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The new krth

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oldies76 said:
You Light Up My Life was #1 in late 1977 (number one for 10 weeks I might add, based on airplay and sales)...If 18 year olds girls were buying her 45 record that year, they'd be 54 today. 70+ is stretching it, don't you think? I highly doubt just 30 and 40 year olds were scooping up her records that fall.

As for Lou Rawls, heck it's on the CBS-FM and KRTH playlists, so they are appealing to the under 54 crowd, not 70+.

You want 70+, try early Dionne Warwick or Sergio Mendes classics, as good as they are.
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Oldies, you really have to get your brain around the concept of "appealed largely to" versus "just 30 and 40 year olds".

Yes, there were younger people buying those records. But the dominant appeal was adults.

Same for Dionne and Sergio...which means those records are likely to be 75 or even 80+ now (I love them, but we've already established I'm weird like that).

So, with Debby Boone and Barry Manilow, you're starting with records that were not universally loved by 15-year-olds then, who'd be 51 now, and on their way out of the demo anyway.

And....and this is something I've spent a year trying to get you to understand....something a 15-year-old girl loved in 1977 is not necessarily something she loves at 51...or even that she still loved at 16 (worth remembering when you run into your high school girlfriend at your next reunion). Especially when it comes to music and fashion, women tend to be more trend-driven than men.

I'll bet you lunch the phrase "that's so last year" was not first uttered by a guy.
 
This really shouldn't be a surprise. After all, CBS-FM is playing Bon Jovi, Duran Duran, and Warp Factor jingles. Time marches on.

I had heard some scuttlebutt that Jhani wanted to push deeper into the 80's before and was told by the powers that be to hold off as to not hurt Jack-FM at the time.

Given the shift since then, I would guess that Jack has also moved forward musically, so they're not both fighting over Hungry Like The Wolf.
 
Time for new jingles...or time to get rid of the jingles? KLOS and KCBS-FM don't have jingles. Does KRTH really need to have them?
 
LARadioRewind said:
Time for new jingles...or time to get rid of the jingles? KLOS and KCBS-FM don't have jingles. Does KRTH really need to have them?
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Purely a personal opinion, not related to my experience in the business or any insight into what the audience wants:

I'm so over having someone sing me call letters.
 
Are you as tired as I am of call letters that are made into a word? Sometimes when I'm traveling, I hear a station for 30 to 40 minutes and I never hear the actual call letters. I wonder what was the first station to pronounce the call letters as a word. Today we have thousands of Kisses and Coasts and Bigs and Mixes and Waves and Hots and Cools and Powers and Magics and Kicks and Bobs and Jacks and Eagles and Hawks and Wolfs and.....
 
In the past three days I've heard KRTH play 1999, We Belong, Come On Eileen, Africa, Jump, Missing You, Sweet Dreams, That's All, Footloose, Billie Jean, Down Under, Upside Down, Caribbean Queen, Out Of Touch, Let's Hear It For The Boy..... Does anyone besides me think KRTH is starting to sound like the old KKHR? I keep expecting to hear Jackson W. Armstrong and the ever-ready-for-ya gorilla!
 
LARadioRewind said:
Are you as tired as I am of call letters that are made into a word? Sometimes when I'm traveling, I hear a station for 30 to 40 minutes and I never hear the actual call letters. I wonder what was the first station to pronounce the call letters as a word. Today we have thousands of Kisses and Coasts and Bigs and Mixes and Waves and Hots and Cools and Powers and Magics and Kicks and Bobs and Jacks and Eagles and Hawks and Wolfs and.....
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People remember names. A random assortment of four letters is harder. Even was back in the day, which is why you got Coast, Kiss, K-Earth, K-Joy and K-Big.

The first? Probably Gordon MacLendon's "Cable" (KABL) in Oakland in 1959. He also gave us "Extra" (XETRA) in 1961 and "Coast" (KOST) a few years later.
 
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LARadioRewind said:
In the past three days I've heard KRTH play 1999, We Belong, Come On Eileen, Africa, Jump, Missing You, Sweet Dreams, That's All, Footloose, Billie Jean, Down Under, Upside Down, Caribbean Queen, Out Of Touch, Let's Hear It For The Boy..... Does anyone besides me think KRTH is starting to sound like the old KKHR? I keep expecting to hear Jackson W. Armstrong and the ever-ready-for-ya gorilla!
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If you do, it'll be news. Jack (and presumably the Gorilla) has been dead about 8 years.

And didn't the vastly more successful KIIS-FM play all those songs too?
 
Armstrong died in March of 2008, and he was indeed a fantastic air personality.

