Re: Simon, Globe: Format change could become
> > WNEW-FM was the most prominent, consistent heritage AOR in
> > NYC for over 20 years, though it was owned by Metromedia
> > most of that time. When Infinity got it in the 90's, they
> > had the chance to continue that heritage, but they blew it.
> > They threw away the heritage, and thought they'd do better
> > trying to update the station.
>
> Well it was the ONLY AOR save a brief period when WAXQ
> programmed by Ron Valeri was a bad sounding active rock that
> "never talked over the music", obviously it didnt last.
There were other NYC AOR's, farther back. Around late 1966/1967, before WNEW-FM went progressive, Scott Muni and Murray The K experimented with a short-lived album format on WOR-FM. This, and KMPX San Francisco on the west coast (before KSAN), are considered the country's first FM progressive album rockers.
In the late 60's WABC-FM went very "free-form underground", considered "way out" compared to WNEW-FM's more progressive AOR oriented approach, until flipping to formatted album rocker WPLJ in the early 70's. It's now Hot AC.
There was a brief period in the mid-70's when classical station WNCN flipped to WQIV, an AOR that broadcast in quadraphonic. It didn't make it, and went back to classical until flipping to WAXQ and that brief active rock format in the early 90's, until finding their identity as classic rock in NYC with some of the heritage WNEW-FM jocks.
There were also other AOR's on Long Island, including WLIR and WBAB.
> WNEW for all the talk ot it's heritage never had numbers.
Well, in the early heyday of AOR in the late 60's, when WNEW-FM (and WBCN here in Boston) first went to the format, such stations didn't really need big numbers. They were broadcasting to a relatively small but then-vital audience which was in those days considered the "counterculture", and there was little competition for that demographic when the mainstream "straight" majority of rock'n'roll listeners were still listening to AM Top 40 stations. They knew overall numbers among all listeners would be small, but there were local format-specific sponsors ("Head Shops", hippie-styled clothing boutiques, rock concerts, "hip" nightclubs, etc...) that wouldn't fit anywhere else but these new "underground" AOR's.
Of course, that didn't last long. In the 70's, competing FM AOR stations sprang up in all the major cities, which resulted in ratings competition between them, and a slow process of mainstreaming their formats from the "free-form" hippie radio days of the late 60's. By the late 70's and certainly the 80's, AM Top 40 radio was dead, FM had replaced AM as the band of choice for all music formats and had become about as mainstream as the AM stations it had once been an alternative to ten years earlier. There was no longer such a starkly separate demographic as the late 60's "counterculture" was, and AOR became just another format to figure into the overall ratings statistics. Some of the stations didn't make that transition very sucessfully number-wise.
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