Week one in radio---I open up Billboard, look at the "HITS OF THE WORLD" page and realize that we're just us. Yeah, some stuff goes global---but not a lot.
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Why are big hits "lost?"
- Thread starter tall_guy1
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And if you go by chart positions, it is even more extreme.
In Ecuador, where my Top 40 stations looked at charts for programming guidance because there was little local record production, I usually found the UK charts more useful than the US ones.
Thank you for posting this link to Jim Ladd's book. I read the Forward by Don Henley. He says that in the 80's, radio stations became investment properties for entrepreneurs who wanted to quickly turn a profit, so ratings was the name of the game. Consultants were hired to restructure and program the stations in the hopes of boosting ratings as soon as possible so that the
station or chain of stations could then be sold. ( I'm indirectly paraphrasing Don Henley's words in order to respect the copyright).
That seems to be what is going on still today, where everything is driven by ratings, advertiser responses, and data. So if a senior even calls up a station like Randy's station in Tampa, it's a threat to the advertisers. It's all data driven. It's all statistics, because the focus is completely on the profits. Therefore, the end justifies the means, in the eyes of the multi-national conglomerate who owns the stations ( and flips them for profit). It's like contractors house flippers in high demand real estate markets like California & Arizona. JMO --- Daryl
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So, what this means is that stations who cater to listeners outside the 18-49 range, is that the music format (which is driven by data and research numbers) is becoming obsolete. Take KRTH which is currently computer formatted for classic hits. (the terminology for 80's music), with fringes of 70's and 90's).
If you run the demographic data, listeners who graduated high school 43 years ago in 1980 at age 18, are now 61 years old. That's way outside the 18-49 demographic that the advertisers want.
And the listeners who graduated in 1990, at the end of that decade, are now 51 years old. So they too have aged out of the desirable demographic. Which means that KRTH and all stations who play 80's hits, will have to change their format or be sold. I can't see that Audacy will hold on to a station like that.
If you run the demographic data, listeners who graduated high school 43 years ago in 1980 at age 18, are now 61 years old. That's way outside the 18-49 demographic that the advertisers want.
And the listeners who graduated in 1990, at the end of that decade, are now 51 years old. So they too have aged out of the desirable demographic. Which means that KRTH and all stations who play 80's hits, will have to change their format or be sold. I can't see that Audacy will hold on to a station like that.
I'm a fan of both Jim Ladd and Don Henley, but there's a bit of disingenuousness at work here. I'd say naivete, but I don't think either of those guys are naive.
Nobody ever built or bought a radio station to make a little bit of money. Ladd got in as a teenager in the early days of album rock at KNAC, and then moved on to KMET before the station was really popular. As a result, he got used to four minutes of commercials an hour. That was never Metromedia's intent.
To keep the lights on, pay the salaries of several dozen employees, including the disc jockeys, and many other obligations and costs of doing business takes money.
There are two ways to get money in broadcasting. You can sell advertising or you can be listener-supported. To sell advertising, you have to be able to show advertisers that you can deliver a large audience any and every time their commercial runs. And the way that's done---the way that's been done since the 1930s---is ratings.
Tom Donahue, who essentially invented FM album rock radio in 1967 at KMPX, moved to Metromedia's KSAN, a major corporation, because it had resources. He rose through the ranks and became general manager, and he was clear-eyed about it being a business and the need to be as attractive as possible to advertisers.
As he famously, if inelegantly put it: "If you get in bed with the devil, you'd better be ready to f***."
This didn't start with de-regulation in the 90s, didn't start with investment firms in the 80s, it started with the FCC in the 20s being okay with people getting licenses to broadcast on the public airwaves making a profit.
Saying that a station is "computer formatted" is like saying that the Golden Gate Bridge was "slide rule designed".
Neither the computer nor the slide rule create anything. They are tools for programmers and engineers to better do their task.
KRTH is very intelligently structured to allow seemingly unrelated and even conflictive songs to be assembled in combination that is attractive to listeners. That requires extreme human skills.
And KRTH focuses on the broad agency buy spectrum which is 25-54, not 18-49. While 18-49 is most used for ethnic buys due to the difference in family formation ages, mass market campaigns are all or some part of 25-54. So KRTH appeals, by design, to 35-54 as the primary demo and likely researches in 33-42 being the most important focus as one researches for the future, not the past.
But, since the mid-60's, stations have played gold... in some cases, lots of it. So a teen in 1985 who is still inside the 35-54 target of KRTH would have been hearing songs from the mid-70's onward on a CHR station of that era.
This is why gold based formats of any kind look back about ten years or so before a listener's "age of music awareness" (let's say somewhere around 13 to 15) for possible library cuts.
Again, you are forgetting "exposure" to songs via the gold library of their favorite station as a teen. That pushes possible song age back by nearly a decade and a half.
Before the 1990s, talk radio had the reputation of being old people calling and complaining about social security or utility bills. They were trying to get a younger demographic, so, when someone called in with "I'm 72 years old" yes, click. WFLA added topics that would be of interest to younger people (including sexual) and drive away the oldsters.
There were no multi-national corporations owning radio stations in the mid-1990s and are none today. I'm not sure what you want? Radio stations to be charities? Run as hobbies?
I think that incident happened recently, not back in the 90's, though.