I was 15 years old when 'Love Is Blue' hit #1, so I think it stands to reason that you're not going to hear that masterpiece on any Classic Hits station ever again, barring a CBS-FM labor Day countdown or other radio special.

What KRTH is doing is out of necessity, as Michael & David have both stated numerous times for years; KRTH's 25-54 numbers have been sliding for years, and an overhaul/facelift had to be done.

Judging by the October PPM study covering Sept. 12/Oct. 9th done by Research Director as detailed on the All Access website, KRTH's 3.9-4.2 jump represents their best book in over a year, but it's still very early in the makeover.
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Pronounceable call letters go back a very long way. Without having to think about it very much, there's KING Seattle in King County, a little late on the scene but still there since the 40s. I heard that there was a KOP, in the 1920s, owned by the Detroit Police Department. Do you really think they didn't call it "Cop"?
 
michael hagerty said:
People remember names. A random assortment of four letters is harder. Even was back in the day, which is why you got Coast, Kiss, K-Earth, K-Joy and K-Big.

The first? Probably Gordon MacLendon's "Cable" (KABL) in Oakland in 1959. He also gave us "Extra" (XETRA) in 1961 and "Coast" (KOST) a few years later.
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Don't forget Gordon's first... Cliff in Dallas, which I think he bought around '49 or '50. Then he had Keel, Kilt, Kelp, Waky, Whistle, Winner...
 
Marv-L.A. said:
I was 15 years old when 'Love Is Blue' hit #1, so I think it stands to reason that you're not going to hear that masterpiece on any Classic Hits station ever again, barring a CBS-FM labor Day countdown or other radio special.
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I played that about 5 years ago on a now-failed "Classic Hits" station. It sounded old and decrepit... not even remotely hip.
 
DavidEduardo said:


Don't forget Gordon's first... Cliff in Dallas, which I think he bought around '49 or '50. Then he had Keel, Kilt, Kelp, Waky, Whistle, Winner...
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Wasn't WAKY (790 AM) in Louisville? Or it was IIRC back in the late 60s. I was stationed in Ft Knox around that time and I remember the station's DJs just say the calls W-A-K-Y ... I never heard them say "wacky".
 
SuperRadioFan said:
Wasn't WAKY (790 AM) in Louisville?
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Yes, that was Gordon's. I did not know they didn't pronounce the calls.

The most interesting McLendon "pronouncable" was the short-lived use of KAKI on KTSA in San Antonio. The idea was to honor and identify with the kaki-wearing military at all the bases around SA, but the hugh Hispanic population simply thought the station was called "poop" and the calls were changed back very rapidly.
 
semoochie said:
Pronounceable call letters go back a very long way. Without having to think about it very much, there's KING Seattle in King County, a little late on the scene but still there since the 40s. I heard that there was a KOP, in the 1920s, owned by the Detroit Police Department. Do you really think they didn't call it "Cop"?
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When KING was a Top 40 station in the mid 70s, the jingles and jocks always said K-I-N-G, and never used the word "King." Same thing up here in the Bay Area with KOIT, which references the landmark Coit Tower. The jocks will occasionally say "Coit" conversationally, but 90% of the time, it is K-O-I-T.

I also recall K-100 in Los Angeles, which in its last couple of years was always called K-I-Q-Q.

A digression, but some interesting trivia on KING. It references King County, of course, of which Seattle is the largest city and county seat. The county was named after William Rufus King, who was Vice President when the Washington Territory was created in the 1850s. More recently, it was discovered that WR King was pro-slavery, so the county was officially named after Rev. Martin Luther King Jr, and the county's logo changed from a crown to a silhouette of the Reverend King.
 
DavidEduardo said:


And there is another reason for staying on overnight... that goes back to when transmitters were less reliable.

After one-too-many occasions of not having the transmitter go on at 6 AM and losing the audience and revenue from a chunk of AM Drive, managers found it more reliable and cheaper in the long run to stay on overnight.

In my case, I had a transmitter not turn on because a rat got into it and went to sleep... The next morning produced an exploding rat and 3 hours of downtime while I cleaned the rat out of the transmitter. Next day we went 24/7 and I never owned, managed, programmed or consulted a station thereafter that was not on the air nonstop.
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I wonder what fried rat tastes like. Guess I'll never know.
 
hm insulators said:
I wonder what fried rat tastes like. Guess I'll never know.
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There was a famous incident and lawsuit in San Juan, PR, years ago where a rat got breaded and dropped in the deep fat...

An ongoing comedy show routine was based on meals at Kentucky Fried Rat....

But I digress (so what else is new?)
 
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