Right. There was also a format battle in home systems, which kept it from ever getting a foothold. Today’s surround is better than what Quad was, so we ultimately didn’t lose anything.
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What Killed Beautiful Music?
- Thread starter Hoxie
- Start date
Beautiful Music seemed to be struggling with aging demos by about 1980, if I recall correctly.
In February 1980, I went to work for a little AM daytimer 30 miles out of Dallas, Texas, KTER in Terrell. Dick Zimmer had the station and he hired a company to help him with the format. I thought the format had opposing sides trying to come together. In drive times, it was 50% country currents and 50% of what was labeled as Contemporary Beautiful Music (ie: Here Comes The Sun, by Hugo Montenegro and Orchestra...mostly 60s and 70s covers). Outside drive times it was 50% country hits, 25% Country 'base library' and 25% Contemporary Beautiful Music.
In 1981 I received a big packet on format offerings from a West Coast company. One was "Lite & Lively". This was about 200+ hours akin to Beautiful Music libraries of the time but it was 75% vocals by original artists (Leaving On A Jet Plane - Peter Paul & Mary; Sunshine On My Shoulders, John Denver, etc.). The other 25% was instrumental covers from the 1960s and 1970s and absolutely no traditional standards.
At the same time from a different company I received the most unique format: Country Fresh & Beautiful. I remember reading the description before threading the reel demo. I recalled thinking this could have been big. There were so many rural stations where the format was country but the FM was Beautiful Music. I figured those folks would prefer hearing covers of the songs they heard on the full service AM versus the pop covers. Tracks from Henry Mancini Goes Country LP, Nashville Brass, Boots Randolph and many others doing covers of country hits. Vocals were mostly folks like Andy Williams and such but originals like Ray Price "For The Good Times" and even Willie Nelson Blue Eyes Crying In The Rain and Sammi Smith among others that had more of an easy listening feel made up the 25% vocals. Simply put it was Beautiful Music based on country versus pop hits. I'm not sure if this had anything to do with the Country Beautiful Music FM in was it Pittsburgh or Philadelphia?
In February 1980, I went to work for a little AM daytimer 30 miles out of Dallas, Texas, KTER in Terrell. Dick Zimmer had the station and he hired a company to help him with the format. I thought the format had opposing sides trying to come together. In drive times, it was 50% country currents and 50% of what was labeled as Contemporary Beautiful Music (ie: Here Comes The Sun, by Hugo Montenegro and Orchestra...mostly 60s and 70s covers). Outside drive times it was 50% country hits, 25% Country 'base library' and 25% Contemporary Beautiful Music.
In 1981 I received a big packet on format offerings from a West Coast company. One was "Lite & Lively". This was about 200+ hours akin to Beautiful Music libraries of the time but it was 75% vocals by original artists (Leaving On A Jet Plane - Peter Paul & Mary; Sunshine On My Shoulders, John Denver, etc.). The other 25% was instrumental covers from the 1960s and 1970s and absolutely no traditional standards.
At the same time from a different company I received the most unique format: Country Fresh & Beautiful. I remember reading the description before threading the reel demo. I recalled thinking this could have been big. There were so many rural stations where the format was country but the FM was Beautiful Music. I figured those folks would prefer hearing covers of the songs they heard on the full service AM versus the pop covers. Tracks from Henry Mancini Goes Country LP, Nashville Brass, Boots Randolph and many others doing covers of country hits. Vocals were mostly folks like Andy Williams and such but originals like Ray Price "For The Good Times" and even Willie Nelson Blue Eyes Crying In The Rain and Sammi Smith among others that had more of an easy listening feel made up the 25% vocals. Simply put it was Beautiful Music based on country versus pop hits. I'm not sure if this had anything to do with the Country Beautiful Music FM in was it Pittsburgh or Philadelphia?
Well, it was a lot harder to sell 35-64 than 25-54, but depending on the market and agency buys, it was doable. KOST flipped in '82, but that was because it was a three-way Beautiful race in Los Angeles and KJOI had established dominance. Plus, Jhani Kaye devised a new type of AC ("Continuous Soft Hits") that actually helped KOST keep some of the younger existing listeners.
Same with KFOG in San Francisco (apart from what they went to and the ability to retain existing audience)---it was clear that KOIT was going to be the leader. But the mass extinction event really didn't happen until the late 80s and into the very early 90s.
I often thought.....
40s on 4, needed a Conductor hat
50s sock hop
60s was beat to move your feet
.... and the 70s on a class all their own.
but then the 80s sounded like the 80s and the 90s/ 2000s and often are one big mess..
great music but you take a HUGE HIT
usher yeah! and by radio standards and definition, it's an " oldie " that still holds up today.. .. And many not thinking about it,
won't believe it's two decades old.
so, imho, thinking the beautiful mush Format just sounded aged; still amazing to the ears that enjoy it however.... asking with the example above
in 1998, a song 20 years old
sounded 1978... and in 2006 a song going back to 1986 would feel appropriate for the 80s...
but, the timeless beautiful music format
doesn't have a window of years, rather it had its time and place in history.
