publisher said:
A couple of surprises that I have heard in the past few days (and they may have been on the DG playlist and I just missed them): Billy Ocean's "Suddenly" and Chris DeBurgh's "Lady in Red." Both fit, IMO, but it reinforces the point we are picking up the slack being left behind by AC stations.
I don't know how long, but Dial Global has played "Suddenly" for many years.
A standards station I used to listen to in the North Carolina mountains played "Lady in Red" as well as that awful Kenny Rogers/Kim Carnes/James Ingram "What About Me". I was still certain the station could be considered standards because they played a lot of the same stuff other standards stations played. Would you believe this was a 100,000-watt FM? I don't know how many years they lasted. The station was strong enough to be heard a long way off even before the signal upgrade, sometime around 1990. I do remember in 1996 they were playing classic hits (I'm referring to the soft version of classic rock, not redefining oldies), and the area's big oldies station had changed the year before and they were Pure Gold before classic hits. The station never did well because they were some distance away and another station on a nearby frequency probably interfered. So that's why they got away with this format. for as long as they did. Now they're rhythmic.
Here's my experience with MOYL. In 1996 I was just turning from one station to another and I found this great music. It was better than my Stardust station. And I could listen in the car when my father and I went to visit his aunt. It was strange they played "It's Too Late" by Carole King and "Goodbye to Love" by The Carpenters. The station's owners a few years later tried going up against Rush with a network of talk stations. Major flop. This station went country gold.
But closer to where I lived, a man who had been denied the right to air Stardust when he bought a station that went off the air tried satellite soft AC. After MOYL became available (it wasn't an option when the man was told he was too close to another Stardust station, even though the directional antenna cancelled out any duplication; the man hated Transtar/Unistar's sound for some reason) he picked it up and it was great.
One day in 1999 my father said, "Turn that junk off." Seriously? They were playing John Denver. A few months later he commented on how much he liked it. They were playing James Taylor's "Fire and Rain" at the time. I also said he had called the same station junk. By this time WSAI had picked up the format so I was hearing it at night. I remember Air Supply among others who weren't really "standards".
My semi-retired barber and everyone who came in liked the station so much. Eventually, though, the owner decided to try oldies part of the day. Then he went all oldies. There weren't a lot of local commercials. They're doing better now and it's the only oldies station for miles.
On the way to the beach I used to hear easy listening. The station that did it added more vocals and then went soft rock. Well, not SOFT--more like so-called soft rock is today, so their AM station went MOYL. The last two times I heard that station before Jones cancelled MOYL it was so extreme I couldn't believe it. One year Ben E. King was the only one doing a song that wasn't a "standard". And there was one year I heard Elvis when I made a wrong turn. One year Jim Croce was played in the middle of lots of real standards,and he really stood out. It was like a train wreck. Why bother with him? On the way home one year I heard "Wind Beneath My Wings" by Bette Midler. That was distressing, but I read somewhere they played that awful Titanic song. I don't reemmber why I didn't listen on the way home both those years, but I think this station had a lot of talk, not to mention a lot of sensitivity to power lines.
For the last two years that station has been Dial Global. So they must have followed Jones, and Jones was taken over.
