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Radio Station record surveys

DavidEduardo

DavidEduardo

Moderator/Administrator
Staff member
In another now-closed thread, the subject of music surveys... those little charts handed out at record shops and such... came up.

Here is one derivative post from KeithE

"I thought those surveys/rankings were done by the stations themselves, based on local record sales, requests, maybe personal interviews, and the like. And the result was more airplay for #1 than #30. Weren't Hooper and Pulse the forerunners of Arbitron/Nielsen?"

In my experience doing such charts in 3 different markets in the 60's and early 70's, we did in fact check sales and also, where possible, juke box plays. We also took into account requests.

But the data was highly massaged to reflect what we played, the flavor of the station and a bit of personal opinion. First, we avoided as much as possible songs that wobbled... up one week, down another, up another. We preferred to hold the position of a song on its way down that bounced back up.

Then we would eliminated songs we did not play. Either in-format songs played by a competitor or out of format songs. And then we made the list look "pretty" by not having 5 ballads one after another and similar happenings.

The data collected for the charts was mostly based on stores telling us the answer to "what are the biggest songs, what are the ones starting to sell and what are the ones that are not selling as much". So the data was very subjective as most stores did not have a real sales ranker... just the feel by the counter staff.

It would be interesting to hear from anyone else involved in station charts of the era.

And a mention of http://www.las-solanas.com/arsa/index.php is appropriate as they even have the "Survey certified Number 1 by C.E. Hooper and Pulse" KTKT surveys of the early 60's.
 
What about the "paper adds" I've read about many times -- the songs that appeared on station playlists without actually getting spins, as a favor to the record companies or their promo men? Did these make it to the "surveys" distributed to the public or were they kept strictly in house? I remember picking up surveys in the late '60s in the Boston area and wondering about some of those songs at the bottom, which I never recalled hearing despite listening for several hours a day, seven days a week.
 
CTListener said:
What about the "paper adds" I've read about many times -- the songs that appeared on station playlists without actually getting spins, as a favor to the record companies or their promo men? Did these make it to the "surveys" distributed to the public or were they kept strictly in house? I remember picking up surveys in the late '60s in the Boston area and wondering about some of those songs at the bottom, which I never recalled hearing despite listening for several hours a day, seven days a week.
Click to expand...

My experience with paper adds is that they happened only after major charts became based on airplay monitoring. So the 60's and 70's charts distributed by stations would be free of those.

I also recall from the early 60's seeing WHK lists and than WIXY lists with songs I never heard. I used the WIXY list to buy music for my station in Ecuador, so it was important to me... and sometimes I'd get a song I could not figure out.

We also had "turntable hits" which were songs that got played for flavor or texture but which did not sell at all. Often they would get good requests, too. But some may have been added for entirely different reasons.
 
Thanks for the explanation. I suppose the Top 40 stations I was listening to at the time (WRKO, WMEX) might have been dayparting certain songs and not playing them in the hours I usually listened -- after school, in the late afternoon and evening.
 
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