Of course, those details are unknown, maybe @K.M. Richards might know. But when it comes to radio listening, older music seems to be the first choice. Also, i see it as more than a quick trend soon to fade out. That high ranking (KXSN) has been in place for at least 3 years in San Diego. With no signs of slowing down. A former KXSN DJ Gene Knight asked some of the youngest listeners why they like 80's music so much. The response was along the lines of "It's really good music", and they "Like it better than what's currently out there".
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Young people don't know these songs
- Thread starter vchimpanzee
- Start date
This one will always be my personal favorite:
It does when you're dealing with limited statistics. KXSN has that music to itself.
Other stations that would appeal to the 18-34 demographic include XHRM, KYXY, KHTS, Star 94.1, Z90.3 and Jammin' 95.7. And then there are less obvious 18-34 choices---91X, KSON. That eight-way split among more contemporary music stations keeps any of them from dominating the demographic. What's their 18-34 share combined and how does KXSN's share in that demo compare?
Remember that 18-34 is not a monolith and there's a pretty solid dividing line before the mid-point. More than half of that demo also falls into the 25-54 demo, and if---IF---the KXSN listenership ramps up from 25 onward (and I'd bet lunch it does), then you're really looking at success in the lower part of 25-54 as much as you are the upper part of 18-34.
That's anecdotal. There are younger people in this thread who would say the same thing to a jock from the old adult standards station KPOP if it were still on the air.
I'll just say that a 34 year old at the highest end of the demo who likes a song, say from 1986...that came out 6 years before they were even born! And then there's that teenager I saw the other day riding a skateboard, and wearing a Depeche Mode t-shirt. Go figure.
Again, anecdotal. My 27-year-old stepdaughter likes Queen, and by her playing it in the car, the 8, 6 and 3-year old grandchildren do, too. That’s an incident, not a statistic.
I agee. if you go back to my original post #99. I simply posed a question based on what I see in the rankings from research director As with most, that is all the info we're privy to, with absolutely no other info to back it up...just an observation on my part. Please go ahead and post anymore specifics if you have it.
I don't. That was kinda my point. We can't draw conclusions from the limited information we have on hand.
Totally agree. BTW, have a great trip! You must really like Italy.
Thanks! I absolutely do, but this is my wife (who was a world traveler for decades before we got together) making sure I see as much of it as possible. This trip repeats a little (returning to Milan and Florence), but the rest of the trip are places (largely in Tuscany, but also Lagomaggiore to the north) that we didn't get to the first time.
She's amazing, and starts planning a year out. She's already working on one for 2027 or 2028 that will cover the Alps, with time in Italy, France and Germany.
K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
Kat, all I can do is cite the same source as you (Gene Knight, who does the liners on The Eighties Channel™ for me) in terms of a reason. We don't subscribe to Nielsen, but their rep occasionally shares statistics without quoting numbers, and the last time he mentioned the 18-34 demo, he said KRKE has just under one-third of all its listening in that demo.
Remember that the "34 year old" may have listened to a station that played songs 5 to 10 years older than them. It depends on how far back a station might go back in oldies
A CHR targets 18-34 or 25-44 year old women. So that 44 year old might know very well a song that was a hit when she was 12 or 13... that is, a 30 year old song. And the 25 year old woman could easily be familiar with songs that are from the early 1990's. And when those two women began listening to radio, perhaps in the 90's, they might have heard plenty of songs from as early as 1980 to 1982.
We spent time last year in Ticino, which is the Italian-speaking part of Switzerland. It was delightful. It's not far from Lake Como. It's the one part of Switzerland we'd go back to...it's probably closer to the Milan airport than the Zürich airport, too.
Rhône-Alpes is one of my favorite regions in France.
Safe travels!
Good point. When I started listening to CHR (Top 40, as it was known then) stations in the mid-'60s, just about everything played was current -- all either peaking, rising or dropping. Recurrents basically didn't exist; when a song was through with its run as a hit, you'd never hear it again. And gold was limited to perhaps one song per hour, plus weekend specials. Country stations were the same way when I began listening to them in the mid-'70s. Things are completely different today. Today's 25-year-old country listener is hearing not only today's big hits, but recurrents dating back a couple of years and plenty of gold that dates back to the '80s and '90s, before that listener was even born! CHR and Hot AC don't go back that far, usually, but there's still a lot more non-current music being played in both formats than was the case decades back.
It probably varied by location and who was programming/consulting. Growing up with KHJ and KFRC (Bill Drake), songs did vanish after coming off the chart, but would re-appear for the year-end countdown---and, since Drake's Gold included "One Year Ago Today", those songs would come back into the Gold rotation after that.
Drake used Gold a bit more heavily than what you describe---two or three per hour on weekdays, with four or five (out of typically, 14 songs in an hour) in middays or overnights.
Prior to Drake launching an exclusive oldies format for the RKO FMs and his own clients, KHJ and KFRC gold could go back all the way to 1955, but once those stations were launched, it tended to be seven years max, with the most-frequently played Gold being three to five years old.
The first place I heard re-currents used heavily was probably KCBQ post-Buzz Bennett (maybe Jack McCoy).
I think all of us "discovered" in the earlier 70's that songs did not die after being currents. What we did was reduce the speed of rotation... what I called, when we created re currents at WERC in Birmingham in about 1973, "going into the school zone speed".
By the time I got to do what was a Hot AC in '75, recurrent were a very strong part of the format. The real issue was determining when a song went from current to recurrent to gold. We had callout by the mid-70's for currents, but it would not be until the early 80's that we got good AMTs that judged out library songs.
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ARSA shows that records usually go up the charts much more slowly than they go down. After a record reached a certain number of weeks, it frequently and completely fell off the charts. Speaking of WBRC/WERC, I wish I had a video of that encounter with Jesse Champion when he had the letter from Taft in his desk offering him the job at WBRC. I was probably the first to find out at my school. I was sad to see him leave. Did you ever talk to him about DXing, like I did?
I never knew he was interested in DXing... we always had a lot more to talk about related to the "mentality" of Birmingham around 1972.
I don't know if he was particularly interested in DXing per se, but seemed fascinated by my experience getting cochannel stations like Taft's WGR and WKRC 550 in the Daytime by just turning my Sony Supersensitve radio different directions. They were also on the letterhead with WBRC. Also, Taft's WTVN 610 by nulling out local WTAC 600. This radio has a 40 microvolt per meter sensitivity, probably now if you had it restored to specifications. I heard KNX 1070 on it barefoot in Southeastern Michigan in the late 1960s.
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Not sure this is a good thing, but ...
I don't know how to make it do that but it's supposed to say "Why a metal icon is recording children's music with Alice Cooper".
https://www.azcentral.com/story/entertainment/music/2026/03/30/rob-halford-alice-cooper/89188701007/
I don't know how to make it do that but it's supposed to say "Why a metal icon is recording children's music with Alice Cooper".