AC, with all its vocals, was much too literal and left us no room to just let our minds go where they wanted to and dream. With Beautiful Music only our imagination and the sky was the limit.
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Reflections on Radio and Records... from half a century ago
- Thread starter davideduardo
- Start date
I found vocals distracting in background music.
This was true even in stores where it was very soft AC not played loud.
When my grocery store switched to AC the volume was really loud and it drove me nuts.
This was true even in stores where it was very soft AC not played loud.
When my grocery store switched to AC the volume was really loud and it drove me nuts.
There have been a few articles written about the decline of certain formats.
"As a one-time disc jockey who played easy-listening music, I appreciate Mike Kerrigan’s “Easy Listening = Alternative Music + Time” (op-ed, Feb. 29). He is right: The definition of easy listening has changed radically over the years; e.g., from big band music to certain rock recordings.
Mr. Kerrigan even states that the music of my era (earlier than his) “has been stripped of vocals and banished to elevators.” We look at instrumentals differently. There were times in the 1940s and ’50s when half the Top 10 lacked any words at all."
"Beautiful continued to be a powerhouse format for a few more years, but the audience was aging out of the target demos. This meant that the revenue opportunity was diminishing and the major market Beautiful stations gradually eased into soft rock formats. In recent years this trend has been accelerated by the corporate consolidations that have seen so most major stations acquired by huge publicly traded corporate operators. The individual station owners and small group operators who might have kept the format alive are now either gone or retired."
www.newyorker.com
"At its height, smooth jazz was a life-style-driven format associated with comfortable, if not extravagant, affluence, as evidenced by the popularity of smooth-jazz cruises. Some of these floating festivals continue to sail to their usual ports of call—Fort Lauderdale, Cozumel, Nassau—even in a world without the infrastructure of terrestrial smooth-jazz radio, which now looks like a predictable casualty of the global financial crisis of the late two-thousands. “It’s not only the demise of smooth jazz,” the guitarist Gil Parris, quoted by JazzTimes, in 2019, says. “I think it’s the demise of the middle class, the middle ground of music, period.”
The rise and fall of smooth jazz reflects economic conditions, but also generational ones. Conceived in the nineteen-eighties, the format grew with promising swiftness in the nineties. Throughout most of the two-thousands, and even while drawing resentment from some quarters, it nevertheless seemed assured long-term success. By the middle of the following decade, however, it had somehow been consigned to virtual irrelevance. Though few of my fellow-millennials came of age in a smooth-jazz world, we can all see the parallels between its trajectory and that ascribed to our generation, more than a few of whose members spent their youths preparing to join institutions only to have those institutions collapse upon their arrival. My own career in smooth jazz came to an end in 2008, but at least I still had my backup dream: to become the editor of a newspaper book-review supplement."
"As a one-time disc jockey who played easy-listening music, I appreciate Mike Kerrigan’s “Easy Listening = Alternative Music + Time” (op-ed, Feb. 29). He is right: The definition of easy listening has changed radically over the years; e.g., from big band music to certain rock recordings.
Mr. Kerrigan even states that the music of my era (earlier than his) “has been stripped of vocals and banished to elevators.” We look at instrumentals differently. There were times in the 1940s and ’50s when half the Top 10 lacked any words at all."
"Beautiful continued to be a powerhouse format for a few more years, but the audience was aging out of the target demos. This meant that the revenue opportunity was diminishing and the major market Beautiful stations gradually eased into soft rock formats. In recent years this trend has been accelerated by the corporate consolidations that have seen so most major stations acquired by huge publicly traded corporate operators. The individual station owners and small group operators who might have kept the format alive are now either gone or retired."
The Rise and Fall of Smooth Jazz
I walked a lonely road as a teen-aged smooth-jazz fanatic.
"At its height, smooth jazz was a life-style-driven format associated with comfortable, if not extravagant, affluence, as evidenced by the popularity of smooth-jazz cruises. Some of these floating festivals continue to sail to their usual ports of call—Fort Lauderdale, Cozumel, Nassau—even in a world without the infrastructure of terrestrial smooth-jazz radio, which now looks like a predictable casualty of the global financial crisis of the late two-thousands. “It’s not only the demise of smooth jazz,” the guitarist Gil Parris, quoted by JazzTimes, in 2019, says. “I think it’s the demise of the middle class, the middle ground of music, period.”
