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Why are big hits "lost?"

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TheBigA said:
As I said, I haven't heard any music lately. Maybe the local stores didn't get the memo.
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I was at the Lebanon, NH, Walmart earlier today (snowstorm on the way!) and the store audio was country, mostly 2010s and 2020s. Randy Houser's 2013 "How Country Feels" was playing as I looked over the selection of ice-melting chemicals ("salt"). I also didn't hear a DJ's voice, nor have I ever at that store.
 
michael hagerty said:
The entire reason for in-store play is that it's been found, when done properly, to affect sales and profits.
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When I was doing my Beautiful Music syndication business in the 80's, I had contact with Muzak about doing some Latin / Hispanic blends or services. One of the things I learned is that in that era, many stores had horrible interior designs with acoustics that amplified the rolling of old-style carts, the chatter of customers, and other background noises... the businesses sounded like the loading dock at a warehouse. So background music was intended to mask the background noise.

Only then did they look at motivating purchases by matching the music to the desired mood.
michael hagerty said:
There's absolutely a science to it, and major chains that think about economizing by not either outsourcing to a really good company or having a top-notch in-house operation are risking money, not saving it.
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I got a tiny bit of insight on how they did the arrangements for custom music... those instrumental covers of well known songs. Everything from the specific instruments to the last notes of the song were evaluated and calculated.
 
AbrahamJSimpson said:
The funny part is someone could have swapped in a cassette at Kmart with virtually no effort whatsoever. Tons of us had access to the console at the service desk, yet no one did to my knowledge. (At our store at least.) Might have been amusing to swap in some AC/DC…Run DMC…pretty much anything that wasn’t what those tapes were.
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Sidebar: that reminded me of when the night jock at 13-Q in Pittsburgh somewhere around '73 or '74 observed that that sister Beautiful Music FM station had a live (Shulke required) voice for the liners that came ahead of every 15' interval stopset... and the guy on evenings would run the spots, start the matched flow tape and go and smoke outside. Four times an hour.

So the Top 40 jock edited in IIn-A-Gadda-Da-Vida along with Mantovanni and Pourcel. It played. The announcer came back from his smoke to find the phone lines all ringing. He wrapped the segment, ignored the phones, went for another smoke. The 13-Q jock removed the song from the tape. Nobody could figure out what happened and they thought some other station had interfered with them.

Lots more fun than lighting the newsman's copy on fire while he was reading it...
 
DavidEduardo said:
When I was doing my Beautiful Music syndication business in the 80's, I had contact with Muzak about doing some Latin / Hispanic blends or services. One of the things I learned is that in that era, many stores had horrible interior designs with acoustics that amplified the rolling of old-style carts, the chatter of customers, and other background noises... the businesses sounded like the loading dock at a warehouse. So background music was intended to mask the background noise.

Only then did they look at motivating purchases by matching the music to the desired mood.
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I'm surprised so much thought goes into shopping music given that, at many stores, it is often interrupted for announcements ranging from special deals to calls for spill cleanup to advisories about closing time -- along with that perennial favorite, "Price check on Register 2!" These always interrupt a good song, I have found. CVS is the worst offender. It's not often that an entire song gets played without some sort of promotional announcement interrupting it.
 
DavidEduardo said:
Sidebar: that reminded me of when the night jock at 13-Q in Pittsburgh somewhere around '73 or '74 observed that that sister Beautiful Music FM station had a live (Shulke required) voice for the liners that came ahead of every 15' interval stopset... and the guy on evenings would run the spots, start the matched flow tape and go and smoke outside. Four times an hour.

So the Top 40 jock edited in IIn-A-Gadda-Da-Vida along with Mantovanni and Pourcel. It played. The announcer came back from his smoke to find the phone lines all ringing. He wrapped the segment, ignored the phones, went for another smoke. The 13-Q jock removed the song from the tape. Nobody could figure out what happened and they thought some other station had interfered with them.

Lots more fun than lighting the newsman's copy on fire while he was reading it...
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At KSLY in San Luis Obispo, we were a little lazier. We were all kids (I was 17, the oldest jock was the PD and he was 24), and when we finished our Top 40 airshifts on the AM, we had to record headlines for our beautiful music FM. Had a little one-note xylophone we'd hit with a soft mallet between news stories, and we were supposed to end with the weather and:

"That's KUNA News. Now, KUNA beautiful music continues."