Interesting case of an artist bypassing radio. Top streaming track, with no radio airplay until after the fact.There are lots of them out there. It's just that they have no impact. If a single station in a small or medium is playing the crap out of some off-beat song, nobody knows. Unless one of the trades notices and writes an article about it. Here's an example with a country song that's #1 on the streaming chart, but #32 on the airplay chart:
What’s The Future For Zach Bryan And ‘Something In The Orange’ At Country Radio?
Zach Bryan had one of country music’s best streaming years in 2022, but his rise at radio has only begun. Bryan’s raw and haunting “Something in the Orange” had 432.1www.countryinsider.com
The PD they interview runs KUZZ in Bakersfield CA, a non-corporate station owned and run by the family of Buck Owens. So you have outliers who champion songs. But the goal is to have an impact, which is why you have group PDs. Radio companies have been doing that since the 70s, and it wasn't just Sklar. Any group that owned 5 stations had someone trying to game the system and show they could deliver spins and hits to record labels. It didn't matter if it's iHeart or Malrite.
432 million streams pencils out to somewhere near $1 million, so he made some money without radio.
The article also says that the song has risen to #33 on the charts, but it's only taken 6 months to get there.
Is this the new normal?
One thing to consider is the incredible amount of material that any station or format has to draw from. Literally thousands of songs. It's easy for a song to get lost on the way.
In some content marketplaces, it's called "competition", i.e., your content is competing with lots of other content. And songs are just content, basically.
Henley might have the right conclusion, but he had the wrong information. I’m sure a few people bought radio stations for investments in the 1980’s, but most of those people were fools. Radio was, as a whole, a money losing industry.
What did happen was the original radio station owners started selling their radio stations. Most of those original owners had other businesses that radio tied into. An example would be about half of the original Clear Channel was part of INSILCO, or the International Silver Company. Turns out, when you mine silver, you also get a lot of copper. INSILCO built and bought radio stations because AM required a copper ground system and could use the radio stations to show how good of a ground system you could get with its copper. By the 1970’s, AM radio licensing was all but frozen, and INSILCO had less of a use for its radio division. So, it sold those stations to the Mays family. Those various operators who bought the castoff radio stations tended to be solely radio operators. They had to find a way to make money on a line of business that wasn't overly successful on its own. They were also dealing with an influx of new radio stations due to Docket 80-90 crowding markets while the advertising pool remained the same or shrank.
Consultants were brought in to figure out what the most people wanted to hear. You had to have listeners to get advertisers to buy time on your stations, and more listeners meant more money. You also had to navigate a new competitive landscape. Those heritage stations had seven competitors instead of three.
He's not purposely "bypassing radio." Up til now, nobody was pitching his music to radio.
In fact the reason he signed a record deal was to reach radio. He already had an audience, but now he wants to broaden it.
Yes its the new paradigm. Record labels do their A&R work by listening to YouTube and seeing who connects. Then they sign them to record labels and pitch them to radio. Several people in the country chart got signed this way. Some of these artists might be better fits for alternative or rock, but those genres don't know how to build talent. They don't have the infrastructure to do it. Country does.
The sad part of the story was that Donohue was overweight and died of a heart attack in 1975. KSAN started to lose its way after that. So John Kluge dropped the rock format for country music, and the station continued with country until 1997. It's now KYLD.
Those who bought their radio stations before 1995 or so we're able to sell them for incredible profit after the telecom 96 legislation and these big conglomerates we're forming to own clusters of stations, in some markets a Max of 8 I believe was possible now, when before you could only have 1 Fm and 1 am each market. I believe pre 96, in the 90s they did up it to 2 Fms, but after 96 a station like Z100 that was bought for 8 million in 1983, was now being sold for 150 million or more!
Being able to build clusters allowed radio stations to make a great deal more money than before and that legislation opened the flood gates.
David here is the radio all star and he can share some of the absolute insane amount of money some stations sold for, even crap signals on the fringe of a major market.
The old money people basically priced out any regular people from buying stations. They can run stupid amounts of debt, throw up their hands, then start it all over again. Prince, lather, repeat. Regular people obviously can't do that.
Being able to build clusters allowed radio stations to make a great deal more money than before and that legislation opened the flood gates.
David here is the radio all star and he can share some of the absolute insane amount of money some stations sold for, even crap signals on the fringe of a major market.
The old money people basically priced out any regular people from buying stations. They can run stupid amounts of debt, throw up their hands, then start it all over again. Prince, lather, repeat. Regular people obviously can't do that.
This particular song gets spun on about every pop station in KC. I have KKJO (out of St. Joe) as a preset, and I think they spin some of their golds more than once a day.
I think we've already discussed this in another thread
If you are referring to the posts about Randy and WFLA, that was from a year or two after consolidation, perhaps in 1996 or 1997.
This is now how artists make money from records. They receive a royalty of a fraction of a cent for every stream. The $1 million you quote is a bulk amount that is split among himself, his label, the musicians, and the writer. To be clear, the 432 million streams doesn't equate to 432 million in sales. People will stream the same song over and over. It's possible that 432 million figure came from 200 thousand people, or less. It's hard to say. When you buy a record, how many times do you play it? That's how many times people will stream a song. The stream has replaced the play.
Im just saying since its a gold and if each station spins it one time (or maybe two in the case of kkjo) youre looking at maybe 6 spins per day in kc.
That station doesn't report to Mediabase, so I can't confirm it. What I know is that station is listed as Hot AC, not CHR, and that Closer is among the most played gold songs on Hot AC. More often than Avicci's Wake Me Up. Nationally, over 650 spins last week.
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