The rise and fall of smooth jazz reflects economic conditions, but also generational ones. Conceived in the nineteen-eighties, the format grew with promising swiftness in the nineties. Throughout most of the two-thousands, and even while drawing resentment from some quarters, it nevertheless seemed assured long-term success. By the middle of the following decade, however, it had somehow been consigned to virtual irrelevance. Though few of my fellow-millennials came of age in a smooth-jazz world, we can all see the parallels between its trajectory and that ascribed to our generation, more than a few of whose members spent their youths preparing to join institutions only to have those institutions collapse upon their arrival. My own career in smooth jazz came to an end in 2008, but at least I still had my backup dream: to become the editor of a newspaper book-review supplement."
Your point about the younger agency buyers is well taken. Of course that would be true. I have heard too many radio people complain about the tastes of the younger time-buyers as well as the "kid MDs" in the 80s and no doubt had allowed that to influence my thinking more than I should have.
Most of the still-successful Beautiful outlets left that format in 1989 - 1990. Over 100. Though some had been dropping it since 1978.
I don't find as sharp a generational distinction in popular recording tastes as you have experienced. People our age grew up listening mostly to pre-rock music during our formative years. So as much as some of us would have enjoyed and chosen rock were accustomed to living with and accepting what was not only our parents' music but that of our older siblings who were loving and buying Patti Page and Frankie Laine and Kay Starr, Vic Damone yes and Gogi Grant. Then quite naturally came Domino and Pat Boone and Haley, Presley etc. and they started to buy them as some of us did as well. Which did not mean that we just rejected everything we knew and enjoyed before that! We all had our favorites but enjoyed things from different genres.
As kids we were 10 or 11 before we bought records and then just 45s. So, getting together to play our records for each other, we fleshed out our "collections" with our parent's records as well. Which ran to Belafonte, Como, Clooney, Chacksfield, Pourcel, 101 Strings, Light Classical, and so on. Just as our parents had liked some R & B or rock songs on the radio such as Louis Jordan, Roy Milton, The Hucklebuck, Dinah Washington. I remember my own father was rather partial to Good Timin' by Jimmy Jones c. 1960. But 0 when there got to too many rhythm selections on for their taste - from 1956 - then they changed the station. Or too much emotion. Just as we may have changed it if we heard too many crooners or big bands.
So those of us who liked only rock were a very small percentage - under 10%. While most of us enjoyed at least some rock but we enjoyed other genres as well. Interviewing people our age and older I have often found those eho enjoyed the other stuff as well referring to the rock as what they liked to dance to - as dance music. But for listening music on their own within the confines of their own rooms they much preferred Melachrino or Kostelanetz or Mancini. Before they liked The Beatles they were liking Connie Francis and Rick Nelson. Their "favorite bands" were Guy Lombardo and Lawrence Welk. Ray Anthony, even Glenn Miller (those were the recordings in their homes) and then they were Johnny and the Hurricanes, The Ventures, and Billy Vaughn.
But I do find there was a gap in how our age related to popular music as compared with say our parents. The latter related to songs while we related more to particular recordings. This is confirmed by much of the research done 30 - 40 years ago. Just as Your Hit Parade of radio from 1935 and later TV gave the Top 10 (or whatever fraction thereof) songs, the radio countdown shows we listened to in the 50s were about hit records, not just songs. Our parents had hit records as well but mostly the most popular songs were heard on radio done by various artists or played on the smaller stations in various recordings, many of them ETs. So there was less consensus that one particular recording of a title was in fact THE hit record. While our generation might have listened to the same songs as recorded by different artists we heard on the radio or purchased in local shops or that our friends had. But with the coming of Top 40 you had people like Bill Stewart trying to regulate the versions of recordings used on a station or group of stations to present a more consistent and unified whole. Rather than just every DJ playing what version he liked or what was given to him.