But we'd change that sometimes---we'd never disturb the music tapes, but we'd lead into some anonymous elevator music (whatever was next on the reel) with:

"That's KUNA News. Now, KUNA beautiful music continues with the sounds of Led Zeppelin, his orchestra and chorus, and "Whole Lotta Love."

...or the title of some equally outrageous record---hoping that someone would actually walk into the record store, ask for it and have their mind blown when they got it home.
 
Kelly A said:
Getting back to the original topic; who doesn't like big hits? I mean, really. If they're big enough, there's little chance of losing them.
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The issue in this discussion is "what makes an enduring big hit?"

When we do research, we consider every high scoring song to be a hit, whether old or brand new.

A song that peaked at #15 and spent only 4 weeks on national charts is not a hit and never was.

As I said earlier, back in the days of the 45 rpm single, there was a huge difference between a top 10 or so song and one that got to the mid-20's or higher teens. When we used to call record stores, the real finding was that there were generally less than a dozen or so real hits at any moment. Everything else was either dropping off, trying to climb upwards or stiffing out.
 
AbrahamJSimpson said:
An early contender for understatement of the year.
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Removing my tongue from my cheek, I do have to say that we come across anomolistic (I think I just made that word up) individual occasionally in music tests. They are what we call "outliers" and they seem to listen to us only because we are "the best alternative" but they don't strongly like songs everyone else loves and love some "mediocre songs" based on the group scores.

When we find an outlier, we eliminate their results. Appealing to them will hurt our appeal to the other 99% of listeners. And today, most of those outliers stream or have personal playlists. In this case, the Chimp is one of the rare "outliers" who regularly and heavily uses broadcast radio.
 
DavidEduardo said:
Removing my tongue from my cheek, I do have to say that we come across anomolistic (I think I just made that word up) individual occasionally in music tests. They are what we call "outliers" and they seem to listen to us only because we are "the best alternative" but they don't strongly like songs everyone else loves and love some "mediocre songs" based on the group scores.

When we find an outlier, we eliminate their results. Appealing to them will hurt our appeal to the other 99% of listeners. And today, most of those outliers stream or have personal playlists. In this case, the Chimp is one of the rare "outliers" who regularly and heavily uses broadcast radio.
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That's a good point. Most radio nerds with eclectic tastes wouldn't be considered for music surveys, mainly because they go out of their way to be outliers. They overthink things. Overall, tiny percentage.
 
Daryl Lynn L.A. said:
Your translation must have been better than the original lyrics, and the OM must have been very good with voiceovers.

This is a question for anyone here who has worked in radio or in the music business. Here's the mystery.

How do these execrable - or at least groan-inducing songs become big hits in the first place? And how is it that they get so much air play to begin with? Some ideas:

1. Does the song resonate emotionally with listeners who normally pay little attention to songs, but tear jerker songs strikes some chord in them that relates to their own lives? Maybe they lost someone due to death, or to a bad breakup, so they call in incessantly to request the song? If you ever took requests via phone, email, text message, etc. - do you find that the same people continually contact the station with requests?

2. Is the mediocre song part of an album release, or a movie soundtrack release which will make a big impact on the culture? For example, "The Way We Were" by Barbra Streisand was just.......not good. It was self-pitying, maudlin, tear-jerking, patronizing, corny, etc. I didn't like it. But it was played to death on L.A. radio. It won a Grammy, I believe. It was heavily promoted, because it was used to sell the movie.

2.a. Same thing with "You Don't Bring Me Flowers Any More" w/ Streisand and Neil Diamond. More maudlin, cornball dreck. It went to the top 10 very quickly after its release, IIRC. There was no movie associated with it. But Streisand and Diamond were huge names in pop music. So fans bought it because at that level, a fan will collect every album that their favorite artist releases.

3. Do listeners request or buy music because the artist is associated w/ another artist that they like? For example, was "You Light Up My Life" a hit because fans of Debby Boone's father, Pat Boone, really liked slow, sentimental ballads that were played at wedding receptions? ( I'm not a fan of this song- I thought it was SO corny with weepy sentiment. But, a lot of my gal friends who got married during this time, wanted it played at their weddings).

