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Top 500 Artists

B

BabyDJ

Guest
Here is a perfect example of the problem at CBS FM with programming not "getting it"

I'm a 60's 70's 80's Classic Hits station.

Here are two artists:

The Supremes
ZZ Top

I'm doing a Top 500 countdown of the biggest artists (in my format). Which artist should be closer to the top spot?
 
Wayne County!
Cherry Vanilla!
New York Dolls!

(Actually, those would be the top artists ranked on CBS-FM if lalumia were the PD ;D ...)
 
Touche... ;)

Meanwhile, I did hear a sample of the countdown yesterday. With all due respect... Cornelius Brothers and Sister Rose is the 102nd most popular artist of all time? Really?
 
speaking of Cherry Vanilla, her auto bio "Lick Me" is released in Nov...
of special interest will be the segments devoted to her days at MainMan, the management company that handled the glitteratti;
Lou Reed, Iggy, Mott the Hoople, Wayne County, and a guy named David Bowie;
there'll be vivid details of what (and who) Vanilla had to do to get "Space Oddity" onto US Top 40 radio in the early 70s;
certain industry heavies will be quite interested...
 
Did anyone hear "Too Close" by Next this afternoon? I'm guessing that a 1998 hit had to be a mistake for CBS-FM.
 
Wow. You're right. They played it at 4:07 PM today. That, according to yes.com.

I actually had to check because I didn't see a ginormous thread on the other New York radio message board discussing this (they were all over CBS-FM playing a twin spin of Tone Loc about a year ago)...
 
Okay, I've done a little more investigating, and it's possible that perhaps CBS-FM did not play a 90's song in their countdown of artists from the 60's, 70's and 80's.

I started looking at the logs for when CBS-FM started this countdown - Thursday morning at 9 AM. I then found the portion of the playlist including the two artists prior to, and following the "Next" entry in today's log. The following are from playlists listed for CBS-FM on Thursday afternoon and Saturday afternoon:

Thursday, 12:57 PM - Gilbert O'Sullivan - "Alone Again Naturally"
Thursday, 1:01 PM - Rick Astley - "Together Forever"
Thursday, 1:04 PM - The Jimi Hendrix Experience - "Purple Haze"
Thursday, 1:07 PM - Albert Hammond - "It Never Rains In Southern California"
Thursday, 1:10 PM - The Cowsills - "Hair"

Saturday, 4:00 PM - Gilbert O'Sullivan - "Clair"
Saturday, 4:04 PM - Rick Astley - "Never Gonna Give You Up"
Saturday, 4:07 PM - Next - "Too Close"
Saturday, 4:11 PM - Albert Hammond - "It Never Rains In Southern California"
Saturday, 4:15 PM - The Cowsills - "The Rain, The Park And Other Things"

So, it appears that, unless cambridge only looked at the log and did not actually hear CBS-FM during this time, it is quite possible that CBS-FM actually played a Jimi Hendrix song today where the Next song is listed. Unless a descendant of Hendrix is involved with Next, and they decided to "go deep," I don't know. To me, the real travesty here is that the station decided not to play "The Free Electric Band" during the second Albert Hammond go-round. But I digress... ;D

So, did CBS-FM actually break their own rules and play a 90's song today - and from the late 90's, no less - or was it operator error? Based on the artist that the song in question follows on the countdown, I think it's fair to say that somebody here has been Rick-rolled. :D
 
It was definitely "Too Close" - I heard it on the air.

