missing the point.

For one thing, the station in Virginia Beach didn't have their playlist up so I went with the bands they were promoting. I am assuming if they are promoting those bands they get quality airplay.

If not, then we probably discovered why the aforementioned transplanted Pittsburghers in Virginia Beach found WDVE so refreshing!

Let's say that AC/DC, Ozzy, Van Halen, and Aerosmith are all bands or musicians that would be considered "Pre-1980" because of their dates of birth.

That leaves nine of the 16 bands featured by the Virginia Beach station as Post-1980.

My point is that to most people under 40 in Pittsburgh- WDVE has not become "Classic Rock"- but it is rather "Oldies Rock."

I don't dislike WDVE per se, but it's sort of a dish my mom found I liked to eat for dinner and served it so much that now I'm sick of it.

That's why I liked K-Rock. It was still meat, but I was getting Adam's Ribs for once instead of liver and fish.

Boss, you said it in a nutshell what I hear out of my speakers when I tune into a station that dammit- I WANT TO LISTEN TO!

"The management people don't care."

Yes, and the audience can hear that. I can hear they are happy with their Model T Ford of a station because it sells well- and so why should I worry about developing an automatic transmission with the cost that research will involve?

In it's hey day of 1990 or so, WDVE was able to beat a KDKA radio station for a book or two that was still worthy of all the legendary status "KDKA" demands.

Now, we are legitimately forseeing a day when a country music station north of the Mason Dixon line could overtake WDVE, and I think it could happen sooner than you think.

All I'm saying for WDVE to prevent this is to embrace the hair bands. It doesn't have to be intensive- but would it kill them to put Poison or Ratt- bands I mention because of their Pittsburgh ties- into the playlist?

I don't care that the 50-year-old from Bloomfield calls up and complains that you're playing that fairy Bret Michaels and not enough Bay City Rollers. He's giving you reaction. He's like the guy who says you have to get Howard Stern off the air- and then listens to Stern for two hours.

But that will bring back the guys like me. It'll be something new. You won't be insulting everyone under 40, the way you do now with "Mullet Talk."

And you will hold on to the top spot indefinitely.
 
BRING BACK THE GLAM ROCK/HAIR BANDS ON DVE, RAH RAH RAH!!! ;)

Those days were the best anyhow! You went to the Mellon Arena to see a concert, the DVE crew had their balloon pumped up, a table with giveaways and airstaff with signed pictures to give out, and all you saw was spandex, makeup, big hair, high heels, on the "female groupies". :eek: :eek: The music was the added feature, kind of like the cherry on top of the whip cream. ;D. Man, do I miss those days!
 
It's cute that you think appealing to "guys like you" is the key to ratings success. Especially when you're finding fault with the top station and holding up the failed K-Rock as an example of the way it should be done.

Keep telling yourself this: Radio is a business.

Business is real good at WDVE.
 
That leaves nine of the 16 bands featured by the Virginia Beach station as Post-1980.

You're missing the point totally. It's not about when the music was recorded. That only matters to radio insiders who can't get past the paradigms of yesteryear. I'm a baby boomer. I'm part of probably the last generation to make a super big deal out of the newness of music. My children's generation might have cared to some extent. My grandchildren's generation couldn't care less. People today are so used to having both the new and older music being played interchangeably that they just don't care about when it was recorded any more. People in their 50's care about Top 40 from the 60's, because those were the songs playing on the radio while they were enacting the live version of "Paradise by the Dashboard Light", if you catch my drift.

But people in their 20's and 30's were probably listening to a radio station that played both old and new songs while they were watching the submarine races (it's challenging to come up with euphamisms the moderator won't delete), so they might enjoy hearing songs from 1967 or 1972 for the exact same reason that their parents like those songs! They were from the soundtrack for their teen years.

My 22 year old daughter likes the Grateful Dead. She knows nothing of their history. She couldn't believe that I saw them in concert in 1968. She loves Led Zeppelin. She doesn't care when their music was recorded, she just likes the way it sounds.

You have to realize that people's attitudes towards songs on the radio aren't that much different from their attitudes towards television programs. There are plenty of people who'd rather watch old sitcoms on Nick at Nite than the new ones that don't seem as funny. When I was a little kid, I preferred old Three Stooges shorts to most of the new stuff on TV in the 50's.

I do agree that 'DVE needs to loosen up their playlist for the sake of their future. Increasing the breadth of what they play is a good idea. So is increase the depth of their playlist. But they can't worry about recording dates, those don't mean much of anything to the listeners.
 
Boss, WDVE has the lead.

And they can keep punching the ball into the line.

But the thing is- in this game the clock never runs out.

Realist- No, I really do hear what you're saying.

And we are coming to the same conclusion- that WDVE should expand their playlist a bit.

All I am saying that they should do it with the only thing that got K-Rock whatever music listenership it had.
 
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