I think you mean WDAS-FM.
-
Get involved.
We want your input!
Apply for Membership and join the conversations about everything related to broadcasting.
After we receive your registration, a moderator will review it. After your registration is approved, you will be permitted to post.
If you use a disposable or false email address, your registration will be rejected.
After your membership is approved, please take a minute to tell us a little bit about yourself.
https://www.radiodiscussions.com/forums/introduce-yourself.1088/
Thanks in advance and have fun!
RadioDiscussions Administrators
The Beatles' new song "Now And Then" to be aired on all 760 iHeart stations next Thursday.
- Thread starter radio2023
- Start date
There will also be a video for the song, and it will be released on Friday. It's directed by Peter Jackson, who did the recent documentary. Here's an article on the making of the video, and some of the video footage is seen in the preview video in post #22.
hitsdailydouble.com
PETER JACKSON ON THE MAKING OF THE FINAL BEATLES VIDEO
The video for The Beatles’ new song, “Now and Then,” will premiere Friday (11/3) at 10am ET on YouTube. It’s Peter Jackson’s first foray into music-video...
hitsdailydouble.com
So which station did you get fired from?
Heard it this morning on KCJJ - I liked it.
None. My point was I-Heart is cheap programming for station owners.
IHeart IS a station owner.
Several stations as a matter of fact.
Didn’t real radio die when all the serials, game shows and studio orchestras went away? I mean, the sacrelige of the studio that once housed the NBC symphony orchestra with Auturo Toscanini to be defiled by the likes of Saturday Night Live? NBC killed real radio when they converted that studio to support the infernal talking picture box.
Records? Just playing a bunch of records with one person playing them instead of a whole symphony? That was horrifically cheap filler and nail in the coffin of real radio.
I'm going to provide for you a primer of the history of cheap programming for radio stations:
It began in 1926 with NBC. Then 1928 with CBS, and 1934 with Mutual. The radio networks provided cheap national programming for radio.
In the 1950s as the national radio networks began to fade, you saw he rise of national program syndicators. By the 1960s, there were several companies providing radio stations with music programming on reel to reel tape. Bonneville, Schulke, and several others. Plus group owners did their own in-house syndication.
In the 1980s, there was the rise of satellite distribution. Several major syndicators of satellite distributed formats. TranStar, Satellite Music Networks, Jones Radio Networks all distributed fully hosted radio formats to stations.
In the 1990s studio automation advanced to the point where stations could pre-record DJ segments and combine them in the computer with music, commercials, and imaging. They called it Voice Tracking. The intent was to get away from satellite formats.
The 2000s had internet distribution. That's where we're at now.
I understand some radio fans have this image of radio stations with live DJs sitting in studios cuing up records and having fun. The advances in station automation in the 90s and 2000s made all of that obsolete. DJs don't have to babysit records all day. That process is done by computers and automation.
When The Beatles came to the US 60 years ago, they met with a handful of radio DJs because there were only a few stations that played rock & roll music. Today, there are thousands of radio stations playing various sub-genres of rock. It's almost impossible for artists to visit every radio station the way they did 60 years ago. So they need to go back to the network model that worked 100 years ago. It's more efficient for the artists. So that's why iHeart did a national distribution of this new Beatles song.
A lot of the artist/band "interviews" you heard back then with your favorite local DJ were fake. The questions were scripted and the answers were pre-recorded:
Or their Spanish language stations.
You really have to stop misquoting or mis-condensing other peoples posts. What I have said is that the Beatles are far less popular today than in the 1960's. Most of their "Beatles" songs do not test well among any group except those over 65, and the post-Beatles songs are a separate entity.
I have said that I think most of the 60's Beatles-as-a-group songs have not aged as well as the Stones, and that can be seen in airplay and sales.
Few people under 40 or 50 "discover" any greatness in old Beatles songs or you'd be hearing that material on stations targeting 18-34 or 25-44 demos.
