I recall that being WDOK which changed to soft hits later in the 80's. Our doctor usually had it on in the waiting room.IIRC, "beautiful music" was still around on the FM dial in Cleveland until the early 80s. Perhaps not as plentiful as in the 60s and it might have transitioned a bit from orchestral "elevator music" (i.e. Percy Faith, the Living Strings, Andre Kostelanetz, etc.) to easy listening or soft hits. Growing up, I listened to it with my dad and I am not gone yet.
WQAL flipped from easy-listening to soft AC on March 31, 1990. Cleveland was an anomaly of a market as it and WDOK were both in the format until 1987 (not counting rimshots like WDBN, WREO-FM and WHBC-FM) while every other major market only had one EZ station remaining. Even WBEA gave up in 1983 when they flipped to Top 40. The format disappeared totally in NYC by 1985 and in LA by 1989 with "Pirate Radio".
Careful now.
Beautiful music disappeared completely from NYC around 1992 when WPAT first switched to light rock as the New 93.1 FM, totally killing off the instrumentals. Before that it was 90 percent instrumental with 10 percent vocals an hour.
Not sure how old you are, but -- aside from a few isolated retirement markets -- the beautiful music on broadcast radio is as dead as their original listeners. We are talking about a station which plays Mantovani, the 101 Strings, Andre Kostelaentz, Percy Faith, etc. These stations have almost completely vanished many years ago.
And don't forget "The Sound of the Western Reserve."
The FCC history cards say the move took place on February 17, 1969.
Some of us are still around. From the Spring of 1958 I used to be able to get the Muzak over WMMW FM Meriden being broadcast to clients. When they moved that to MX they ran Muzak's Programatic for about a year. Many of the same Muzak artists but with vocals and without the flat sound peculiar to normal Muzak processing then.
The major stations all jumped ship in the early 90s, if not before. There were a few hundred smaller outlets through much of the 1990s I used to hear Bob Bittner's WJIB AM up to 2004 when he went to Adult Standards/Oldies. An exciting development has been the wealth of internet broadcasters over the years who have chosen to work in that format. Several of them surpassed anything I ever heard on terrestrial radio. More interesting and diverse, looser presentation, if you will.
WZAK's callsign was derived from Muzak; it was originally a joint venture between former WXEN exec Xenophon Zapis and the Ohio Music Corp., a regional Muzak franchise that held the CP for the station. From the start it was a block ethnic format and did not carry Muzak on the primary channel.
1) No although Music Of Your Life attracted many listeners as the first original artists syndicated format focusing on record hits from the 1940s and '50s. What happened to Beautiful Music radio was that increasingly from 1981 the older generation became anathema to the young agency time buyers. They just started thinking they were death to business or didn't want to think about them at all. Didn't so much matter if a Beautiful outlet was #1 even 12+ - they looked to see what its 24 to 54 numbers were. And by the end of the decade, as the editor of M Street Journal observed in 1992, they had been removed from radio "with a crowbar" as the popular Beautiful stations dropped the format in 1990 and 1991. Of course underlying it all was that the record companies had stopped producing it mostly by the end of the 1960s when that generation stopped buying records. So after that there was very little new product being made to keep the format fresh - outside of a certain amount of custom recording done by Beautiful Music syndicators on their own or banding together. The format was attracting few younger listeners in spite of attempts by some stations and syndicators to add more rhythmically modern selections and more Adult Contemporary vocals. So stations, even those still doing very well, were facing years of increasing attrition and erosion of their traditional listener base and just gave up and moved on to something else.