My friend posted it on the NY board, but apparently Sniffen deleted it. That board seems to avoid discussions of individual titles.
 
that board also always deletes mentions of "Death To Disco" by The Psychotic Frogs getting log jammed with votes into the WABC Top 9 Request Show with Howard Hoffman back in 1980, making it the only 'punk' record to ever get played on Music Radio 77 (even if only for one night, heavily edited; they banned it immediately thereafter; the dentist tries to make that part of history vanish, but to no avail...
Mr.Hoffman now remembers it fondly, which wasn't the case when it was actually happening
 
Being as www.yes.com gets their song info from picking up a "code" from a song over the air as opposed to picking up the info from a computer (or other online) generated code or list, there have been many discrepancies in the past between what actually aired versus the yes.com listings, with some songs not listed at all (mostly brand new or rarely played tracks). And being as the artist on the earlier playback song log was Jimi Hendrix (an artist sometimes but rarely heard on WCBS-FM), it's possible yes.com picked up the wrong code over the air for a Hendrix song they don't have "coded" and transcribed it as being "Too Close" by Next from 1995, which has a zero percent chance of airing on a 60's/70's/80's top artists weekend (much less during "regular daily programming"). The only chance would be if the instrumental track of the song was used as a bumper into/out of a break/segue - not likely either.

*Or as another poster mentioned as I was typing this, if indeed it was actually heard on-air at WCBS-FM, a mistake was made at the station in airing that song.*

The same thing happened with Adult Contemporary WBEB (Philadelphia's #1 station overall) a few months ago when a hard rock/metal song showed up on their Yes.com song log list, making some Radio-Info board members scratch their heads wondering what happened. It was then pointed out by some of the posters there how Yes.com gets their song log info, which can lead to inaccuracy.

Unfortunately I can't get any info from mediabase.com currently. They're just showing "No Data Found For This Station" for all stations across the country as of this posting. The "Now Playing" feature on WCBS FM's website only goes back about 10 songs, so it's of no use.
 
I agree that Yes.com makes mistakes, but this afternoon, CBS-FM definitely played "Too Close."

I wonder if CBS-FM shares an audio library with its sister stations, so this may have been as simple as a typo in a log, no?
 
The CBS FM music library is divided into two parts... the Jack library and the main library which 95% of what you hear daily is taken from.

The old Jack library lives and is updated for ToNY HD-2, but for special programming on CBS FM, there are songs pulled from the Jack library when needed.
 
cambridge said:
It was definitely "Too Close" - I heard it on the air.

My friend posted it on the NY board, but apparently Sniffen deleted it. That board seems to avoid discussions of individual titles.
Click to expand...

1. Not that I ever doubted when you originally posted that you heard this song, but I'll take your word for it...

2. Not so; read my earlier comment about how the board discussed them playing a two-fer from Tone Loc. Maybe if the board wasn't already doing something with their "Rewound" channel this weekend, the thread might have stayed up awhile longer, but the thread might have been taken down, so as not to get sidetracked on their "focus" this weekend?
 
Does anybody know how this ranking of artists was compiled? For example Dionne Warwick has over 50 singles that charted according to my Joel Whitburn Book covering 1955-96, yet she was about #318. There were several artists ahead of her that charted only a few times in the 1960s-80s Greatest Hits era. Was there a vote from the listeners. The rankings don't make sense to me.

Bruce
 
I myself am dying to find out where the 90's band Next ranked on this countdown of the greatest artists of the 60's, 70's and 80's!
 
They haven't claimed that the ranking was based on any listener voting, and it seems pretty random at best. My money is that it's designed for programming first; you can imagine that 8 hours of the weaker artists (e.g. 500-401) might not make for great radio. Instead, the biggest core artists are up top (Beatles, Elton, etc.) and then other key artists are staggered throughout the rest of the list.
 
I most also presume that many of the Top 500 lists are altered for playing purposes. For example, they wouldn't want too many ballads played in a row. I get a laugh when 50s hits like In the Still of the Night and Earth Angel still chart very high even though they are rarely if ever played on CBS-FM any longer.

Bruce
 
... and that explains why a listener-requested Top 500 countdown is a thing of the past at CBS-FM.

I remember that the "New York Top 500" every Thanksgiving would end with those two songs you mentioned, and it would always be in the 9 PM hour that Friday after Thanksgiving.

Anyway, these days, those songs would be lucky if they made it to the Top 100 tier of the current countdown...
 
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