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Which is more "Lite"? WFEZ/WLYF?

strangelove said:
KAHM in Prescott, AZ is still doing the B/EZ format the way WLYF used to back in the day.
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The same format, but with very mediocre programming.

I have heard varying stories about "Calm" and listened to it as long as I could stand when I had a place in Prescott. It sounded like they had obtained left-over beautiful music tapes from several syndicators when the format died and dubbed the songs onto automation equipment. It had / has very poor sequences and is nowhere as good as any of the principle services back in the 70's and early 80's.

To clarify, I owned a beautiful music syndication company serving Latin America and was on nearly 100 stations, including markets the size of LA and Chicago so I have strong feelings about how the format should sound. KAHM does not even come close.

For some reason, now I gotta' play Whittaker's "Last Farewell" and some Frank Pourcel...
 
Here's a clip from former Lite PD Rob Sidney from the night WLYF moved to their tower in 2009. Includes some great old Life/Lite imaging and a dedication to the station's engineer who passed on before the project could be completed. Classy stuff.
 
DavidEduardo said:
The same format, but with very mediocre programming.

I have heard varying stories about "Calm" and listened to it as long as I could stand when I had a place in Prescott. It sounded like they had obtained left-over beautiful music tapes from several syndicators when the format died and dubbed the songs onto automation equipment. It had / has very poor sequences and is nowhere as good as any of the principle services back in the 70's and early 80's.

To clarify, I owned a beautiful music syndication company serving Latin America and was on nearly 100 stations, including markets the size of LA and Chicago so I have strong feelings about how the format should sound. KAHM does not even come close.

For some reason, now I gotta' play Whittaker's "Last Farewell" and some Frank Pourcel...
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I never had a basis for comparison, just what I've read about the format and some of the methods that went into programming it. 'Elevator Music' by Joseph Lanza is a good book about the history of easy listening, mood music and the rise of Muzak. The KAHM webstream is pay-walled now, interestingly.
 
strangelove said:
I never had a basis for comparison, just what I've read about the format and some of the methods that went into programming it. 'Elevator Music' by Joseph Lanza is a good book about the history of easy listening, mood music and the rise of Muzak. The KAHM webstream is pay-walled now, interestingly.
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If I'm not mistaken, the paywall was prompted by the influx of out-of-market listeners the station gained when SiriusXM eliminated its BM channel, the Marlin Taylor-programmed Escape, for several months.
 
As an aside, long before the FEZ calls wound up in Miami they were used for a small station first located in Williston and later moved to Gainesville (at which point it became WLLO "Willow"). The Williston station was actually housed in a double-wide and was located in a field which may have also been a cow pasture (I know, I visited the station to see someone I knew there at the time). One of the on-air guys names was Gordon Much...a mysterious British guy who seemingly vanished from radio not long afterwards. Thought you folks might like that little bit of trivia!
 
CTListener said:
If I'm not mistaken, the paywall was prompted by the influx of out-of-market listeners the station gained when SiriusXM eliminated its BM channel, the Marlin Taylor-programmed Escape, for several months.
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It was available online. But people wanted Sirius/XM to put it back on their regular receivers. I think there was an extra cost to listen online.
 
JIB on the web is an excellent, and FREE, elevator station run by former WJIB announcers. Excellent presentation, both musically and announcer interactions. Sounds more Shulke, then Bonneville, if you know the difference. http://jibontheweb.com
 
vchimpanzee said:
It was available online. But people wanted Sirius/XM to put it back on their regular receivers. I think there was an extra cost to listen online.
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Yes, at that time you had to pay $5 more per month to get online access to SXM; the standard fee only allowed you to listen to SXM on your radio.
 
DavidEduardo said:
This is a good moment to mention that Marlin Taylor's own book is available from Amazon and is a good story of a very nice person and a real radio "star".

Radio...My Love, My Passion, Taylor, Marlin R., eBook - Amazon.com
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Oh yes. Marlin's memoir is must reading for anyone who wishes to know more about Beautiful Music, or I would say radio in general. Though we like to think of him primarily as a programmer it is prudent to remember that he was a very effective GM as well at stations such as WDVR FM Philadelphia, WBCN FM Boston , WRFM FM NYC in the 60s and very early 70s.
 