4. Do listeners buy it because they like the genre or like to sing along? Example "That Summer" by Garth Brooks. ( Gawd. I don't like the lyrics. The guy spends the rest of his life bragging about a fling he had with a desperate older woman on a farm). The chorus is not all that singable, except to people who believe they have very strong voices. Anyone who thinks he/ she sounds like Garth, Reba McEntire, LeeAnn Rimes, or Dolly, likes to sing along. It's a big karaoke favorite on cruise ships).

4.a. Another example of sing-along with not very good lyrics, not very good beat, not very danceable - but a chorus that draws the bar-- karaoke crowd: "Friends in Low Places". Great song to slur along with at 1 a.m. in the local watering hole.

5. Is there a dance step associated with it? "Achy-Breaky Heart" was cute, the first 500 times that it was played. After that, well, not so much. Same thing way back in the 1960's with Little Eva's "Locomotion."

These are not kind comments. But it is a mystery to me why stations start playing these songs in the first place. My guess is - they get a lot of requests, then they play it more, then it starts selling, then they play it some more, so it becomes an upward cycle that turns it into a high-charting hit. But that doesn't mean that it's good music. JMO from a listener's perspective. -- Daryl

P.S. What do you think is the pop song voted the # 1 Worst Song of All Time? According to a CNN poll from 2006, it's "You're Having My Baby" by Paul Anka and Odia Coates. ( I didn't think anything could top "Honey", but I have to agree with this poll).

The Worst :-(
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Great job with this. BTW, I was the DJ at a wedding reception whereby people requested “Friends In Low Places”. Yes-open bar.
 
michael hagerty said:
At KSLY in San Luis Obispo, we were a little lazier. We were all kids (I was 17, the oldest jock was the PD and he was 24), and when we finished our Top 40 airshifts on the AM, we had to record headlines for our beautiful music FM. Had a little one-note xylophone we'd hit with a soft mallet between news stories, and we were supposed to end with the weather and:

"That's KUNA News. Now, KUNA beautiful music continues."

But we'd change that sometimes---we'd never disturb the music tapes, but we'd lead into some anonymous elevator music (whatever was next on the reel) with:

"That's KUNA News. Now, KUNA beautiful music continues with the sounds of Led Zeppelin, his orchestra and chorus, and "Whole Lotta Love."

...or the title of some equally outrageous record---hoping that someone would actually walk into the record store, ask for it and have their mind blown when they got it home.
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Before all of that beautiful music, there were the Seeburg players. A music library for factories and one for retail
 
michael hagerty said:
Worth remembering as well---Debby Boone's "You Light Up My Life" was inescapable if you were (for the sake of the discussion) living in L.A. and listening to KFI, KMPC, KHJ, KTNQ, KIIS, KRLA, KIQQ, KRTH or KIIS-FM.

If you were among the about-to-peak number of people between 12 and 34 listening to KMET, KLOS or KWST (I'm leaving KNX-FM out of it because I'd like to think they passed---but I can't swear to it), you never heard it on a radio station you listened to.
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Very true. Jim Ladd, Mitch Reed, and Mary Turner on 94.7 The Mighty Met are not going anywhere near that song.
Greg Goodfellow said:
Great job with this. BTW, I was the DJ at a wedding reception whereby people requested “Friends In Low Places”. Yes-open bar.
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Did they also request "You Light Up My Life" as the first waltz? :ROFLMAO: Ugghhhh. There's a lot better music to play for the first waltz, which is usually played so that everyone can dance with everyone else in different generations. Off-topic: When my son got married ( this is in the past 10 years), his Italian mother-in-law asked the DJ to play "That's Amore" by Dean Martin as the first waltz. Ewww ! That is a song from my parents' generation -- and I'm a boomer. It is not even relevant. But that's what the mother of the bride wanted, and that's what she got. The DJ actually had that song. Wow, that's corny. :rolleyes:
If couples want a sentimental oldies love song for the first waltz, then a great oldie is "My Cup Runneth Over With Love" by Ed Ames. He can really sing, and that's a beautiful arrangement. It blows Debby Boone right out of the water. JMO. -- D.
 
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