Of all the songs popping up on 1983 CHR stations that would turn off a listener who liked earlier styles, you pick a remake of a 1973 British smash by Slade. Strange! I'd have thought the British sounds of the early '70s were what you'd cut your musical eye teeth on. What WERE you listening to before CHR went all to hell? I was 28 in 1983 and I thought "Come (to avoid the stupid censorship ***'s) On Feel the Noize" was a breath of retro fresh air amid all the Men at Work/Eurhythmics/Phil Collins stuff on CHR back then. It was straight-ahead Top 40 rock with not a bit of bitter-old-man attitude like "Old Time Rock and Roll." I can't understand how that song would send you running off to AC and not "I Ran" or "Sunglasses at Night."
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Today's Classic Hits target demo was listening to Current Hits at what age?
- Thread starter PirateJohnny
- Start date
Of all the songs popping up on 1983 CHR stations that would turn off a listener who liked earlier styles, you pick a remake of a 1973 British smash by Slade. Strange! I'd have thought the British sounds of the early '70s were what you'd cut your musical eye teeth on. What WERE you listening to before CHR went all to hell? I was 28 in 1983 and I thought "Come (to avoid the stupid censorship ***'s) On Feel the Noize" was a breath of retro fresh air amid all the Men at Work/Eurhythmics/Phil Collins stuff on CHR back then. It was straight-ahead Top 40 rock with not a bit of bitter-old-man attitude like "Old Time Rock and Roll." I can't understand how that song would send you running off to AC and not "I Ran" or "Sunglasses at Night."
Soundscan opened radio's eyes to the fact that "burnout" doesn't happen as quickly or as often as radio people used to assume it did. It really is an alien concept to the average listener, who can listen to a favorite song in heavy rotation for months on end without getting tired of it, as unbelievable as it may seem to us oldies geeks.
And again...
All #1 in Billboard ever meant was that for that particular week, that record moved more copies (at wholesale, for most of the chart's history) than any other record.
All Soundscan did was change that to an accurate snapshot of what was actually selling at retail.
T
Thomps2525
Guest
Michael, do you remember in the late 1970s---I think---when a record researcher tried to rewrite the Joel Whitburn Billboard reference books by ranking the songs based on actual sales? This was long before SoundScan. I wish I could remember his name. He tried to compute sales figures for every Hot 100 song on a week-by-week basis. He explained that, for example, a number-one song in December might sell twice as many copies in a week as a number-one song in September. I believe he put out chart books representing only a few years. Whitburn ranked each year's songs by chart position and weeks at number one, weeks in the top ten, etc., and all the number ones were listed first, then all the number twos and so on. This other guy ranked all the songs by what he claimed were actual sales figures and the lists were dramatically different from Whitburn's.
If Mister oldies76 wants to hear something that will really elicit a "Good grief!", how about this: Ice Ice Baby by Vanilla Ice was one of those records that moved the most copies in a particular week. Yikes!
If Mister oldies76 wants to hear something that will really elicit a "Good grief!", how about this: Ice Ice Baby by Vanilla Ice was one of those records that moved the most copies in a particular week. Yikes!
Steve: I remember. The problem was the effort was doomed because the only way to get actual retail sales figures would be from the labels, but they weren't about to talk. So I didn't trust his numbers either.
He's right about seasonal sales being at many different volumes.
But the central thing a lot of people miss is this:
It's very possible (likely, in fact) that a record that spent 2 weeks at number two outsold a record that was #1 for one week.
Ditto a record with a few weeks at #3 or #4...especially if it was in a high-traffic period.
Which is another reason why "but it was #1!" is meaningless.
"Waiting for a Girl Like You" probably ran circles around any number of #1 songs!
Maybe. By that point, singles sales were iffy and Foreigner was more of an album band.
Some years ago LA's #1 AC station had a power current that played every 3 hours which spent over 13 months in that rotation category. That was based on callout, which verified that there was no burn and great passion for the song.
It has always been the record companies that have promoted the idea that after 12 or 13 weeks it is time to play the next song from "the album" without any regard for the status of the already-being-played song. This is symptomatic of the entire music promotion arena from the 50's onwards... bonuses, incentives and more for "bringing in" the new single, but no attention placed on the artist catalog that isn't current.