40s on 4, needed a Conductor hat
50s sock hop
60s was beat to move your feet
.... and the 70s on a class all their own.
but then the 80s sounded like the 80s and the 90s/ 2000s and often are one big mess..
great music but you take a HUGE HIT
usher yeah! and by radio standards and definition, it's an " oldie " that still holds up today.. .. And many not thinking about it,
won't believe it's two decades old.
so, imho, thinking the beautiful mush Format just sounded aged; still amazing to the ears that enjoy it however.... asking with the example above
in 1998, a song 20 years old
sounded 1978... and in 2006 a song going back to 1986 would feel appropriate for the 80s...
but, the timeless beautiful music format
doesn't have a window of years, rather it had its time and place in history.
All right, full stop! I asked 20 years go when and why they changed the money demo from 18-49 to 25-54 and David told me it never happened and that it had always been that way! It seemed to me that there was an announcement in the early '70s, when I was in college.
I don't know that you could call it an announcement, and the early 70s seems too early.
I recall the shift in emphasis from 18-49 to 25-54 beginning in the late 70s. And it had to do with agencies that believed they could widen the target a bit, which benefitted the Beautifuls.
I'll look for anything I can find in terms of contemporary articles, but purely unscientifically, if you go to the R&R archives on David's WorldRadioHistory site, and do a search for 18-49 limited to the 1970s, it returns 66 results. If you change the search to 25-54, you only get five.
Do the same searches in the 1980s and you'll get 372 results for 18-49, but 924 for 25-54. So clearly, the emphasis had shifted.
I'll also say that I remember one of the arguments being that with 25-54, you were dealing purely with mature adults, and that 18-year-olds and 49-year olds were too different.
As a programmer at the time, I thought that was ridiculous, as nobody (nobody smart, anyway) was aiming at the ends. As I've said here way too many times over 20 or so years, it's like archery---you aim for the center of the target. So if I'm programming to 18-49, I'm aiming at a 33-year-old. If I'm programming to 25-54, I'm aiming at a 37-year-old. There's just not that much difference, though at the time---1979-80, those centers were on opposite sides of the line dividing Baby Boomers from the generation before it.
As a programmer at the time, I thought that was ridiculous, as nobody (nobody smart, anyway) was aiming at the ends. As I've said here way too many times over 20 or so years, it's like archery---you aim for the center of the target. So if I'm programming to 18-49, I'm aiming at a 33-year-old. If I'm programming to 25-54, I'm aiming at a 37-year-old. There's just not that much difference, though at the time---1979-80, those centers were on opposite sides of the line dividing Baby Boomers from the generation before it.
By the middle 80s, the 25-54 thing was resulting in some cringe-worthy thinking:
PS, Semoochie: I found your exchange with David from 2006, and you've misremembered it:
(semoochie)
> >
> Thank you for your very informed
> response. I think what I'm getting at is: As I recall, the
> money demos used to be 25-49. There were also demos for
> 18-34 and 18-49 but the "money demos" were stated as 25-49.
> About 35 years ago, this changed. The money demos became
> 25-54. I have no recollection of this demo at all prior to
> that time. This change was announced in some way. I don't
> remember if it was on the news or I learned it while
> attending college but they tacked 5 years onto the old
> numbers. Does anyone remember this and if so, was a reason
> stated at the time for the change?
(David)
As long as I can remember, the two overall sales demos were 18-49 and 25-54.
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And David's right in that the 25-54 demo existed. It was always there as part of the demographic breakout. My point is that ad agencies started to make noises about being able to deliver more business to stations in 25-54 than they had previously around the late 70s.
A classic example of how this was used prior to then---KMPC Los Angeles, with smart-aleck disc jockeys like Geoff Edwards and Gary Owens, sold based on its 18-49 numbers. Stodgy old KFI (pre-Lohman and Barkley) sold based on its 25-54 numbers.
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I have the last The Pulse release from 1977 before it closed and it did not have and it featured 18-49 as the "lead table" in the first age break. 25-54 came a number of pages later.
The first AC station that I programmed that wanted older than 18-49 was KOLO in Reno in 1977. They were coming from being a top-heavy 25-54, wanted to be more contemporary so as not to age out of that demo, and told me that they'd consider success to be #1 25-49.
It made sense for them, because there were a couple of local institutions that were going to dominate 25-54 (largely on the strength of listeners 45-54) as we started to skew younger, and another couple that were going to own teens and 18-34 no matter what, so aiming where they weren't was a good call.
