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Aaahhh those KOST Classics HD2

3

34james

Listening on tunein radio to KOST Classics HD2. Those old KOST songs from back in the day sound fabulous.
When i compare it todays KOST i was like wow . When KOST came on board it was a Soft AC station, then evolved into a Adult Contemporary station, now its Hot AC.
Times have definitely changed. :)
 
34james said:
Listening on tunein radio to KOST Classics HD2. Those old KOST songs from back in the day sound fabulous.
When i compare it todays KOST i was like wow . When KOST came on board it was a Soft AC station, then evolved into a Adult Contemporary station, now its Hot AC.
Times have definitely changed. :)
Click to expand...

Actually I remember when it was a beautiful music station (I can still hear the harps now). Somewhere in the early 80s they took huge step forward by inserting Barbara Streisand and Neil Diamond vocals to become that "soft AC".
 
ChannelFlipper said:
Actually I remember when it was a beautiful music station (I can still hear the harps now). Somewhere in the early 80s they took huge step forward by inserting Barbara Streisand and Neil Diamond vocals to become that "soft AC".
Click to expand...

I can beat that...I remember when they became KOST (and beautiful music) after a year or so as KADS, all classified ads.
 
michael hagerty said:
ChannelFlipper said:
34james said:
When KOST came on board it was a Soft AC station, then evolved into a Adult Contemporary station, now its Hot AC.
Click to expand...

Actually I remember when it was a beautiful music station (I can still hear the harps now). Somewhere in the early 80s they took huge step forward by inserting Barbara Streisand and Neil Diamond vocals to become that "soft AC".
Click to expand...
I can beat that...I remember when they became KOST (and beautiful music) after a year or so as KADS, all classified ads.
Click to expand...

James' observation brings up a point which should be -- but isn't --kept in mind when talking about stations with "heritage" formats.

James, if I recall, is in his 20s. (Please correct me if I'm not recalling correctly.) For him KOST has always been an AC, which goes back to 1982. He could be in his 30s and still have that perception.

Flipper is a bit older and would remember both formats well. To me, all of the BM/EZ stations -- KOST, KJOI, KXTZ, KWST -- sounded more or less the same, but his observation did jog my memory of the harps. :)

Michael and I are very close in age, so our radio listening habits go back to the 1960s, and would have included KADS for me as well, except that I only had access to AM radios until the early 1970s.

If any of us were around when 103.5 first went on the air, it would be remembered as "good music" KGLA before McLendon launched KADS.

Kind of adds another perspective to discussions about stations moving up the timeline with their on-air music libraries to stay in the upper adult ad buy demos.
 
K.M. Richards said:
J
Flipper is a bit older and would remember both formats well. To me, all of the BM/EZ stations -- KOST, KJOI, KXTZ, KWST -- sounded more or less the same, but his observation did jog my memory of the harps. :)
Click to expand...

I can remember those harp glissandos on Beautiful Music stations from the 60's. When I put my first FM on the air in '66 I bought an LP from some film SFX house with about 50 different harp gliss cuts on it. At the time, I thought they were the ne plus ultra of sweepers! We had carts of up-to-down, down-to-up, slow-to-slow and all the other segue possibilities to go, a couple of times an hour, from Percy Faith to Paul Mauriat and such.

Now, of course, it just sounds hokey. It's part of my continual embarrassment over things I did which I thought were great but which simply bite today.
 
Last edited:
I'm guessing that it was typical for Beautiful Music stations to transition to soft AC. In the Bay Area, that's what KOIT did - with great success. KABL-FM tried to imitate KOIT's success by going soft-AC a couple of years after KOIT, but it didn't prove to be popular. The format that followed was K-Big (KBBG) 70s classic hits. That lasted only a couple of years, and after it was purchased by Clear Channel in 98, it adopted a successful classic soul (old school) format which endures to this day, with many tweaks.

The 3rd Beautiful Music station in the Bay Area (K-FOG) transitioned in the 80s to the rock format it has today.
 
LKellerIII said:
I'm guessing that it was typical for Beautiful Music stations to transition to soft AC. In the Bay Area, that's what KOIT did - with great success. KABL-FM tried to imitate KOIT's success by going soft-AC a couple of years after KOIT, but it didn't prove to be popular. The format that followed was K-Big (KBBG) 70s classic hits. That lasted only a couple of years, and after it was purchased by Clear Channel in 98, it adopted a successful classic soul (old school) format which endures to this day, with many tweaks.