I always found much of the excitement in radio hearing the different interpretations of their material and following them and judging them. And though I did like a number of hit records more often I found that my preferred versions, either instrumental or vocal, were other than the so-called "hit" versions. So perhaps, though I always liked some rock like Fats Domino, R & B groups, I leaned more toward what was an "older" way of perceiving and judging. For instance I am familiar with Al Martino's recording of Mary In the Morning which was a hit record. Yet I have always favored the recording Ed Ames made of same which I find has more depth of feeling. And you may recall Jane Morgan's recording of The Day the Rains Came from 1958. As good as that was I always much preferred the recording Raymond Lefevre made of the same title and I think for the same company. Which I purchased when I was 11. Which btw was also a hit.
My theory, backed by research I have found, has been that the generation growing up through the depression were mostly through buying records after the mid 60s, or winding down after 1962. Because by then they had waht they wanted and in many cases much more than they ever imagined they would ever have as far as that was concerned. Which left teenagers and young adults as the main record-buying public. Who bought most of what was sold in all genres of recorded music after that.
Not only the hit instrumentals, but the joy of hearing a familiar title arranged and expressed instrumentally, orchestrally in a distinctive and exciting and satisfying manner drew us to Beautiful Music radio. So that most often our favorite recordings of a particular number were not the hits at all but rather instrumental versions. But seems it became that younger people just seemed no longer able to get into instrumentals. I wonder is that because they lacked the imagination factor? Or just perhaps had no necessity to dream big and let their imaginations run wild the way we did? Or I wonder - maybe for them music had to be about more than just the notes for them, like it had to have a more literal dimension as well? Thus the necessity for words.There have been a few articles written about the decline of certain formats.
"As a one-time disc jockey who played easy-listening music, I appreciate Mike Kerrigan’s “Easy Listening = Alternative Music + Time” (op-ed, Feb. 29). He is right: The definition of easy listening has changed radically over the years; e.g., from big band music to certain rock recordings.
Mr. Kerrigan even states that the music of my era (earlier than his) “has been stripped of vocals and banished to elevators.” We look at instrumentals differently. There were times in the 1940s and ’50s when half the Top 10 lacked any words at all."
"Beautiful continued to be a powerhouse format for a few more years, but the audience was aging out of the target demos. This meant that the revenue opportunity was diminishing and the major market Beautiful stations gradually eased into soft rock formats. In recent years this trend has been accelerated by the corporate consolidations that have seen so most major stations acquired by huge publicly traded corporate operators. The individual station owners and small group operators who might have kept the format alive are now either gone or retired."
The Rise and Fall of Smooth Jazz
I walked a lonely road as a teen-aged smooth-jazz fanatic.
"At its height, smooth jazz was a life-style-driven format associated with comfortable, if not extravagant, affluence, as evidenced by the popularity of smooth-jazz cruises. Some of these floating festivals continue to sail to their usual ports of call—Fort Lauderdale, Cozumel, Nassau—even in a world without the infrastructure of terrestrial smooth-jazz radio, which now looks like a predictable casualty of the global financial crisis of the late two-thousands. “It’s not only the demise of smooth jazz,” the guitarist Gil Parris, quoted by JazzTimes, in 2019, says. “I think it’s the demise of the middle class, the middle ground of music, period.”
The rise and fall of smooth jazz reflects economic conditions, but also generational ones. Conceived in the nineteen-eighties, the format grew with promising swiftness in the nineties. Throughout most of the two-thousands, and even while drawing resentment from some quarters, it nevertheless seemed assured long-term success. By the middle of the following decade, however, it had somehow been consigned to virtual irrelevance. Though few of my fellow-millennials came of age in a smooth-jazz world, we can all see the parallels between its trajectory and that ascribed to our generation, more than a few of whose members spent their youths preparing to join institutions only to have those institutions collapse upon their arrival. My own career in smooth jazz came to an end in 2008, but at least I still had my backup dream: to become the editor of a newspaper book-review supplement."