Again, the eventual dominance of 25-54 wasn't the creation of a new demo, it was ad agencies being able to deliver better on it than they had historically. And, as the R&R piece from 1986 I linked to above shows, it eventually became a way to keep the ad dollars moving as the Boomers aged.
I'm wondering how much rising marriage ages had to do with that change. If you immediately got a union card and married after graduation, you'd be buying a house, car and Amana Radarange much younger than if you got married or otherwise set up housekeeping in your late 20s, as it is today.
Thank you, Michael! I love the internet. It still amazes me that you can find something like that so quickly! I was momentarily thrown off by the irony of the situation and it was only 16 years ago, not 20. Yes, I was referring to the change in the money demos from 25-49 to 25-54. Was a reason given for the change? It can't be that they were looking forward to a time that it would increase baby boomers' viability, can it?
Let me see if I can explain this clearly.
The demos (12-17, 18-34, 18-44, 18-49, 25-34, 25-44, 25-49, 25-54, 35-44, 35-49, 35-54, 35-64 and 55+) had all been there. Through the 60s and into the 70s, 18-49 was generally accepted to be the big money demo in both radio and TV, but there was also advertiser demand in the 60s for teen numbers and 18-34 was hot (among some buyers) for decades.
It's just that 18-49 was considered a "mass audience' and demos on either side of that were considered less so. There were fewer dollars being allocated to reach those audiences. But, especially in saturated markets, filing a niche demo could result in profitable ad sales.
25-49 was a subset of 18-49. It was not a core demo in the way 18-49 was or that 25-54 became. I mentioned it only because it was strategically good for the first AC station that I programmed that wanted something a bit older than 18-49 and a bit younger than 25-54 and I outlined the reasoning for that in my post.
Again (and I may not have said this well before), it really can't be called a "change" and there wasn't "an announcement". It was just a case of ad agencies finding that more clients were willing to increase spending on 25-54, making it a more profitable proposition for stations delivering that demographic. And, over time, once the entire Baby Boom was 25 and older (1989), that demo held within it a massive population bulge.
As to your last question, it's a demographer's job to think about people aging and where significant percentages of population will be in five, ten, twenty or more years, so yes, of course that was part of the equation.
Ad agencies in 1978 had more clients willing to spend more money on stations that did well 25-54 than they did a decade earlier. In 1969, 25-54 was people born between 1914 and 1943. In 1978, it was people born between 1924 and 1953. The big difference? There were no Boomers, the largest generation in history at that time, in the 25-54 demo in 1969. There was seven years' worth in 1979, bringing with them sheer numbers, and a larger percentage of college degrees, which tended to translate to higher earning and spending power.
And that only increased as long as the oldest boomers were 54 or under (the year 2000). But---for B/EZ, it only went so far. The format didn't attract Boomers, so its audience, largely in its 50s and older, aged out rapidly. They made money because, especially in the mid-late 70s, they tended to be #1, #2 or #3 in the demo. And agencies then were more prone to blindly buy the demo, rather than ask if the people they wanted, who happened to be in that demo, were listening to that station. That changed over time.
In the early 1970s KBMR (Bismarck, ND) was a contemporary country station that was live at daytimes but ran an automated beautiful music format overnights, which (from the little bit I've heard airchecks of) was covers of country songs. Was that the same library KBMR used?
The FM 100 Plan had "Beautiful Country" which, of course, had lots of Floyd Cramer cuts. It was intended for markets that, back in the 60's, had more country listeners than AC listeners as shared audience.
That sounds a little like Casual Country, which I worked with briefly. We ran it on 2 reels, one vocal (not all big hits either) and one instrumental, which tended to be heavy on Danny Davis and the Nashville Brass.
Part of what made 25-54 grow in importance was the rapid increase in the median age of Americans. That was the era of the cures for many diseases like polio and the consequent increase in life spans. Because of the improvements in health, families started looking at two children as the right family size, making younger demos of less rapid growth.
But 18-49 to this day are the standard for Black and Hispanic buys due to the considerably lower median age of those groups... around 10 years in both cases.
If we look back at 50's and earlier 60's ratings, there were no demographic breaks at all! That explained the focus of Top 40 stations where the lack of demo breaks let them appeal heavy radio users to build the share.
You could also add KNOB 97.9 Long Beach and KDUO 97.5 Riverside to the list.
Thank you, Michael! When I suggested an announcement, I was thinking it made the news rather than someone going through the streets of town with a big megaphone. It appears that I had at least two things wrong. I honestly thought the money demo was 25-54 and 25-54 replaced it, probably because it sounds like it refers to actual adults with adult buying power for things like 30 year mortgages. I thought 18-34 was second. As I was reading this, something occurred to me. Now that we have a 6+ total audience, do we now have 6-11 and 6-17 demos?
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