That was unusual. Since this is the NYC board, I'll bring up WNEW. They never played Elvis or Little Richard or other 50s stars. When they played Beatles, it was from the last four albums. And that stopped by the 80s. Jonathan Schwartz played Bob Lind's Elusive Butterfly as his theme, but he was gone by 1976. Jonathan also liked to play Sinatra, and that's ultimately why he was fired. By the 80s, it was rare that you'd hear 60s or early 70s rock on WNEW. I think the same could be said about WAPP and WPIX.
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WCBS #1 18-34
- Thread starter Theater of My Mind
- Start date
That was unusual. Since this is the NYC board, I'll bring up WNEW. They never played Elvis or Little Richard or other 50s stars. When they played Beatles, it was from the last four albums. And that stopped by the 80s. Jonathan Schwartz played Bob Lind's Elusive Butterfly as his theme, but he was gone by 1976. Jonathan also liked to play Sinatra, and that's ultimately why he was fired. By the 80s, it was rare that you'd hear 60s or early 70s rock on WNEW. I think the same could be said about WAPP and WPIX.
In Charlotte NC 61 Big WAYS stopped playing Top 40 around that time and switched to talk. In fact, it was listed under "adult contemporary" where the newspaper listed all the stations in the market each year. Later the list became a weekly one.
WBCY had been "Charlotte's Best Rock" but it was being advertised as the easygoing alternative to the hard rock station (s). It too was classified as "adult contemporary" but if the term "Hot AC" had existed I believe that's what it would be. Meanwhile, Love 97 and EZ-104 were playing "soft rock".
Only WROQ was still rocking hard but it too was headed in a Top 40 direction.
I logged a couple days' worth of WCBS-FM's playlist and came up with just over 400 songs. They're playing two songs from the 1960s: the Beatles' "Twist and Shout" (1964, but re-released in 1986 after being featured in "Ferris Bueller's Day Off"), and Steppenwolf's "Born to Be Wild" (1968). The years with the most playlist entries are 1983 to 1985. The artists with the most number of songs being played are Madonna and Michael Jackson, each with 11 songs being played. The two newest songs they're playing are Uncle Kracker & Dobie Gray's remake of "Drift Away" from 2003, and Robin Thicke's "Blurred Lines" from 2013 (which borrows heavily from Marvin Gaye's 1977 hit "Got to Give It Up"). Also Kate Bush's "Running Up That Hill", if you count it as a current hit that just happened to take 38 years to reach its peak chart position!
Like I've said before, this is NOT our WCBSFM - they have, from your posts above, have practically eliminated ALL 60's songs (and a lot of 70's stuff too) in an effort to appeal to that 18-34 demographic - in other words, to appeal to people young enough to be MY kids (I'm 63). I have NOT listened since 2014 - this is NOT the station that's gonna play "Denise" by Randy and the Rainbows or "My True Story" by the Jive Five. This is NOT the station that would acknowledge its legacy/history - or the passings of those (like Don K. Reed) who were part of it!
Their target is not 18-34. It is 35-54. But, because the PPM measures "hearing" and not "listening" many people who are with family, at work, commuting with friends or the like "hear" stations they would not pick themselves and get measured if they have a PPM meter.
Advertisers don't care. They pay for ears, not station preference.
A station's "legacy" is based on the last set of songs a listener hears today. If they don't like it they may never come back. Whatever the station did in the 70's or 80's has no relevancy in programming or ad sales today.
About 360 songs get played each week, and about 650 total are in the library. They range from 0 to about 18 or 19 weekly plays. Many of the songs that get higher plays one week get fewer plays then next week, so it seems they dynamically adjust the spin count up and down to give some rotational variety and multiply the possible combinations of songs in a sweep.
Here's the playlist breakdown by decades:
1960s: 2 songs
1970s: 51 songs
1980s: 285 songs
1990s: 62 songs
2000s: 6 songs
2010s: 1 song
This is going by year of Billboard chart peak (except for Kate Bush, as noted above), so for example, Michael Jackson's "Rock With You", released in November 1979 and peaked in February 1980, counts as an '80s song.
1960s: 2 songs
1970s: 51 songs
1980s: 285 songs
1990s: 62 songs
2000s: 6 songs
2010s: 1 song
This is going by year of Billboard chart peak (except for Kate Bush, as noted above), so for example, Michael Jackson's "Rock With You", released in November 1979 and peaked in February 1980, counts as an '80s song.
Staying “your” CBS-FM is actually a horrible idea. Radio is not a museum. It’s a business.
Just an observation: Your music taste is old for your age. You were two years old when the Jive Five release My True Story and four years old when Denise was released. To be honest, I never heard either of those songs.