You could say the same thing for the Smooth Jazz. Although I always much more enjoyed the older harder Jazz. Though the Smooth Jazz was certainly attractive. A lot of it. And I thought it worked as a small part of a Beautiful Music format.
This isn't my experience.
I don't remember my parents listening to "pre rock" music and I don't remember radio stations that played it. My only memories of listening to anything like this was "Those Were the Days" on a local station and "High Hopes" a few years later.
We mostly listened to a pop station which was conservative before the term "adult contemporary" existed, and a country station. I liked instrumental background music in stores and offices, and later when we got our first FM radio in 1977. My father liked the beautiful music station.
I discovered the pre-rock artists on stations in the late 70s and early 80s, and then heard those artists again when stations like that became popular in the late 80s.
Well Beautiful Music was all over FM radio during the early years of the medium. Because, with Classical and to a lesser extent Jazz, instrumental music showed best the strengths of FM broadcasting. However by the 1980s FM became too expensive for more minority or limited tastes in music. Because there was more money to be made from more potential listeners to Country or AC or Rock. Whereas up through the late 1960s or early 70s most people did not even have FM receivers to listen to.There have been a few articles written about the decline of certain formats.
"As a one-time disc jockey who played easy-listening music, I appreciate Mike Kerrigan’s “Easy Listening = Alternative Music + Time” (op-ed, Feb. 29). He is right: The definition of easy listening has changed radically over the years; e.g., from big band music to certain rock recordings.
Mr. Kerrigan even states that the music of my era (earlier than his) “has been stripped of vocals and banished to elevators.” We look at instrumentals differently. There were times in the 1940s and ’50s when half the Top 10 lacked any words at all."
"Beautiful continued to be a powerhouse format for a few more years, but the audience was aging out of the target demos. This meant that the revenue opportunity was diminishing and the major market Beautiful stations gradually eased into soft rock formats. In recent years this trend has been accelerated by the corporate consolidations that have seen so most major stations acquired by huge publicly traded corporate operators. The individual station owners and small group operators who might have kept the format alive are now either gone or retired."
The Rise and Fall of Smooth Jazz
I walked a lonely road as a teen-aged smooth-jazz fanatic.
"At its height, smooth jazz was a life-style-driven format associated with comfortable, if not extravagant, affluence, as evidenced by the popularity of smooth-jazz cruises. Some of these floating festivals continue to sail to their usual ports of call—Fort Lauderdale, Cozumel, Nassau—even in a world without the infrastructure of terrestrial smooth-jazz radio, which now looks like a predictable casualty of the global financial crisis of the late two-thousands. “It’s not only the demise of smooth jazz,” the guitarist Gil Parris, quoted by JazzTimes, in 2019, says. “I think it’s the demise of the middle class, the middle ground of music, period.”
The rise and fall of smooth jazz reflects economic conditions, but also generational ones. Conceived in the nineteen-eighties, the format grew with promising swiftness in the nineties. Throughout most of the two-thousands, and even while drawing resentment from some quarters, it nevertheless seemed assured long-term success. By the middle of the following decade, however, it had somehow been consigned to virtual irrelevance. Though few of my fellow-millennials came of age in a smooth-jazz world, we can all see the parallels between its trajectory and that ascribed to our generation, more than a few of whose members spent their youths preparing to join institutions only to have those institutions collapse upon their arrival. My own career in smooth jazz came to an end in 2008, but at least I still had my backup dream: to become the editor of a newspaper book-review supplement."
I think it might be the case with each generation that the institutions we have grown up with change or are gone by the time we are ready for them! Although I can't believe in the class theory for the U.S. I can believe that there are economic classes. And as far as tastes are concerned the idea of "middle-brow" music certainly stimulated the rise of Beautiful Music as a genre during the Second World War. But that had been developed by network radio.
I was writing about my own childhood and youth which was a bit earlier. 1950s. Those Were the Days was a hit in 1968 and High Hopes 1959.In the 1950s and early 60s the Top 40 and radio in general was full of instrumental music. Some MOR stations played half instrumental. Then the Beautiful Music stations proliferated in the late 50s - early 60s. With us rock as a genre came in when we were 7 to 10 years old. So when we were very young was before most of us heard it. So many early baby boomers naturally liked rock when we heard it but we had grown up steeped in other styles, some of which were partly rooted in the genres rock grew from. Like Swing and R & B and Folk.
