Kudos for this post (and thread, so far).
Don't get me wrong, I'm not going to rush to tune in should Sirius ever add such a stream. (At this time I subscribe to Sirius but not XM.)
At one time, I would have been one of those for whom such a statement as "A lot of beautiful music got trashed as elevator music or muzak" applied. (And, indeed, to cite one bad example, around 10 years ago I heard, in a Louisiana grocery store, what I thought was a godawful instrumental cover of Split Enz's "I Hope I Never," in which Tim (not Neil?) Finn's plaintive vocals were replaced with a mild saxophone. I have nothing against saxophones, in fact sometimes they're great, but in this case, ahem ... Of course, I would hope that the onetime members of Split Enz enjoyed the royalties -- they might've needed them, for all I know -- and covers such as these do provide employment for the easy listening musicians. In fact, I imagine it might even conceivably be fun sometimes to come in to work and hear, for instance, "Today we're going to be working on that Beatles number.")
But posts such as these make the format seem more interesting to me.
Nice.
(BTW, on another related note, one specific source of material for an easy listening format might be Devo's EZ-Listening Disc that, if I'm not mistaken, was recorded as a joke. See
http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=10:4u9yxd7bjol7 for one reviewer's take on it. [He seemed underwhelmed.])
> > Gotta admit this is very cool for beautiful music fans
> like
> > myself. I'm hoping the "new" beautiful music channel has
> > more of a contemporary sound, so to speak. Here's why. The
>
> > beautiful music radio I remember from the late 80's and
> > early 90's was mainly covers of 70s and 80s pop tunes, and
>
> > as corny as most of them were, I nevertheless LOVED them.
>
> I think some of the best examples of beautiful music came
> from Europeans like Paul Mauriat, Caravelli, James Last and
> Pourcel. A lot of beautiful music got trashed as elevator
> music or muzak, but as you know there are major differences
> in the music styles of foreground conductors like Paul
> Mauriat, and say some studio session doing random hold music
> and stuff for stores and offices. One is designed to stand
> out, the other not.
>
> Some of Mauriat's arrangements edge closer to jazz
> interpretations, not simply remakes.
>
> There are lots of problems with carrying forward the format,
> and you can clearly hear them on Sunny and the handful of
> stations left still playing the format.
>
> First, because beautiful music formats require such a deep
> library, it's getting increasingly hard to find new music to
> add to the format without, in essence, changing the format.
> Let's face it, you can study the format's progress by its
> playlist. Cover renditions of popular songs reached their
> heights in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s. What
> Beatles song wasn't covered at least once and is still
> seeing heavy rotation on Sunny today? The pop music of the
> 1970s all the way into disco is well covered. Then, by the
> 1980s you could see the writing on the wall. Fewer new
> songs resulted in format providers like Bonneville having to
> commission their own orchestras to get new material. Lex
> DeAzevedo was a perfect example for Bonneville. He started
> doing a lot of music for the LDS/Mormon Church and was
> basically drafted by Bonneville to help them fill their easy
> listening library with a lot of instrumental arrangements of
> contemporary music. He did a fine job but let's face it -
> that stuff was never going to be commercially viable on its
> own.
>
> In the early 1980s, Bonneville moved away from reel to reel
> tape and put their format on satellite (many stations called
> it 'Satellite Stereo'), and I recall one major "coup" for
> them was a customized arrangement of the theme from the ABC
> miniseries The Winds of War which they managed to record and
> get onto Bonneville stations around a week after the
> miniseries started. You can do that with your own
> orchestras.
>
> The BBC light music department also became essential for a
> lot of good program material.
>
> The second problem is what kind of music is adaptable to
> easy listening. Pop music in this country has changed quite
> a bit from the 1960s and 1970s. Today's pop has a lot more
> influence in R&B and is very reliant on the vocals, which
> are delivered a lot differently than Karen Carpenter or Neil
> Diamond might have done them. How in the world do you adapt
> a lot of that music to instrumental renditions? You really
> can't. You could manage to adapt some adult contemporary
> stuff and even some country and western, I suppose, but it's
> not as easy as it used to be.
>
> The third problem is what to do with your core library,
> which isn't getting any younger. There were different music
> philosophies between the major syndicators of the day. You
> could easily pick out a Schulke client station from a
> Bonneville client. Some syndicators tolerated a lot of
> older catalog material. For instance, you'll still hear a
> lot of Bert Kaempfert and Ronnie Aldrich in the
> instrumentals and Ray Conniff vocals on Sunny. They scream
> 1960s, right down to their hiss laden and compressed
> frequency response sound. On Bonneville stations, you might
> hear Aldrich, but older stuff was de-emphasized. There were
> some easy listening stations that faked a stereo sound out
> of a lot of old mono material as well.
>
> We're now into the 21st century and a lot of the core
> library was produced for people who are no longer with us.
>
> The answer for some stations was to branch towards
> contemporary instrumental jazz, add more recent vocals, toss
> in a few radio friendly uptempo new age songs, or get rid of
> the format.
>
> Sunny right now seems trapped in time. It's like the clock
> stopped around 1985 and you have their unchanging library
> playing the same tunes over and over until you finally just
> quit the channel.
>
> That leads to problem number four - the fact that the format
> is essentially commercially dead and the carcass core
> libraries of the major syndicators of days gone by are now
> warehoused by one or two remaining providers. So XM really
> has limited options as to where to go to build a new
> channel. It likely will contain the same music as Sunny
> does today.
>
> > That's what gave the format its charm ... hearing a custom
>
> > instrumental cut of Whitney Houston. "Sunny" plays some of
>
> > these, but not very many. Some of the stuff Sunny plays
> > almost borders on big band. I hope the new station takes a
>
> > more "modern" sound, by modern, I mean being late 80s
> > sounding B/EZ radio, instead of 60s, 70's and early 80s
> > sounding B/EZ radio. Anyone else agree?
>
> I just don't see that happening unless the drop the current
> 80/20 instrumental/vocal split and move closer to 50/50
> because all of the more modern stuff is going to be vocal,
> and then suddenly you are in AC land. Music Choice found
> more contemporary arrangements by going overseas - there is
> still a light music following in Europe and now increasingly
> in Russia and the former eastern bloc. Japan still has a
> major following of this kind of music as well. For Music
> Choice, that meant mining whatever Reader's Digest was
> putting out on CD - they have some minor orchestras
> generating music for their compact disc series. But I
> haven't seen anything like that coming from Sunny's
> playlist.
>
> I think the best remaining hope for this music is going to
> come from orchestras overseas, especially in Europe and the
> former USSR/eastern bloc countries + Japan. But it will
> forever more be a niche format. If pop music in this
> country swings back away from R&B back towards the sound of
> the 60s and 70s, there is a chance the format will draw some
> new material from that as well.
>