We hurt ourselves enormously back when it was common practice to stop playing a record entirely for a year after a record left the charts.
The first clue I had was when I experimented with a recurrent category in the early 70s and found that keeping those songs on the air was beneficial.
The first clue I had was when I experimented with a recurrent category in the early 70s and found that keeping those songs on the air was beneficial.
In the late 80's at one station I worked at, the problem was Janet Jackson & Bobby Brown among a few artists of the day. Callout showed the songs didn't burn, but the promotion machine kept pushing singles, so you'd have 3 or 4 singles active at a time in various rotations. Our computer for music scheduling was ancient (it took it hours to schedule a day on its own and editing was a joke) so the solution was to print the log and then draw arrows on the log with a Sharpie to flip songs by those artists to try to keep some separation.
We had the same problem in the 90's with Alanis. Between the singles and the non singles we played because listeners asked for them, we probably played all but 2 cuts on Jagged Little Pill. Maybe I'll be ready to listen to that record again in 10 years.
We had the same problem in the 90's with Alanis. Between the singles and the non singles we played because listeners asked for them, we probably played all but 2 cuts on Jagged Little Pill. Maybe I'll be ready to listen to that record again in 10 years.
T
Thomps2525
Guest
In the late 1960s and throughout the '70s, I compiled and printed the weekly list of best-selling singles and albums for a local record store. (Remember "records"?) We were one of the stores that reported to KHJ. After spending four weeks at number one on the Boss 30, Hey Jude started dropping. In its 9th week on KHJ, it fell from #10 to #20. It was still our biggest-selling single---by far---and it was the best seller at almost every record store. When we asked KHJ's music director why the song was down to #20 on their chart, we were told, "We don't want our list to get stale." (Indeed, from 1965 through 1969, it was unusual for any song to spend more than eight weeks on the Boss 30.) We pointed out that the list should be accurate. The following week, lo and behold, Hey Jude went back up to #12. But the week after that, it fell to #23 and that was it.
The next song to spend 11 weeks on the Boss 30: Sugar Sugar by the Archies.
The next song to spend 11 weeks on the Boss 30: Sugar Sugar by the Archies.
Ron Jacobs (KHJ's PD from 1965-1969) was all about getting the new stuff first. And that meant getting rid of the old stuff, even when it was still hot. As a result, a lot of stiffs got played and a lot of songs that were valuable got dumped too soon.
Here's how new-record happy RJ was. If you take the first Boss 30, you have 30 records. Now, if you add an average of 3 hitbounds a week for 8 years, that's 1,248 songs. Plus the original 30...1,278.
Round up and let's say that KHJ should have played 1,300 records in the time between Boss Radio's launch and Bill Drake leaving RKO.
Ray Randolph's site [urlhttp://93khj.blogspot.com[/url]. not only has every Boss 30 from that period, it also has a database with every song from that period.
T
Thomps2525
Guest
Surveys from several stations in Los Angeles, Chicago, Albany and Minneapolis/St. Paul are at http://www.oldiesloon.com/
KHJ had changed by the mid-1970s. There were several weeks when only one song debuted on the Top 30...and one or two weeks when there were no debuts. Redbone's Come & Get Your Love stayed on for 23 weeks---Jacobs must have been apoplectic!
KHJ had changed by the mid-1970s. There were several weeks when only one song debuted on the Top 30...and one or two weeks when there were no debuts. Redbone's Come & Get Your Love stayed on for 23 weeks---Jacobs must have been apoplectic!
Surveys from several stations in Los Angeles, Chicago, Albany and Minneapolis/St. Paul are at http://www.oldiesloon.com/
KHJ had changed by the mid-1970s. There were several weeks when only one song debuted on the Top 30...and one or two weeks when there were no debuts. Redbone's Come & Get Your Love stayed on for 23 weeks---Jacobs must have been apoplectic!
Paul Drew, who became RKO National PD after Drake left, tightened the music considerably.