The other part of it was the change in technology. Until the 60s, FM was mainly available through component stereo systems. The kind of person who bought that kind of thing was an audiophile. In fact there were magazines directed at those people, and FM radio listings were also a part of that. Part of the reason for this was the need for an antenna to receive FM. That made it more cumbersome for portable radios. Audiophiles tended to prefer classical music. But when the FM patent ran out in 1965, the Armstrong estate didn't renew. All of a sudden, electronics manufacturers started to incorporate FM in their radios, and developers worked to improve reception in ways that made it better for portables.
At the exact same time, an entire generation was getting interested in owning home stereos. It became very popular to have a home music system that incorporated FM radio. Radio station owners realized they had a new audience to reach, and started targeting them. But the conversion to FM really began with the technology becoming free for manufacturers to include in their radios.
Vaporwave, an online music trend popular with some young people in the 2010s, was based largely on Smooth Jazz instrumentals, slowed down and with reverb added to make it sound dreamlike, or like walking through a dead mall where all you hear is the Muzak echoing through the empty halls.
Vaporwave - Wikipedia
Neil Howe and William Strauss, author of the book the Fourth Turning posits that history unfolds in a cyclical pattern. Within each cycle are four seasons, lasting roughly 20 years each represented by the following four recurring generational types—Prophets (Boomers), Nomads (Gen X), Heroes (Millennials), and Artists (Gen Z) that define the mood of each turning. The mood of each turning is reflected across societal, economical, political and cultural changes.
Here's a summary of Howe and Strauss' thesis as applied to generational music.
The Generational Music Theorem. When what's hot in hit music unpredictably changes overnight, that change was completely predictable. How will music "unpredictably" change in 2025? - Matt Bailey
The Generational Music Theorem
When what's hot in hit music unpredictably changes overnight, that change was completely predictable. How will music "unpredictably" change in 2025?
www.graphsaboutsongs.com
Not sure about the Armstrong estate. Certainly FM was around and available long before 1965. Companies did not produce so many FM receivers because there was not a big market for them. Most FM broadcasting duplicated what was on the AM stations. Very true that there was an explosion was FM receivers in 1965. Which was when I bought my first set. Though my father had got one buying his ship to shore band radio in 1958. And attractive consoles including FM receivers as household furniture were around before. For instance the Magnavox Astro Sonic Stereo of 1962.
Those who assembled or built their own systems in the 1950s often did enjoy the new Classical recordings which were improving sonically year by year. They also listened to Beautiful Music. Read the Hi-Fi and Stereo mags of the 60s and they are full of reviews of the latest beautiful Music recordings as they are of the Classical.
As I interpret history, Beautiful Music radio had a lot to do with the rise to prominence of FM from the mid 1960s. because lots of people were buying FM by '65 as an alternative to what they were getting on AM which was either Top 40 or personality-dominated MOR. They bought FM to access more and what they thought was nicer music which was available all over the band by then.
Oh Classical Music never dominated the FM band. But in the newspaper radio columns they would invariably list the programmed Classical selections on a station. Even though that station might have only played two evening hours of Classical a day and Beautiful and/or vocals all the rest of the day. Yes there were all-Classical stations but these, in those days, were often on AM as well as FM.
But by 1965
They also had to pay a copyright royalty to the estate of the inventor of FM: Edwin Armstrong. That requirement ended when the copyright ended in 1965. RCA had purposely refused to install FM in any of its radios because they were in litigation with the estate. All that ended in 1965. One could argue that was why there wasn't a big market for FM before that time. The early history of FM is very long and complicated. It became much simpler after 1965. After that, it was easy to buy an AM/FM portable for under $20. Not long after that, you could add an FM converter to your car for about the same price.
This is very similar to the situation now with HD Radio. That is a trademarked technology, and radio manufacturers must pay a royalty if they include it in their devices.
