After say 1963 most of the record buying, including of MOR artists, was done by young people. Oh listeners in their 50s and 50s might occasionally add something they found striking or important to their collections, but surveys show that only half of all adults were still buying recordings in 1966 while 82 percent of teenagers were actively engaged in that pursuit.
I reached "musical maturity" almost simultaneously with Rock Around the Clock and Buddy Holly. Anything that sounded like Big Bands or the crooners was anathema to me, and I'd switch stations if they even played a current Nat "King" Cole hit later in the 50's. And at school, I knew nobody who liked any of "my parents'" music. There was a pretty severe cut between generations.
Remember, too, that stations did not carry network shows 6 AM to Midnight. There were plenty of music shows... but the disrupting factor there lay in the restrictions of the Musician's Union (AFM) on recorded music. So the way music was presented was very restricted until the union's influence over radio collapsed as the 40's ended.
Because of that fact MOR artists still active were mostly hustled by recording companies into making youth-oriented tunes hoping the young generation still buying would accept them and acquire them. Which they did not always feel comfortable with. And doubfful that youthful buyers were going for Andy Williams or Frankie Laine or Doris Day doing White Rabbit or Born To Be Wild.
And what they did was not popular among young listeners. There were a few exceptions, but even those were driven by the adults in Top 40 audiences, not the kids.
And all along we had stations that played MOR... some included big bands and instrumentals, some just played the crooners and traditional artists. There were options for those over 35.
In the later 60's, in my home town of Cleveland, we had two R&B stations, three Top 40 ones and three MOR stations. It was not as if those folks over 30 or so did not have a place to go.
Another factor was that a recording company had to lay out a lot of money for musicians and arrangers to make the kind of full orchestral sessions MOR artists were accustomed to. Much greater savings in going with a small guitar band or a few studio instrumentalists or by purchasing masters already produced and recorded by others.
For a hit record, that is a minor part of the costs. The issue was that few young people wanted pop songs by Gogi Grant.
George Melachrino died in 1965, Hugo Winterhalter in 1973. Mantovani and Hugo Montenegro retired from recording in 1975, Percy Faith died in early '76. Andy Williams was active to about 1980.
But Beautiful Music had moved away from those "movie soundtrack" type instrumentals to Caravelli and Frank Pourcel... orchestra leaders who could also lay down the tracks for Top 40 songs.
Other artists still selling in the 70s such as Ferrante and Teicher, Paul Mauriat, Roger Williams sold as well to mostly younger buyers. The over 30s never embraced Mauriat at all or Montenegro's later style both of which which they considered "rock".
It depends on the cuts. I did a Beautiful Music that ran in a bunch of multi-million population markets and there were many Mauriat songs that they loved, but lots of Ferrante and Teicher and Roger Williams that that they hated. We never played Montenegro at all, as it sounded too "Hollywood".
So I would say quite natural that the record companies had long since set down the older generation by 1975 since they had stopped buying.
The problem was that there were few new artists that had such broad appeal or appeal only among those over 35. But we had lots of Streisand and that stream of artist that older people did enjoy. But that is not the cause for a decline in older consumer purchases of music.
That group´was the biggest beneficiary of the profusion of FM music stations in the 70's: there were suddenly adult formats, using the term "chicken rock" or "Adult Contemporary" that came in to replace lots of Beautiful Music and MOR stations. They played songs that those over 35 loved, and those people felt little need to buy anything but the exceptional album. They had more important things to spend on than records as they were adults.
There was still product that older listeners might have been interested in being made in England and Europe to the mid 1980s which for the most part American buyers did not have access to. I can remember a number of good things available on Peters International by the later 70s and Bainbridge reissued some of Bob Shad's 1960 - 63 Time Records catalogue in the early 80s. They had few takers.
But the over-35 public found, in the 70's, a profusion of music stations playing things they liked and they had not need to buy records.
The generations which had grown up with radio in the 20s and 1930s stayed with it, gravitating to Beautiful Music stations on FM in the 1970s when MOR outlets became less and less music-oriented to the point that personality hosts no longer chose their own music, leaving that up to young aides who tended to program current Top 40 hits.
By the 70's, even AC or old line stations used research to find out what their listeners liked to hear. The idea that you have that "aides" in their 20's "chose" the music for stations like WNEW or KMPC or WGN or WIND has no basis in fact.
Then a funny thing happened. In the 1980s the younger agency time buyers less and less wanted the older audience.
Agency time buyers did not determine the age targets of campaigns, then or now. I called on my first time buyers at agencies in 1964, and ever since them I would hear the same "the client's target its... " and a detail of the age, gender and other requirements of the buy. If what I was selling did not reach, efficiently that target, I was not on the buy.
That same audience who had bought them all manner of records when they were growing up (and kids records were 10 percent of the market, sometimes more, in the 1950s and into the 60s) which went far to establishing them as regular record buyers in life!
You are not taking into account the introduction of the "45" with cheap and easy to use players. That replaced the fragile 78 and the constant changing of needles and the like. Remember, we call multi-cut records "albums"" because in the era of the 79, people bought 10 songs by an artist on five 78 rpm records in a cardboard album with sleeves for each disk.
How many Beautiful Music stations gave up the ghost in the 1980s and early 90s while they still had double digit rating shares? Granted that audience was already shrinking due to attrition and the lack of an active recording industry producing new product to support it.
There was plenty of production of instrumental pop music in the 80s, but most of it was in Europe and Asia. Much of it covered songs that were not hits in America. But we solved that by doing custom music, often enough to cover over half of what we needed.
Which had ceased to exist because of lack of demand, as already mentioned, and because few younger music arrangers possessed the skills of the older writers most of whom had been trained in network radio. You may recall that from 1973 through the early 80s Beautiful Music syndicators such as Schulke and Bonneville commissioned their own music to obtain suitable new product or gathered together with notable stations, as you did with IBMA, for the same end. The more successful of this custom music was by arrangers who had been working before 1960, as younger men, with the exception of the brilliant Nick Ingman, had no or too little experience in setting pop music for orchestral forces.
You are forgetting all the new aritsts like Francois Goya and Richard Claydarman and many others who produced original material... from composers like de Senneville and Toussaint.
The obvious point I am making is that the mature audience stopped buying in quantity by the mid 60s so the recording industry eventually set them aside. Without the backing of new commercial recorded product the MOR radio formats appealing to older people dried up and radio set the older audience aside as undesirable. After the death of the Beautiful Music radio in the early 1990s
It died in the late 1980's, not the 90's. I closed my syndication firm in 1987 when I could not get new clients and some of the old ones were moving to youth formats. The real issue is that the Beautiful Music audience was aging out of sales demos, and was becoming almost all 55+.
its audience learned to do without radio for the remaining 20, 30, 40 years of their lives.
Yes, the listeners over 55 lost most formats that appealed to them because advertisers did not buy 55 and older.