DrAkbar said:
JIB on the web is an excellent, and FREE, elevator station run by former WJIB announcers. Excellent presentation, both musically and announcer interactions. Sounds more Shulke, then Bonneville, if you know the difference. http://jibontheweb.com
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I would recommend JIB on the Web. A real feeling for what the Beautiful format was about in the 1970s. If it reminds one of SRP perhaps that is because the gentleman was an announcer on the original WJIB FM 1968 to 1981 and they ran the Schulke format the last seven and a half years of his tenure. I hope I am not sticking my neck out by saying that in the WJIB FM in the 1970s was the most cleanly-formatted FM station I ever had the privilege of listening to. Some years ago Phil Stout, the man who programmed the Schulke format, referred to WJIB FM in those days as one of the five "perfect Schulke stations". The operator of JIB on the Web also worked for SRP for a couple of years so had a good perspective on it which he is able to build upon with many resources unavailable to programmers back in the day. For the last almost 20 years the best Beautiful Music programming has been on the web.
 
Dick's History said:
If it reminds one of SRP perhaps that is because the gentleman was an announcer on the original WJIB FM 1968 to 1981
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Yup, and Warren Schroeger did work for SRP. While Bonneville tried to change with the times by ditching matched flow with random access, it didn't move the needle. Demos for all elevator music stations were aging and PPM revealed the truth about actual TSL. Marlin's creation and influence on the format is undeniable. IMHO, JIB on the web is a much better product than Sirius XM's Escape channel. But as was the case years ago, not many listeners today can tell the difference. It's all just relaxing, beautiful music.
 
strangelove said:
I'm currently checking this station out on Tune-In. I don't know where it's been hiding but thanks for posting the link!
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@DrAkbar I second strangelove's comments. I gave the "JIB on the web" site a listen a few nights ago after seeing the link you posted here and enjoyed the content, AND it took me back a bit to working in the garage or sitting on the porch with my grandpa, who normally had a radio with him tuned to either beautiful music, or the local "Music of your Life" station.
 
DrAkbar said:
Yup, and Warren Schroeger did work for SRP. While Bonneville tried to change with the times by ditching matched flow with random access, it didn't move the needle. Demos for all elevator music stations were aging and PPM revealed the truth about actual TSL. Marlin's creation and influence on the format is undeniable. IMHO, JIB on the web is a much better product than Sirius XM's Escape channel. But as was the case years ago, not many listeners today can tell the difference. It's all just relaxing, beautiful music.
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Bonneville offered a random select version of their format as early as 1974 if not before. It was designed primarily for AM stations and small market stations. When Darrell Peters brought his remaining FM 100 clients to Bonneville he was allowed to continue servicing them with the random select he was accustomed to using, and Dave Verdery assembled a random select format containing more vocals and lots of custom cuts of recent hits Marlin had commissioned. So their "Ultra" random select format was available in those three versions - the Peters more conservative one, Taylor original one, and Verdery's 35% percent vocal with custom versions of hits which later became more jazz and New Age oriented. Bonneville's matched-flow service, programmed by Marlin Taylor, remained available until after he left the company in 1987 and most of it was incorporated on the CDs they issued the last few years. But as a lot of the kid stations GMs seemed to think a "younger" and more "vocal" orientation would capture younger demos Marlin's matched flow, though it did incorporate 25 % vocals the last few years, became less popular with many clients trying for younger audiences.
 
Dick's History said:
But as a lot of the kid stations GMs seemed to think a "younger" and more "vocal" orientation would capture younger demos Marlin's matched flow, though it did incorporate 25 % vocals the last few years, became less popular with many clients trying for younger audiences.
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More vocals would make most elevator music stations fall into the Lite AC format...one which was already dominated by stations playing all vocals. It was the lush melodic instrumentals that made Beautiful Music so popular. But as listeners who loved that format aged out of the demo, there just weren't enough coming in who had the same tastes. Jerry Lee of EZ 101 in Philadelphia saw the early signs of decline and wisely went all soft vocals. He was criticized for pulling the plug too early, but proven right years later.

Can't fault the syndicators...they tried just about everything to save the format. But time moves on, and so do musical tastes. PPM was the final nail in Beautiful Music's coffin. But I dig JIB on the web and crank it up every time I hear Eye Level by Harald Winkler!
 
DrAkbar said:
More vocals would make most elevator music stations fall into the Lite AC format...one which was already dominated by stations playing all vocals. It was the lush melodic instrumentals that made Beautiful Music so popular. But as listeners who loved that format aged out of the demo, there just weren't enough coming in who had the same tastes. Jerry Lee of EZ 101 in Philadelphia saw the early signs of decline and wisely went all soft vocals. He was criticized for pulling the plug too early, but proven right years later.

