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The new krth

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KRTH today played Wonderful Tonight by Eric Clapton/Yvonne Elliman/Marcy Levy. The song got to #16 in 1978. Hey, Rick, how about adding more non-top-ten hits? I'm certain that within a few months, I'll have to delete all the 1960s songs from the playlist I compiled. It's on page two of the KRTH thread at http://xmfan.com/viewtopic.php?t=120994&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=15 and yes, Thomps2525, is me. There's also an "oldies76" who posts to that thread and I have a pretty good idea that he's the same guy who posts here as "oldies76." I'd make an excellent detective!
 
michael hagerty said:
Semoochie:

Gotcha. But remember, those 10 shares for KIIS-FM were 30 years ago. It's like talking about 1953 then. A lot has changed...radio, music, competition, measurement and ethnic makeup are all radically different.
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I only used KIIS, as an example, to make my point, since you brought it up. I'm sure that there are lots of stations that win the entire demo, based on strong performance at either the high or low end. " In the first decade or so of rocking top 40's (from let's say '56 to the mid-60's), few if any oldies were played. So kids growing into adolescence on a diet of Top 40 only heard the most current songs." David, this isn't the way I remember it. Where I live, my Top 40 station played older songs all the time and on the weekend, every other song was "gold", under the banner, "Million Dollar Weekend". I wouldn't know many of the songs that traditional Oldies stations played, otherwise.
 
semoochie said:
I only used KIIS, as an example, to make my point, since you brought it up. I'm sure that there are lots of stations that win the entire demo, based on strong performance at either the high or low end. " In the first decade or so of rocking top 40's (from let's say '56 to the mid-60's), few if any oldies were played. So kids growing into adolescence on a diet of Top 40 only heard the most current songs." David, this isn't the way I remember it. Where I live, my Top 40 station played older songs all the time and on the weekend, every other song was "gold", under the banner, "Million Dollar Weekend". I wouldn't know many of the songs that traditional Oldies stations played, otherwise.
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Assuming you're talking about the 60s, you're right - the "goldens" went up to about 50 percent on the weekends. But many of them were recurrents, and the bulk were songs from the early 60s and very late 50s. And when you think about it, the rock and roll era was a little more than a decade old at that time. If they had played 40 year old songs, they would have had to have been Bing Crosby and his contemporaries. Even much Big Band music was only about 20 - 30 years old at that point.
 
There are airchecks of KFWB in the late 50s playing one "KFWB Flashback" (or some phrase like that) an hour. But they were one to three year old songs.

Bill Drake was the first to take it further...two Goldens an hour in weekdays, usually one to five years old, and up to 50% gold going back 10 years on "Million Dollar Weekends".

The weekdays really didn't expose music you hadn't heard before unless you were young and just starting to listen.

The weekends did, but often, for me, at that stage in life, it was too obscure and I'd flip to KRLA to hear more current music.
 
LKellerIII said:
Assuming you're talking about the 60s, you're right - the "goldens" went up to about 50 percent on the weekends. But many of them were recurrents, and the bulk were songs from the early 60s and very late 50s. And when you think about it, the rock and roll era was a little more than a decade old at that time. If they had played 40 year old songs, they would have had to have been Bing Crosby and his contemporaries. Even much Big Band music was only about 20 - 30 years old at that point.
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Yes, I war referring to a song being within the rock era. I don't think they had recurrents, then. Songs would disappear, at the end of their run and come back as Oldies a year later.
 
michael hagerty said:
Again...35-year-old chart numbers are irrelevant...which is why "Moondance" gets play.
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I'll bet the Whitburn / Bronson books are referenced too, in making some decisions in what to air on KRTH. Why not? Radio stations and record shops (the ones still around, like Norwalk Records in the city of Norwalk, still use the chart data). It's valuable information in conducting some research on music and lost hits. Chart data is not irrevelant or should not be to the PD's of classic hits stations. Although I do not expect DJ's to mention chart data on the air these days anymore.
 
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David and Michael often mention those infamous "auditorium tests." Does anyone have a list of songs from any of those tests? I'd love to see how many songs were tested and what years they were from and how high they got on the Hot 100. I'm guessing that almost every song tested was a top-ten hit. And yet Moondance, a 1970 album track that was released as a single in 1977 and stalled at #92, made KRTH's playlist. Go figure!
 