Jacobs didn't care what KHJ did after he left. By the time of "Come and Get Your Love", he had co-founded Watermark, launched American Top 40, left, and was two years in to programming KGB AM & FM in San Diego.
WRKO Boston was doing the same thing -- hitbounds from out of left field that vanished almost as quickly as they appeared: Long John Baldry's "Let the Heartaches Begin," Jackie Wilson and Count Basie's "Chain Gang," Mitch Ryder's "What Now My Love," Hamilton Camp's "Here's To You," The Tremeloes' "Even the Bad Times Are Good." Each of them must have been played for only two weeks, but they were getting spins in nearly every daypart.
This certainly added an element of excitement for those listeners who couldn't wait to hear new songs, but as Soundscan proved, the true hits were selling at the record stores -- and kept on selling for months rather than weeks. I suppose you could argue that those stiffs were taking up airtime that could have been filled by big-selling hits, but the practice didn't seem to hurt WRKO, which had the advantage of having a superior signal to its competitor, WMEX, which may have reached more listeners in Ireland at night than in Boston's western suburbs.
Great stories. But now a story related to my original line of questions:
On one of the first new incarnations of Nashville's 104.5 (either KIX104 or Fox104, maybe Arrow104) they put listeners on the air when making requests. They asked the listeners to tell about the first time they heard the song they were requesting. All the stories I heard related a time when the songs were already at least 10 years old.
The listeners of this "oldies" station had not heard the songs when they were currents.
That is the point of my questions. When programming a Classic Hits station, what percentage of the audience never heard the songs as currents and how much weight does that segment have on picking songs?
Does a Classic Hits library really need to "slide" every couple of years?
(I was born in 1957 and when I hear Buddy Holly I crank the volume to 11. I can remember entering a contest on American Bandstand to win an autographed Beatles hairbrush when I was SIX years old.)
On one of the first new incarnations of Nashville's 104.5 (either KIX104 or Fox104, maybe Arrow104) they put listeners on the air when making requests. They asked the listeners to tell about the first time they heard the song they were requesting. All the stories I heard related a time when the songs were already at least 10 years old.
The listeners of this "oldies" station had not heard the songs when they were currents.
That is the point of my questions. When programming a Classic Hits station, what percentage of the audience never heard the songs as currents and how much weight does that segment have on picking songs?
Does a Classic Hits library really need to "slide" every couple of years?
(I was born in 1957 and when I hear Buddy Holly I crank the volume to 11. I can remember entering a contest on American Bandstand to win an autographed Beatles hairbrush when I was SIX years old.)
Maybe it is because Kevin Dubrow screamed rather than sang!
Actually, I heard Slade's version later, and quite liked it.
Seriously, you gotta take issue with EVERYTHING that I post anymore??
T
Thomps2525
Guest
Mister CT thinks the Quiet Riot song was "a breath of retro fresh air"? He must have been comparing it to I Put A Spell On You by Screamin' Jay Hawkins!
Okay: To answer your question, it depends on the station and the average age of the audience. A 60-year-old will remember The Beatles. A 40-year old won't.
To keep your station from aging with the audience, you need to focus on the center of the 25-54 demo. That's 39.5, so say 40.
There will be songs from before their time that they like. Testing will tell you what those are and they shouldn't get broomed just because of the year of release. But new listeners will bring in new songs, and some existing tracks will lose their appeal.
I get your Beatles and Buddy Holly references. One of my favorite all-time records is Stan Kenton's "Intermission Riff"...it's from 10 years before I was born. Half the Nat Cole stuff I love is from before my time.
But those are widely varying individual things that absent a mass cultural event (a movie, death of a major artist, etc.) is virtually never held in common by enough of the core audience. My Stan Kenton cancels out your Buddy Holly, David's Royal Teens (I know it was a joke ) cancels out LandTuna's Elvis.
T
Thomps2525
Guest
Stan Kenton, eh? I like Count Basie's Boss's Blues simply because Jerry Lewis pantomimed to it in The Errand Boy, one of the funniest movies ever made. (I also occasionally have an opportunity to use one of Jerry's lines, "Don't yell or hit." I'll spare you the details.)
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