Smoke said:
Eli Polonsky said:
They're afraid that for every listener that might say "I haven't heard that song in a while", that perhaps a hundred listeners might say "I don't know this song. I'm changing the station. Maybe WROR is playing something I know right now".
And there is a whole generation of listeners who are turning off the radio entirely because of those tight playlists. If you really only want to hear the same 80 songs over and over again then an iPod is what you want, not the radio.
Got news for you... that generation, who enjoyed the broad, deep playlists of late 1960's "underground" FM rock radio and of 1970's progressive album rock radio, ALREADY turned off from commercial radio a long time ago... twenty to thirty years ago... they went to their record and tape collections and shows on public/college radio stations... then they added CD's, satellite radio and internet radio... and more recently iPods, and perhaps eventually some HD-2 stations... and conventional commercial stations throwing in some lesser-known songs is NOT going to lure them back. That audience turned off commercial radio for good years ago, and if the major stations try throwing in more than a very occasional lesser-known track nowadays, they'll only alienate their current hit-focused listener core.
WROR tried it for half a year in 2001. They called the format "Timeless Rock And Roll Classics". They mixed deeper late 60's and 70's AOR tracks into their Classic Hits format, and they played an entire popular album all the way through every evening. They were playing some songs I hadn't heard (on commercial radio) since the heydays of WBCN and WCOZ. I and a very small handful of deeper music afficionados thought it was really cool, but their ratings took a sharp nose dive, and kept going down after half a year of the format. All they did was alienate their current core of Classic Hits listeners, without successfully luring any of the old 60's/70's AOR audience to try coming back to commercial radio. That former audience had no idea it was even happening. When they went back to their narrow, repetitive Classic Hits format (to the present), their ratings came right back up, and have since surpassed WZLX's consistently.
Charles Laquidara tried it when he was moved from WBCN to WZLX in the mid-90's. At first, WZLX let him play some of the music he used to play on WBCN in the 70's that WZLX no longer normally played. But, their morning ratings went consistently down for the year or two that they let him do that! When they made Charles stick to their usual playlist for his last couple of years there, his ratings came back up! He was no longer alienating their younger current Classic Rock listeners with cuts that, to them, weren't well known, and Charles' older listeners who had followed him through the years still stuck with him for his personality, despite the playlist that bored them. When Charles left WZLX, the last remaining bastion of that audience left WZLX forever, and left commercial radio in Boston as well.
A small (but very faithful and supportive) cult of listeners from the AOR heydays listen to my bi-weekly "Lost & Found" 60-'s/70's show on volunteer MIT college station WMBR, which doesn't have to worry about accruing mainstream ratings. I play some of the music you may have heard on WBCN or WCOZ in the late 60's or 70's, but has since been dropped from commercial radio. (I alternate the show bi-weekly with a former WCOZ DJ, Larry Miller). We purposely don't play the songs which are currently overplayed on commercial classic stations, though we often play deeper, neglected cuts from the same major artists. Occasionally some of our listeners may call requesting some of the overplayed commercial hits, and I have to tell them "Sorry, we don't play that song because it's still played every day on WZLX, WROR, etc... but I'll play another great track by that artist that you haven't heard in a while", and they usually say, "Well, I didn't know that song is still played every day, because I haven't turned the dial up into the commercial band for twenty-five years!!! ...But, when I was tuning around the public radio stations on the lower end as I usually do nowadays, I stumbled onto your show, and it brings back what I used to listen to on commercial album rock stations back in the 70's!"
Commercial FM radio has really replaced what AM was decades ago. Mainstream, hit-oriented music for the mainstream audience. FM is the new AM. So, what is the new FM? There doesn't seem to be one such thing. It's now scattered in bits and pieces between satellite radio, non-commercial radio, internet radio, people's iPod's, hard drives and CD collections, and perhaps the beginnings of HD-2 programming.