The KRTH playlist that I compiled and posted on that other site is not necessarily complete. (That's my official legal disclaimer.) Today I added ten more 1970s-80s songs, including Carl Carlton's She's A Bad Mama Jama (22/1981). I'm waiting to see if all the 1960s songs disappear from KRTH's playlist before I start removing any of them but it certainly appears that a 1970s-80s-90s format is inevitable.
 
LARadioRewind said:
David and Michael often mention those infamous "auditorium tests." Does anyone have a list of songs from any of those tests? I'd love to see how many songs were tested and what years they were from and how high they got on the Hot 100. I'm guessing that almost every song tested was a top-ten hit. And yet Moondance, a 1970 album track that was released as a single in 1977 and stalled at #92, made KRTH's playlist. Go figure!
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When a station does a $50 thousand dollar music test, they don't give the data out to anyone.

The number of songs tested is a function of format.... a CHR might test 300 or so, and a country station 800 - 1000 and a gold station over 1000.

The lists are made up of what the station plays, what it has played recently and rested, and "what if" songs that may be more recent songs that might now be appropriate, etc.

Generally, chart position is amply ignored. What matters is how much a song appeals to people today.
 
In other words, people want to hear the low-charting songs Shout and Moondance but not You Light Up My Life. which was number one for ten weeks. As the Latin saying goes, "De gustibus non est disputandum."
 
DavidEduardo said:
When a station does a $50 thousand dollar music test, they don't give the data out to anyone.
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And when people drive up the 405 through the Sepulveda Pass in their $100,000 Ferrari's and Porsche 942's, everyone see them. What's so secret about a list of songs?? Really, it's just a poll taken in a room. I don't see the purpose of keeping this list secret from the general public....it's just a list of songs and artists and maybe the year they peaked in popularity. So?
 
LARadioRewind said:
In other words, people want to hear the low-charting songs Shout and Moondance but not You Light Up My Life. which was number one for ten weeks. As the Latin saying goes, "De gustibus non est disputandum."
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I'd rather hear "L.A. Freeway" on K-Earth 101, which peaked at #99 in 1973, than those first two songs you mentioned. In fact, why isn't "L.A. Freeway" played in...........L.A.?? Or better, to meet the stations demo goals, we could hear "Walking In L.A." by the Missing Persons.
 
oldies76 said:
And when people drive up the 405 through the Sepulveda Pass in their $100,000 Ferrari's and Porsche 942's, everyone see them. What's so secret about a list of songs?? Really, it's just a poll taken in a room. I don't see the purpose of keeping this list secret from the general public....it's just a list of songs and artists and maybe the year they peaked in popularity. So?
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Actually, the year of popularity is not measured in a music test.

The results generally take the form of data in a program that allows sorting by things like P1's, P2's, men, women, different age groups, cluster analysis, filters on different variables, etc.

The data determines the appeal or lack of same of songs, and shows how much to play those songs that pass. It is as proprietary as the formula for Coke.
 
LARadioRewind said:
In other words, people want to hear the low-charting songs Shout and Moondance but not You Light Up My Life. which was number one for ten weeks. As the Latin saying goes, "De gustibus non est disputandum."
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Again, the criteria for play is how appealing a song is today. The charts from over 30 years ago are irrelevant.
 
jimbo said:
David, these days are any songs added to a CHR or gold playlist based on "guts" (ie. programmer instinct) ?
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Almost all adds to a CHR are based on programmer discretion. This may be based on feeling about the song, play by other similar stations or things like past success of the artist, social media trending, etc.

There is no credible research that can tell you how an unfamiliar song will do against your audience, although all kinds of psychoacoustic and pattern based testing has been tried.

Gold based playlists of significant are nearly always based on research into listener preferences.
 
Hey, maybe someone-a tell me why Billy Joel's Scenes From An Italian Restaurant gets-a played on New York stations but not-a on-a Los Angeles stations. (Said in my best Chico Marx voice.)

I now hate at least one third of the 1960s-70s hits that KRTH has been playing. Most of them are songs that I used to like but I got sick of hearing them over and over for forty years. I would think that the main reason a huge 1960s-70s hit would lose its appeal is simply because it gets played so often...but hardly any station ever plays You Light Up My Life, so why has that song lost its appeal? Barry Manilow still draws huge crowds to his concerts, so why have almost all of his songs, with the exception of Copacabana, lost their appeal? Did the people who liked Manilow in the '70s decide they don't want to hear him on radio in the 2000s? And if that's the case---why?
 
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