Nor have I. We are starting to have a consensus.
BigA wrote...>>>Since this is the NYC board, I'll bring up WNEW. They never played Elvis or Little Richard or other 50s stars<<<
True. But WNEW-FM played plenty of 1960s artists in the 1970s, 80s and 90s. I started listening to WNEW-FM and WPLJ in the 1970s. I heard tons of Beatles, Who, Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan, etc. OK, maybe my saying it played music recorded before some listeners were born is stretching. But if you were 15 in 1985 and 20 in 1990 and were listening to an album rocker, you heard plenty of pre-1970 titles.
As someone who divided my time between WABC and WPLJ/WNEW-FM in the 1970s, I heard almost no songs that were older than a few years on WABC. Most of the hour was current hits, with maybe one or two from the library. But when I switched to WPLJ or WNEW-FM, most of each set of three, four or five songs was from the library. Perhaps one was current or from a recent LP. I listened carefully to both stations so I'd sound like that when I got on my college station. And I did the same thing as did my fellow college DJs. Before each shift, I'd pull 25-30 albums from the library. And in the studio was a box of current LPs. That's how we'd assemble each set. Mostly library cuts, with a current or two thrown in. IIRC, our college station asked us to play at least three currents per hour, so they could be reported to the record labels. The rest, do what you'd like!
How did Country stations have weekly surveys that were 30 or more songs long, if they weren't playing almost all currents? When would they have time to play a 30-40 song current chart if they were playing much library material? Same with R&B stations. Their current charts were 30-40 songs long too!
WABC was famous or maybe infamous for having only a 14 song chart, with a handful of "bubbling under" titles. But WABC rotations were so fast, #1 played nearly every hour and other hits every 90-120 minutes. How would WABC have time to play much library material?
I'll stand by my statement again. Album Rock stations played a good deal of library material. Top 40, Country and Urban stations did not. And that's why Classic Rock stations can go back further in their playlists than other formats. It's because their listeners don't consider those artists unacceptably old. Growing up, they heard The Who, The Stones and Led Zeppelin as frequently as they heard contemporary rock artists.
True. But WNEW-FM played plenty of 1960s artists in the 1970s, 80s and 90s. I started listening to WNEW-FM and WPLJ in the 1970s. I heard tons of Beatles, Who, Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan, etc. OK, maybe my saying it played music recorded before some listeners were born is stretching. But if you were 15 in 1985 and 20 in 1990 and were listening to an album rocker, you heard plenty of pre-1970 titles.
As someone who divided my time between WABC and WPLJ/WNEW-FM in the 1970s, I heard almost no songs that were older than a few years on WABC. Most of the hour was current hits, with maybe one or two from the library. But when I switched to WPLJ or WNEW-FM, most of each set of three, four or five songs was from the library. Perhaps one was current or from a recent LP. I listened carefully to both stations so I'd sound like that when I got on my college station. And I did the same thing as did my fellow college DJs. Before each shift, I'd pull 25-30 albums from the library. And in the studio was a box of current LPs. That's how we'd assemble each set. Mostly library cuts, with a current or two thrown in. IIRC, our college station asked us to play at least three currents per hour, so they could be reported to the record labels. The rest, do what you'd like!
How did Country stations have weekly surveys that were 30 or more songs long, if they weren't playing almost all currents? When would they have time to play a 30-40 song current chart if they were playing much library material? Same with R&B stations. Their current charts were 30-40 songs long too!
WABC was famous or maybe infamous for having only a 14 song chart, with a handful of "bubbling under" titles. But WABC rotations were so fast, #1 played nearly every hour and other hits every 90-120 minutes. How would WABC have time to play much library material?
I'll stand by my statement again. Album Rock stations played a good deal of library material. Top 40, Country and Urban stations did not. And that's why Classic Rock stations can go back further in their playlists than other formats. It's because their listeners don't consider those artists unacceptably old. Growing up, they heard The Who, The Stones and Led Zeppelin as frequently as they heard contemporary rock artists.
They were very selective about which songs by those artists they played, especially after 1972, when the consultants got involved. It's not about artists, but songs. So while WNEW may have played the Stones in the 80s, it was their current or recent music, not their oldies from the 60s.
The printed surveys only contained the currents, and not the gold. But that doesn't mean they didn't play older songs. No radio station, including WABC or Z-100 only played currents. Those surveys were a commercial version of the playlists they reported to the trades, and they only had currents because that was the only interest of the record labels.
If they played "library material," it wasn't older than 10 years. They were very careful not to trend too old. Read Pete Fornatale's book. They were very careful once Lee Abrams got involved to stay in a very narrow box and not become a classic rock station.