The 3rd Beautiful Music station in the Bay Area (K-FOG) transitioned in the 80s to the rock format it has today.
Click to expand...

Llew: It was typical. In L.A. KOST, KBIG and KJOI all made the flip around the same time. In Phoenix, it was a real train wreck as two beautifuls and a classical went AC, jumping into a market that already had three ACs. Interestingly, it was the classical that (for a while) was the survivor. The two beautifuls were AC for only a brief time before flipping...one to oldies and one to CHR.
 
michael hagerty said:
In L.A. KOST, KBIG and KJOI all made the flip around the same time.
Click to expand...

I'm going to try to sort my own memories out on this.

Going into the 1970s, there were those three plus KPOL-AM/FM, KWST and KLVE. KBIG was called KXTZ then.

In 1975, KWST went AOR, then CHR by the end of the decade (and AC in 1982 as KMGG). KLVE went Spanish language by the end of the 1970s as well, doing the "Romanticas" format it still has today.

KPOL-FM flipped to a KNX-FM mellow rock clone in 1978, becoming KZLA a couple of years later. (And not long after that, KPOL's AM took on the same format and call letters, which ended the format entirely at the Sunset Blvd. offramp of the northbound 101 freeway.)

KOST went directly from BM to AC in 1982. KJOI added both smooth jazz and contemporary vocals as "Touch" in 1989 before going full soft AC as KXEZ the following year. I'm pretty sure that was a response to KBIG going all soft vocals as "Big Mix" about a year earlier.

Excluding stations with less than full-market coverage at that time (KSRF in Santa Monica, KOCM in Newport Beach, KACY-FM in Oxnard, KRUZ in Santa Barbara, KOTE in the Antelope Valley, and I forget who out in the Inland Empire), that would have been all the BM/EZs in Los Angeles.

Six pre-1975, half that by 1980. After KOST flipped, two for most of the rest of the 1980s, none by 1990.
 
Addendum/correction: 107.5 was KPSA at the beginning of the 1970s, became KEZM in 1973, then KLVE when they went entirely English-language love songs about a year later, and kept those calls as it went to Spanish-language Romanticas.
 
No discussion of harps and old time radio can in my opinion be complete without including the weekday evening Bekins Hollywood Music Hall and the Masters of Music. It was a dinner time program sponsored on the CBS Pacific network in the early fifties (and possibly before that). According to Google it included Victor Young and his Singing Strings among other artists,. It was popular enough that a transition to television was attempted in 1954 but it was swamped by other musical programs such as Lawrence Welk's Champagne Music and Dick Sinclair's Polka Parade. .
 
This stream has nothing to do with the KOST Classics HD2 output. This is a RadioNomy stream and more a sort of tribute stream. Don't know if their is a official stream from KOST HD2?
 
KOST now simulcasts KFI-AM on their HD2 channel. For a while, they were flagshipping "Big Classic Hits" for the IHeart app, and a handful of IHeart HD2 stations. None of the KOST DJ's were involved. Voice tracks came from Majic 105.7 in Cleveland. The format has since moved to Hawaii.
 
erwin33 said:
This stream has nothing to do with the KOST Classics HD2 output. This is a RadioNomy stream and more a sort of tribute stream. Don't know if their is a official stream from KOST HD2?
Click to expand...

Perhaps James thinks it is something it is not?
 
K.M. Richards said:
James' observation brings up a point which should be -- but isn't --kept in mind when talking about stations with "heritage" formats.

James, if I recall, is in his 20s. (Please correct me if I'm not recalling correctly.) For him KOST has always been an AC, which goes back to 1982. He could be in his 30s and still have that perception.

Flipper is a bit older and would remember both formats well. To me, all of the BM/EZ stations -- KOST, KJOI, KXTZ, KWST -- sounded more or less the same, but his observation did jog my memory of the harps. :)

Michael and I are very close in age, so our radio listening habits go back to the 1960s, and would have included KADS for me as well, except that I only had access to AM radios until the early 1970s.

If any of us were around when 103.5 first went on the air, it would be remembered as "good music" KGLA before McLendon launched KADS.

Kind of adds another perspective to discussions about stations moving up the timeline with their on-air music libraries to stay in the upper adult ad buy demos.
Click to expand...

Im 42 :)
 
Now that i look at KOST. It dawned on me. They are moving towards Classic hits. Most of their playlist is 80's and some 90's. I would not be surprised if they drop currents in a year or so.
I looked at media base to draw my conclusion by the way.
 
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