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Novelty Music - Did Dr. Demento kill it?

I think the question isn't whether novelty recording is dead (Weird Al proves it's not), but whether you can get airplay for it anymore even if you're Weird Al (I don't think you can). And I'm not sure Dr. Demento has all that much to do with it. It's more about songs that, by their nature, will cause an unacceptable percentage of your audience to change the station.
 
If anything Dr. Demento kept it going at least into the 90's on to his radio show when stations stopped playing them. It was in the late 90's and 2000's that his show gradually faded away from being on stations.
 
kwthom said:
Based on post in a thread...


Novelty music - a thing (depending on where you were...) in the late 50's thru the early 1970's.

Did the rise [and fall] of programs like Dr Demento 'kill' this type of recording?
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Dr. Demento is an acquired taste, but my friends and I used to laugh our heads off at his zany show on weekend nights. He found really crazy things to play, especially songs dealing with banned substances, which we thought were hilarious. ( We have since moved on).
Novelty songs on the radio had been around since the 50's with Alvin and the Chipmunks, Purple People-Eater, and Spike Jones. They tend to come and go.

Rick Dees tells a very funny story about his novelty recording of "Disco Duck" from the mid 70's, when he mentioned to his own station, WMPS in Memphis, that Disco Duck was # 1 in Chicago, where ( I think) WBBM played it all the time. He was promptly fired, and WMPS never did play it. But, he was hired on at WHBQ Memphis, an RJO station, then transferred out to KHJ in L.A. I was kind of ambivalent about disco, but the duck song was cute.
We don't have this kind of silliness today, (except for maybe the "Baby Shark" type of songs), but in 70's, it was fun.

Rick Dees

 
Pretty simple: It was a niche audience and genre that over time faded away. Now you have amateurs in their bedroom doing funny dance videos via TikTok. Will goofy song parodies ever return? Only time will tell.
 
I tend to agree with both @michael and @anotherguyTN. It's my opinion that Dr. Demento didn't kill novelty music. To the contrary, he gave it a platform and got more exposure for that genre and those songs and artists than would have been possible without his program. That said, "novelty songs" don't really fit into any radio format, aside from maybe a few that get tossed in during morning shows here and there, or used as bumper music on occasion during talk shows.

Another problem with shows like Dr. Demento's is that, while he may have been popular in the 70s and 80s when he was carried by many CHR stations (my local station aired his show on Sunday nights from 10 - midnight), it's tough to keep up the same schtick each week with many of the same songs and the "funny five" and the sound effects and all of that, and remain relevant after a number of years. From what I recall, his star started to really fade when many of the mom and pop stations that carried him were gobbled up under Clear-Channel and other larger corporations, who didn't really see a place for his show in the formats they were airing. At one point, he told the remaining stations that carried his show that they couldn't air his program via their streams, only OTA. That, of course, caused them headaches as they now had to air his program OTA and pick different content for their streaming platforms and that caused many of the remaining stations to drop him. Last I heard, as of a few years ago you could only access his programs through his website. You could purchase individual older shows or there were other subscription levels, including for those who wanted to hear a new program from him each week, which he was still creating and producing.
 
I remember in elementary school enjoying songs like Dickie Goodman's "Mr. Jaws," where Goodman plugged in snippets from popular songs of that day as answers to questions being asked by a reporter in Amity. Norfolk, VA Top 40 station WGH played it.

In the 80s, AOR station WNOR had a pretty talented group of musicians who helped the morning team put together parody songs like "Atlantic Avenue," which was to the tune of Eddy Grant's "Electric Avenue," and "Puppy Livers," which was based on ZZ Top's "TV Dinners." I think these songs were put on an album whose proceeds went to a local charity. Fun Times!!
 
Mikey Radio said:
I tend to agree with both @michael and @anotherguyTN. It's my opinion that Dr. Demento didn't kill novelty music. To the contrary, he gave it a platform and got more exposure for that genre and those songs and artists than would have been possible without his program. That said, "novelty songs" don't really fit into any radio format, aside from maybe a few that get tossed in during morning shows here and there, or used as bumper music on occasion during talk shows.

Another problem with shows like Dr. Demento's is that, while he may have been popular in the 70s and 80s when he was carried by many CHR stations (my local station aired his show on Sunday nights from 10 - midnight), it's tough to keep up the same schtick each week with many of the same songs and the "funny five" and the sound effects and all of that, and remain relevant after a number of years. From what I recall, his star started to really fade when many of the mom and pop stations that carried him were gobbled up under Clear-Channel and other larger corporations, who didn't really see a place for his show in the formats they were airing. At one point, he told the remaining stations that carried his show that they couldn't air his program via their streams, only OTA. That, of course, caused them headaches as they now had to air his program OTA and pick different content for their streaming platforms and that caused many of the remaining stations to drop him. Last I heard, as of a few years ago you could only access his programs through his website. You could purchase individual older shows or there were other subscription levels, including for those who wanted to hear a new program from him each week, which he was still creating and producing.
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I was just recently on his website at https://www.drdemento.com and he is charging $9.95 a month for new episodes alone or $14.95 for new episodes and access to 3 archived episodes per month and $3.00 each for individual episodes. That's just too high unless you're a truly devoted fan. $3.00 for each individual episode might not be too bad if you want something out of the archives but even with that I don't know that I'd want anything that badly. I actually think the Doctor is hurting his sales by charging like this.
 
I think the $149.95 annual subscription is a better deal. A new 2 hour episode every week and 3 credits weekly (not monthly) to listen to archived episodes. Unless I was retired I can’t imagine having enough time to listen to more than 4 episodes weekly (assuming each “credit” equals one episode). There are also package desks of holiday plus “Funny 25” shows - 5 shows for $9.00.
 
TheBigA said:
Ever hear of Weird Al Yankovic? He was a Demento desciple who had novelty hits in the 80s, 90s, and 00s.
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Weird Al's You Don't Love Me Anymore received a lot of regular air play in the 1992 timeframe on stations on Luzon in the Philippines. I was living in the Philippines at the time and I suspect that I heard it a number of times before I actually listened to the lyrics and realized what they were.
 
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