But that brings up my original point on this subject. While that might explain why people your age accept older material on rock radio, it doesn't' explain why people born after the demise of WNEW-FM would accept it. They like it because of what it is, not because of any pre-90s experience with radio, because they weren't born.
In the 60's and 70's, current songs were on average less than 3 minutes long. So if a station had 15 to 18 minutes of ads, news and other stuff, that meant about 14 to 16 songs an hour.
My own first Top 40 in 1964 played 18 to 20 songs an hour, and never less.
Prior to that, I worked at an R&B station where they also played over 15 songs an hour on average.
So if you had 40 hit songs, and played the hot ones every 2 hours to 2:30, and the bottom 10 every four to five hours, you could easily play 10 to 12 currents and "hitbounds" an hour as well as 3, 4 or 5 gold songs (we had not invented the term "recurrent" yet and thought a song had to be "chilled" for a while before coming back as an oldie).
The #1 song caused a light to flash every 90 minutes in the studio at one point. They played it roughly 100 times a week. And while the list was short, it was a lot more than 14 songs.
Back in the 60's and 70's before Urban Cowboy attitudes took over, there was very deep library play on country. If you listened to the Opry, the members would sing a new song and several old ones. Country stations did not have as regimented a Top 40 list, and they played lots of "superstars" as well as new songs.
Top 40 was conceived to cover today's hits. So of course they played little gold. But R&B stations long before the "urban" term was invented played lots of big name artist gold always... right back to what WDIA and the earliest stations of the type played.
At WJMO where I worked, the studio had a record library that covered a big part of a whole wall, and included lots of things that could only be played in certain shifts or days of the week... early dayparting.
It's more about the quantity and quality of new releases. AOR stations in the 70's focused on "superstars" and that is what Burkhart-Abrams called the format. In fact, there were places in the clock at some of them that allowed for "any approved song by any of these star artists".
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But we have to make it clear that The Who, The Stones, and Led Zepplin were CURRENT artists at that time. They were releasing current hits in the format. So a rock station didn't have to play catalog music to cover those artists. They were making current music that was accepted by the P1s as good. My point is they WERE contemporary artists in the 70s and 80s.
Certainly not as currents, but they spun on Drake-Chenault's "Solid Gold" along with currents and re-currents.
What century were those songs released? LOL. Hell, I am older than all of ya (probably) and work oldies into the 60s still a bit and don’t recall those songs. I have to refresh what memory I obviously don’t have.
Quick question on the CBS-FM train. Anyone of the thought that when they were doing things like “Oh Wow Wednesday” and More 80s weekends, that the playlist was a bit more rock than it is today? I just don’t get a chance to spot check or listen at all. Thanks for answering a question I should the answer too. I dunno who
Is even been programming CBS in the last few years. Climbing back under my rock.
Quick question on the CBS-FM train. Anyone of the thought that when they were doing things like “Oh Wow Wednesday” and More 80s weekends, that the playlist was a bit more rock than it is today? I just don’t get a chance to spot check or listen at all. Thanks for answering a question I should the answer too. I dunno who
Is even been programming CBS in the last few years. Climbing back under my rock.
I would consider "My True Story" to be a local NY hit. It wasn't heard much outside the region "Denise" was much more of a national hit. In fact I just looked at KRTH's Z to A Labor Weekend playlist from 2008 and "Denise" was on the list. So it must have been somewhat familiar to Los Angeles listeners.
We've just redefined an "oh wow" record. I'm going, "Oh wow, you don't know this song?"! You can be forgiven for "My True Story" but "Denise"? It's had airplay on every Oldies station I ever listened to! You really don't know this song?
Here is a 1960's format clock from one of the Benns family's 50 kw AM top 40 stations... WFLI in Chatanooga. Look how many songs, and then look at how they were playing 3 "Gold" and 2 "Hall of Fame" songs an hour as well as all the currents, divided into 3 categories.
This also shows how whether a station's weekly chart showed a song as #1 or #10, it played the same number of times a day...
Not going to argue that some forward thinking needs to take place over at Audacy for this format to work. Quite frankly, WCBS seems to be one of the better classic hits stations that I’ve come across that is owned by Audacy (most of them don’t hold a candle to the product that iHeart puts out). But I will certainly argue that “Blurred Lines” does not belong anywhere near the WCBS playlist. That song was playing on hip hop stations in the early 2010’s… and now it’s classic hits? I won’t argue about “Drift Away.” It’s not an offensive piece of crap and I assume most listeners are okay with it. It’s a fairly common song on classic hits radio today.
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