Nothing unique or rare or earth shaking about this. A few Top 40 stations I've worked at subscribed to a service that would interview the top vocalists or groups of the day, edit the audio to only include their answers and they'd send that out to stations along with a script that could be read on air to make it seem like the local jock was doing the interview. One of those stations used it for a Sunday night Top 10 countdown program. An intern would get the interview audio as it was sent, delete the ones from artists/groups we weren't playing, then put the rest in the order our station was ranking their current hits, from 10th to 1st. DJ read the interview questions from the script, triggered the recorded responses from the artists, the banter sounded natural and well-timed, the jock would then intro their latest music, told listeners where it currently ranked on our station and voila! Lots of interactive "interviews" and even phone pranks (which are actually scripted and prerecorded in those cases) from morning show prep services work exactly the same way.
I'm guessing some nationally syndicated hosts at times probably work this way as well, depending on availability of the person they're trying to interview. Send a lackey out in the field to meet and talk with them, remove lackey's voice, insert host asking the same questions and there ya have it... Same with callers. I'm sure it's not always the national host that answers the phone each and every time they're recording a bunch of callers so they can use the best ones for banter on the air.
Being a Red, Blue or even Mutual affiliate (or even Don Lee or Yankee network affiliate) was not cheap; an affiliation took a huge percentage of a station's commercial inventory and was about the only viable alternative in the era of union limitations on recorded music, the high costs of ETs and the absence until the very late 1940's of tape recording.
When the networks began to decline... a roughly 15 year process from the advent of television... stations adopted local music programming. There was practically no syndication of programming in the 50's and most of the 60's.
What there was, indeed, was a lot of state and regional networks, often based on news, some sports and lots of agriculture and weather.
Those did not begin until about a year or two after the FCC prohibited most simulcasting by FMs. It was in the early 70's that SRP, Bonneville and others specializing in smaller markets grew, as much due to the availability of good automation gear due to the early work of Paul Schaefer, IGM andd others. Technology made syndicated formats a profitable option as it allowed stations to "run the FM in the back room" with no staff.
And there were many syndicators of formats, not "several". In Beautiful Music alone you had SRP, Bonneville, FM 100, Churchill, Peters, IGM, KalaMusic, a group out of Detroit whose name I don't recall, Música en Flor, Drake-Chenault and two or three others.
And most of that effort was only marginally successful and did not last long.
The disadvantage was the fixed stopset length, requiring stations to fill unsold avails with fill stuff. Dreadful.
We were able to do that back in the 70's, but just with more work and lots of carts. The top 3 stations in market #12 in the later 70's were personality music stations that were fully automated outside of AM drive!
We did not call it anything initially as those of us who had used total or partial automation for the prior 20 years simply improved our equipment to use hard disks instead of carts and reel tape.
In the mid-60's every rated market had one or two and sometimes three top 40 stations. Whether is was Meridian, MS, Springfield, IL, Springfield, MO, or Kalispell, MT, there was a Top 40 in every market that had more than 2 or 3 stations
In the 60's and 70's, many Top 40 stations in places like Houghton Lake, MI, never got called on by the labels. They either bought a record service or did a trade with the local record store and subscribed to Gavin to know what to play. But there were hundreds and hundreds of them in that era.
Last edited:
There were also a lot fewer radio stations at that time...perhaps less than one third as many stations as we have today. And a lot less in-market media competition.
Radio is not a barometer for what people are listening to. Ask just about any musician alive today and they will say they were influenced by The Beatles. Obviously, the Beatlemania of the 1960s is long past. For a band that only existed for about 8 years, they have had significant influence on music. Physical copies of their catalog were best sellers for decades. Streaming has changed the business model. Why do you think people like Dylan and Springsteen sold their music rights? They cashed out because record sales are almost extinct.
Iheart wouldn't be bothering with this Beatles "Final Song" Event if the band was irrelevant. Saying Beatles songs don't test well is absurd. I would immediately discount any research like that. That's like saying Alfred Hitchcock didn't know how to make films...
Last edited:
- Status