Actual Muzak in malls and offices and supermarkets back in the day was not mood music or lush but more rhythmic and gently bouncy small ensemble music to keep things moving along and flowing along well-adjusted.Vaporwave, an online music trend popular with some young people in the 2010s, was based largely on Smooth Jazz instrumentals, slowed down and with reverb added to make it sound dreamlike, or like walking through a dead mall where all you hear is the Muzak echoing through the empty halls.
Vaporwave - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
I know that part of the litigation with RCA was over the patents which they were claiming as well. But I question whether this stopped any manufacturer from offering FM if they wanted to do so. A number of companies, including some out of the U.S. made FM receivers.
You probably are aware that Armstrong's Alpine NJ FM, which ceased operation after his death, though primarily an experimental laboratory, broadcast primarily Beautiful Music from ETs.
Absolutely! I never said other manufacturers didn't add FM. If you research stereo magazines from the 1950s you'll see lots of them. I think Fisher, Scott, Kenwood, and others were available.
But they were costly, so out of the budgets of most people. We're talking about hundreds of dollars, which was a lot at the time. Once the royalty was gone, adding FM was much cheaper, thus FM radios were more affordable for the average consumer.
There were a lot of instrumentals that were hit records played on the regular Top 40 stations, songs by the Tijuana Brass, Booker T & The MGs and others plus various TV themes and on movie soundtracks. I don't know of any instrumentals that were hits in the last 30 years. I considered the "Beautiful Music" radio format of my childhood to be boring sleep inducing elevator music that I had to listen to in my parent's car.
I heard "High Hopes" in the early 70s and don't know what station it was on. But I have no memory other than the two songs of hearing anything that wasn't country or AC.
How did the FCC's 1965 ruling influence the rise of Beautiful Music radio?
"The Federal Communications Commission (FCC)'s 1965 ruling played a pivotal role in the rise of the Beautiful Music radio format in the United States. The key regulation mandated that AM and FM stations under common ownership in the same market could no longer simulcast identical programming; instead, each band had to offer separate content. This move was intended to encourage greater diversity and innovation in broadcasting, particularly as FM—then an under-utilized band—offered technical advantages such as stereo sound and less interference compared to AM.
Before the ruling, most FM stations simply duplicated their AM counterpart’s programming, limiting FM's potential. Once required to differentiate, station owners looked for new formats that could benefit from FM’s superior sound quality and appeal to untapped audiences. The Beautiful Music format—featuring lush instrumental arrangements and minimal interruptions—was ideally suited to the high-fidelity capabilities of FM. As a result, many station owners adopted Beautiful Music for their FM signals, finding it attracted adult listeners and provided a serene alternative to the personality-driven, ad-heavy AM band.
This regulatory change sparked rapid growth in both the number and popularity of Beautiful Music stations during the late 1960s and 1970s. FM quickly became the preferred home for this format, solidifying its association with high-quality, relaxing background music and helping to establish FM radio as a vital part of American media culture. The FCC's 1965 ruling, therefore, was a catalyst that not only fostered the proliferation of Beautiful Music, but also transformed FM radio into a platform for creative and specialized programming."
The “early years” of FM were the 40’s and 50’s. In fact, there were more FMs in 1950 than in 1960! The programming tended to be block formatted, with “better music” like classical.
The term “Beautiful Music” did not become well used until some point in the 60’s, when FM was approaching a quarter century of limited success.
What changed things was two events. First, the Armstrong patents expired in the early 60’s, opening up better and more affordable radios. Second, the later 60’s saw the FCC prevent most simulcasting, forcing FMs owned by AMs to create new format offerings.
Formats that were favored were those that did not compete with an owner’s AM operation, so Beautiful Music and rock were very common choices.
I don’t think Beautiful Music began in the 40’s under any interpretation. We had pop music, mostly big bands and crooners, classical, what was called “race music”, jazz and, in some areas, western and country.
The widespread use of the term “beautiful music” really began with the new profusion of independently program. FM stations came about due to the non-duplication rules. That place brought adoption of the name to the benchmark period of 1967 to 1968.