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Power 106’s 40th Anniversary is approaching.

Brandon1993

Brandon1993

Ok, I know that Power 106 will be 40 next year so I just wanted to discuss the station. What are your memories that y’all hold dear until this very day. I was born in 1993 when they went more hip hop/R&B but still played dance until 1996-97 when B100.3 was on the air and that station was gone in a year. IMO 1994-2004 were Power’s best years.

Chime In People,

Brandon1993
 
Brandon1993 said:
Ok, I know that Power 106 will be 40 next year so I just wanted to discuss the station. What are your memories that y’all hold dear until this very day. I was born in 1993 when they went more hip hop/R&B but still played dance until 1996-97 when B100.3 was on the air and that station was gone in a year. IMO 1994-2004 were Power’s best years.

Chime In People,

Brandon1993
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I heard them shortly after they went on the air in early 1986, replacing Magic 106. It sounded great, much more urban than KIIS-FM or the then-fading KKHR.

This is the earliest I can find online:

 
I liked the CHR version of KWST better than any of the Power incarnations.

"The greatest hits of all time ... ALL the time!" (jingle) "K-West 106" "K-W-S-T." "Los Angeles!"
 
michael hagerty said:
I heard them shortly after they went on the air in early 1986, replacing Magic 106. It sounded great, much more urban than KIIS-FM or the then-fading KKHR.

This is the earliest I can find online:

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In 1986-93, they were going against KIIS FM, KJLH and KDAY AM 1580. In the 90’s, they went hip hop and KKBT @ 92.3 moved from Urban AC to Urban Contemporary thus playing hip hop and KDAY AM 1580 went off the air. From then on, Power became the hip hop powerhouse we all know and love.
 
TOH is exactly as I remembered it. I'd forgotten the produced intro ahead of the launch (voiced by Bobby Ocean!), even though I was listening when it aired that evening.

I note that several of the songs that were currents then are still Classic Hits staples ... even the Gary U.S. Bonds song (trivia: Written and produced by Bruce Springsteen) which I play occasionally as a Forgotten 45, although the AC crossovers like the Clarke/Duke Project around :50 have not aged as well.

KWST was the last top-40 station Chuck Martin programmed. And Pat Garrett did mornings at Y97 in Santa Barbara during much of the time I was doing afternoons there.
 
Brandon1993 said:
I’m aware that not everyone “loves” Power. Hell, I grew up on it have so many memories of how it used to be back in the 90/2000’s.
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Then perhaps you could have said "I love" instead of "we all love"? I hate being spoken for without being consulted ... :rolleyes:
 
MarkW said:
I much preferred the late 80s / early 90s version of KPWR to the hip-hop heavy version.
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I was born in the late 80’s but I’ve heard air checks from that time and I’ve have to admit that the station sounded damn good. I mainly remember the hip hop era Power 106 from 1993-Present.
 
I'm laughing as I read this thread. Different generations view the radio they heard at the same time on the same frequency very differently. That should really be no surprise to anyone.

As for me, while I was living in Phoenix and working in the hotel industry at the time, I can tell you that some of my colleagues were experimenting with listening to Internet radio and that many preferred KPWR's hip-hop playlist over that of local outlet KKFR.

The other thing I find interesting about this station is its surveys available through the ARSA survey site. From the station's 1986 launch through 1990 or 1991, the station consistently produced a top-40 survey each week of all of the current music it was playing. However, when I checked the surveys from 1993 and early 1994 from the same source, the playlist size has been cut down to 30 or fewer singles per week (the number is not consistent) and, as with Billboard magazine at the time, songs they were playing were staying on their charts longer. It was also in the spring of 1993 with Dr. Dre's "G-Thang," that KPWR-FM shifted to playing more of the gangsta (though usually the clean versions thereof) than it had in the past.
 
ted chittenden said:
I'm laughing as I read this thread. Different generations view the radio they heard at the same time on the same frequency very differently. That should really be no surprise to anyone.

As for me, while I was living in Phoenix and working in the hotel industry at the time, I can tell you that some of my colleagues were experimenting with listening to Internet radio and that many preferred KPWR's hip-hop playlist over that of local outlet KKFR.

The other thing I find interesting about this station is its surveys available through the ARSA survey site. From the station's 1986 launch through 1990 or 1991, the station consistently produced a top-40 survey each week of all of the current music it was playing. However, when I checked the surveys from 1993 and early 1994 from the same source, the playlist size has been cut down to 30 or fewer singles per week (the number is not consistent) and, as with Billboard magazine at the time, songs they were playing were staying on their charts longer. It was also in the spring of 1993 with Dr. Dre's "G-Thang," that KPWR-FM shifted to playing more of the gangsta (though usually the clean versions thereof) than it had in the past.
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I remember when they first went on the air, their playlist was upbeat but varied. In particular they played "You can Call Me Al" by Paul Simon and "I Want To Be a Cowboy" by Boys Don't Cry. This made the station interesting, but soon it was all rap and hip hop and I was gone.
 
ted chittenden said:
The other thing I find interesting about this station is its surveys available through the ARSA survey site. From the station's 1986 launch through 1990 or 1991, the station consistently produced a top-40 survey each week of all of the current music it was playing. However, when I checked the surveys from 1993 and early 1994 from the same source, the playlist size has been cut down to 30 or fewer singles per week (the number is not consistent) and, as with Billboard magazine at the time, songs they were playing were staying on their charts longer. It was also in the spring of 1993 with Dr. Dre's "G-Thang," that KPWR-FM shifted to playing more of the gangsta (though usually the clean versions thereof) than it had in the past.
Click to expand...
Oddly, it took many stations and programmers decades to realize that there was no such thing as "Top 40".