Can't fault the syndicators...they tried just about everything to save the format. But time moves on, and so do musical tastes. PPM was the final nail in Beautiful Music's coffin. But I dig JIB on the web and crank it up every time I hear Eye Level by Harald Winkler!
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Some of the syndicators and stations adding more and more recent vocals caused their music formats to be perceived as Adult Contemporary and once attracted that particular audience only wanted more of the same. The numbers of us who loved Beautiful Music remained pretty steady but the addition of too many AC type vocals turned a lot of our traditional listeners off so they stopped listening. And the young people growing up listened to other kinds of music on the radio. Beautiful accounted for about 10% of national radio listening when the stations began switching en masse. Whereas that figure had been close to 20% on the average in 1976. Oh many of us in our 30s and 40s were listening to Beautiful to the end as long as we could find a station which still carried on the same level of musical excellence and idealism. Lee was a leading figure in the format and an inspiration for many and many stations just blindly followed him out of the format because he said so. He enrolled a number of his colleagues in sponsoring an auditorium testing of the format in the late Fall of 1987 by William Moyes who was a known foe of the format as well as one of the originators of the AC concept so there was no question as to what would be the outcome of the study. It was a put-up job they used to justify their leaving the format. They were all doing very well though not as well as two or three years earlier but they saw the writing on the wall and they all decided to change then rather than wait until they really started to lose their audiences to attrition. Beautiful Music had another fifteen years left naturally as a viable radio format when the plug was pulled. When you write that Jerry was "proved right years later" that is exactly right. But it was many years before Jerry and most other stations equaled the money they made with Beautiful. Most had to start over again. Many tried to wean their audiences off Beautiful but that did not work. Others moved it to their AMs but lost money because though it sounded good on AM it just wasn't the same and listeners knew they were getting the shaft. But two and a half to three and a half generations of radio listeners (depending on how you count them) lost their radio entertainment of choice. And most of them turned off their radios and never listened to them again in their lives. I listened to Classical Music and Jazz as I still do when I can get them. Also I had built up by the late 80s a large personal library which I much preferred to radio so really when they pulled the plug I was hardly aware of it for a couple of years until I realized what had happened and looked into it. Which is why I decided to do the history for all those people the radio industry disenfranchised. And though I know this is a very simplistic conclusion, that marked the beginning of the end for terrestrial radio. At exactly the same time radio began losing listeners. Because more and more it was no longer programmed for real listeners but rather for ideal demographic abstractions which never existed. There was a lot of drama and a lot of heartache in this which I learned about later and which I'm sure is already forgotten except when I write or post some history on the net. What happened is the record companies stopped issuing it and after the 60s no longer developed artists skillful enough to craft new genre product. Though the stations and syndicators commissioned custom product and some of it was indeed decent, more was inept and had neither the energy nor the excitement of the earlier artists who had mostly come up in radio used to making an arrangement of a popular tune that was exciting and told a story or took the listener from one place to another. Because back in the network days if you allowed things to get dull listeners would change to another stations or network. So with little enough new suitable product stations were relying more and more on the same artists they had played 20 or even 30 years earlier. Most of the new custom stuff didn't cut it and some listeners were lost. In the early 80s a business recession caused the advertising industry to cut back to basics, which meant even more focus on the fresh and youthful market. So agencies stopped buying Beautiful stations two or three deep and and cut their accounts for Beautiful stations. Still those with the good ratings were still bought and that is how it remained until the end. But in the late 70s the rock stations rose against Arbitron ratings service and started their own services which would give their own music better numbers. So faced with the loss of business from the more youth-oriented stations Abitron altered the way it measured ratings to benefit the young-oriented formats. This first took effect in the Spring of 1982. Many young people never got Beautiful Music because they never listened to it but AT it. Just the same as a lot of adults never really listened to much of the rock and R& B that most of my generation enjoyed in the 1950s. So it meant nothing to them and some even thought it was some kind of plot. All they could think of good to say about what for many of us was almost our lifeblood was that it must be "relaxing". Which, of course I suppose one can relax to anything and why not if that is what we want to do? But we found it stimulating and refreshing and for most of us it symbolized all peoples working together in harmony to create one monumental idealistic whole - beautiful all the time. Which we knew was unrealistic but we liked to think was possible. Beautiful Music was all that for us.
 
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