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Why no "Music of Your Life" tapes?

oldradiotapes

oldradiotapes

Every once in a great long while an original Drake Chenault, Bonneville, ABC Watermark, etc. automation reel-to-reel tape will surface on Fleabay. In almost 20 years of searching I've never once come across an old Music of Your Life reel in circulation. I mean the syndication tapes, not airchecks. Why is this? Were they all sent back to MYL after airing to be wiped and reused, so perhaps they simply don't exist today, or so rare that collectors have accounted for all of them?
 
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The overwhelming majority probably ended up in the landfill. At the first station I worked at, I saved a few LPs of various pre-recorded programs we ran there, mostly on weekend mornings (Powerline with Brother John, Rick Dees' Weekly Top 40, etc) and then a few CDs from when they switched from LPs to that format, but the overwhelming majority went into the dumpster. Long-form programming that came in on reel usually got tossed into a box until it got full, a few were erased and reused for production, but the majority got thrown away.

At a later station I worked at, the transmitters were adjacent to the air studios. After the building and transmitters were damaged, they decided to move them to the basement which was more secure and entirely encased in concrete. That meant clearing out the basement space and the amount of stuff in storage was pretty amazing as the station had been on the air in one fashion or another since the early 1950s and as one generation of equipment was replaced by the next or they updated studios and equipment, all the stuff they didn't know what to do with but didn't want to throw away ended up in there. It was like a multi-generational time capsule of sorts: There were old RCA on-air consoles, loads of old mics, cartridges and cartridge players of all shapes and sizes, turntables of various generations, carts and reels from various networks and agencies, rudimentary automation systems, old mutitrack reel to reel machines on wheels once used for production, mixers designed to be used for live remotes when they were using TELCO lines for those and countless old manuals, catalogs, schematics and old stationary and give aways with past logos on them, etc. To some, that would seem like a treasure trove, but in their case it was seen as "old junk" that had to go.

They had a large dumpster that was open on one end backed up as close as they could get it to the door, and most all that stuff I mentioned, found its way inside to be hauled away. Several reels of the type of music you've searched for on eBay also made their way into the dump. The station had a contract engineer who had no real connection to the station and didn't really care about any of that stuff and he just wanted to make a spot for his transmitters. Most of the staff cleaning the place out were sales, administrative and a few on-air guys who weren't into the engineering or nuts and bolts side of things, they just saw a bunch of old, antiquated stuff that needed to go. I ended up grabbing a few things with permission from the GM, but I had no place to store much, and as the old saying goes, not everything is worth keeping and you can't hang on to everything, so to the dump it all went.
 
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Unfortunately, some magnetic tape does not hold up so well with time. I remember taking, what then was a 20 plus year old 7.5 inch open reel tape, and rewinding it on a used Open Reel deck I purchased about 10 years ago. The magnetic coating of the tape just started flying off of the mylar (or whatever substance it was made of) portion of the tape. Needless to say, I was heartbroken and instantly realized that some tapes are NOT forever!
 
Yes unless someone archived those old tapes thirty years ago, most were probably rendered unplayable. Even if stored in decent conditions, the oxide starts falling off the tape. If you're lucky you have one play and not all of that will play before clogging the heads with chunks of oxide.
 
Agree that a lot of them probably got tossed by the stations and radio service companies that had them, even before they got into the hands of collectors. When the company I worked for changed buildings, we filled two dumpsters to the brim with automation tapes and CDs. The heads told everyone to lighten up the inventory. And that was 20 years ago.

I would think you'd have a better chance of finding automation CDs for sale online than tapes. For one thing, the players required to play the reel tapes are becoming rare as hen's teeth. I think the number of collectors of Ampeg 400s and ATRs are few and far between. Those devices are pretty heavy and take up a lot of space, and if they break, you have to be able to fix them yourself.
 
boombox4 said:
Agree that a lot of them probably got tossed by the stations and radio service companies that had them, even before they got into the hands of collectors. When the company I worked for changed buildings, we filled two dumpsters to the brim with automation tapes and CDs. The heads told everyone to lighten up the inventory. And that was 20 years ago.
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Where I work now we're going through the same as I type. There are boxes and boxes of 2", 3/4", Beta, Beta SP, DVCPro, and Sony XDCAM tapes and optical media hitting the dumpster. These no doubt had recorded news stories and network shows spanning over sixty years.
Reality is; we don't have any functioning 2" or 3/4 tape machines to even try to play the tapes. Plus most of the tapes just have numbers written on the labels, probably part of some long-gone cataloging system. Ultimately have to toss all of this media into a tall dumpster without our Assistant News Director watching, or he'll probably pass out.
 
The closed-circuit TV station at the community college I attended in 2002–03 (which had area cable coverage) still had a set of functional 3/4” tape players; I forget how many were in service. Which in that time period was likely an absurd exception to the rule, but those were to play PBS or Annenberg/CPB telecourses that were nearing the end of usefulness.

By 2012, only 2 or 3 of those were left along with a few SVHS players at a dedicated rack for digital conversion dubbed “the Smithsonian”. I doubt they are still around but that nickname sure stuck with me.
 
Nathan Obral said:
The closed-circuit TV station at the community college I attended in 2002–03 (which had area cable coverage) still had a set of functional 3/4” tape players; I forget how many were in service. Which in that time period was likely an absurd exception to the rule, but those were to play PBS or Annenberg/CPB telecourses that were nearing the end of usefulness.


Oh trust me. I'm glad we don't have any old 3/4 decks around anymore. Makes the decision to get rid of old junk, that much easier.
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I worked at an FM in Seattle where the am was running “music of your life “. Part of my job was changing the reel tapes while I was trying to perform my FM show. The procedure was somewhat complicated and could be very frustrating. Because the tapes could end every 30 minutes or all at the same time! Like any exercise, it isn’t fun but when you complete it you feel good.
 
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