Call-out research on currents that developed in the later 70's really showed that there were less than 20 real hits at any given moment in time.

Yes, there was new music... as many as 5 or 6 new cuts a week... that Top 40 stations played. About half, at best, became real hits. And there were songs that were fading; we now call them recurrents. Those could be played more lightly, as they had that crispy feel of getting burnt out and turning negative unless we slowed them down.

So, really, if you add the 20 currents, an average of 5 "new" songs and maybe 10 or 15 recurrents, you do have 40 songs. But half or less are proven, current hits. Just looking at those station charts or "surveys" proves that.

Also worth noting that, since stations only had a few rotation categories for all their currents, there was no difference between, let's say, #13 and #18 or #6 and #9. So most of those charts were very arbitrary and done more to amuse listeners than to reflect any real data.
 
davideduardo said:
Oddly, it took many stations and programmers decades to realize that there was no such thing as "Top 40".

Call-out research on currents that developed in the later 70's really showed that there were less than 20 real hits at any given moment in time.

Yes, there was new music... as many as 5 or 6 new cuts a week... that Top 40 stations played. About half, at best, became real hits. And there were songs that were fading; we now call them recurrents. Those could be played more lightly, as they had that crispy feel of getting burnt out and turning negative unless we slowed them down.

So, really, if you add the 20 currents, an average of 5 "new" songs and maybe 10 or 15 recurrents, you do have 40 songs. But half or less are proven, current hits. Just looking at those station charts or "surveys" proves that.

Also worth noting that, since stations only had a few rotation categories for all their currents, there was no difference between, let's say, #13 and #18 or #6 and #9. So most of those charts were very arbitrary and done more to amuse listeners than to reflect any real data.
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Since we've been talking about (and looking at) the new REELRADIO, I found this quote that Richard Irwin had put on the site (I think at its inception 29 years ago), showing that Top 40 began with some seriously flawed logic:


"Todd (Storz) and some others were sitting around figuring out what they could do on their station and they noticed that WDSU had a program called the Top 20. And they thought if the Top 20 was successful, that the Top 40 would be even better - and that's what they said - We're going to be twice as good as WDSU 'cause we're gonna play - The Top 40."

- Hon. Wm. L. Armstrong, U.S.S., Ret., Denver, Colorado
from Radio's Revolution and the World's Happiest Broadcasters
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The mistake was in not recognizing that there were different levels of popularity. Number 10 and number 39 may both be in the Top 40, but they're completely different animals.

Bill Drake told me that he hated the weekly countdown of the "Boss 30" or "Big 30" on the RKO stations. "I'm going to spend an hour every Wednesday night playing the least popular half of the playlist back-to-back?". But both Ron Jacobs at KHJ and Tom Rounds at KFRC insisted on the value of a countdown.

And, of course, years later, they formed Watermark and launched American Top 40, which proved their point. Still, a lot of people I knew tuned in for the last hour or two of AT40 because hour number one was filled with songs they didn't know yet and songs they were sick to death of.
 
michael hagerty said:
And, of course, years later, they formed Watermark and launched American Top 40, which proved their point. Still, a lot of people I knew tuned in for the last hour or two of AT40 because hour number one was filled with songs they didn't know yet and songs they were sick to death of.
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KRKE runs the classic American Top 40: The 80s shows on Sundays, and (naturally) I listen to it on the stream, often with the cue sheet open in my PDF reader. Even today, the songs that have remained viable for the Classic Hits format are largely the ones in the last half of the show, although now those first two hours contain the debuts of songs that went on to be big hits ... although there were a lot of stiffs in there, too.

But even some of the big charters (including more than a few #1s) are poison to the format now.
 
K.M. Richards said:
KRKE runs the classic American Top 40: The 80s shows on Sundays, and (naturally) I listen to it on the stream, often with the cue sheet open in my PDF reader. Even today, the songs that have remained viable for the Classic Hits format are largely the ones in the last half of the show, although now those first two hours contain the debuts of songs that went on to be big hits ... although there were a lot of stiffs in there, too.

But even some of the big charters (including more than a few #1s) are poison to the format now.
Click to expand...
I listen to the "Big 40 countdown" every week on SiriusXM's Eighties on Eight Channel, and I am just the opposite. I generally only listen to tracks 40-11. The top 10 have been burned to a crisp for 40 years. Don't need to hear "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" again. Or possibly ever. But I am glad to hear "They Don't Know" by Tracy Ullman. Similar songs, one is fun and adds variety to my music listening, the other... I have heard more than enough.
 
As has been said many times, Flipper (by me, David, and others) you belong to a sub-class of listeners called "outliers". Your preferences are outside those of the mass audience we have to program to in order to be commercially viable.

Okay, we get it. You can stop using that "burned to a crisp" line anytime now. It does not apply to the vast majority of listeners' POV.

Just because you don't want to hear those songs again doesn't mean everyone doesn't. Quite the opposite, as it turns out. We're going to continue to make them happy, at the expense of losing the relative handful of listeners like yourself.

All you do by occasionally dredging that up is irritate the professionals here. Is that the image you want for yourself?
 


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