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CBSFM- Songs that should be added or re added to the rotation?

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Huff said:
Most people would probably use the very last line with Robert Plant singing "..and she's buying a stairway to heaven." That's enough to remind people of the song, especially a song that has had that much exposure for more than 50 years.

I've always considered the hook of a song to be what someone would reply with if you asked them, "Hey, how does that song go?" And yes, some songs have multiple sections that can be hooks, some have hooks that are too long to be useful, so you go with the best option you can.

I would also take two different hooks of a multi-structured song like "Bohemian Rhapsody" and use the average of those... but there wasn't all that much of a difference. In a research test of 500-800 songs, you don't sweat small variations, you want to see what the absolute biggest testers are, what the absolute duds are, and everything in the middle really comes down to nuance and how categories are structured.
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I would think that it's a waste of time for a classic hits station to test Bohemian Rhapsody. If you don't know that one, Take on me, Don't stop believing, Don't you forget about me, and Living on a prayer test at the top, maybe you have the wrong job, like a vending machine owner not stocking Coke Classic.
Maybe because of the length you would have B.R in second tier, I could see variations there with programming but more so to alter it out of power here and there, but never to just not play it at all.

Someone mentioned Usher. If you are one of the few pop focused Classic Hits you would play You make me wanna over the much stronger better testing Yeah just because Yeah is a tougher blend currently with a majority of your playlist, but that will change in time, it always does.
 
DOB said:
I would think that it's a waste of time for a classic hits station to test Bohemian Rhapsody. If you don't know that one, Take on me, Don't stop believing, Don't you forget about me, and Living on a prayer test at the top, maybe you have the wrong job, like a vending machine owner not stocking Coke Classic.
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The first time I tested music for a format that I was trying to fix in a top 20 market, I took the first 100 songs and scored them myself based on what I thought each song would score.

Now, this was a format that I had created in the market, and I was now working with a competitive station. They were #1 still, and my new station was the lowest rated FM.

About 25% of the songs I classified as "Like" on the hate, dislike, indifferent / don't care, like and love scale were stiffs. Unplayable. About a third of the ones I called "Love" were just "like" or "indifferent". And so on.

We cut the gold library from 1300 to about 450, the currents from over 50 to 25 including new songs and what today is a power recurrent. Went from a low two share to a 12 share in next book, and beat the direct competitor.

Again, 6 years before that date, I had created the format itself. Yet despite being intimately aware of the music, the artists and the lifestyle, I was thoroughly wrong on the music. I was a programmer, inside the building. I talked with the artists and the labels. I listened all day. And I was not close enough to the users of the format to know what they wanted to hear.

Big hits from the past are not what a station plays today. We play songs people want to hear now. We are not a museum for old songs.
 
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coreynj2461 said:
I like the risk, you can only play so many 80s before the format gets stale
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That's inherent in the format. When you only play old songs, those songs have to stand up to repeated plays. People tune in because they want to hear certain songs from a certain era. If people want something else, there are other stations in the market. So far, WCBS seems to know what people want to hear.
 
TheBigA said:
That's inherent in the format. When you only play old songs, those songs have to stand up to repeated plays. People tune in because they want to hear certain songs from a certain era. If people want something else, there are other stations in the market. So far, WCBS seems to know what people want to hear.
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Ratings are getting down "playing always the same songs, all the time"
 
dr.luke said:
Ratings are getting down "playing always the same songs, all the time"
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What does that mean? Are you saying that rating are dropping or decreasing for stations that play tight, researched playlists? The fact is, the opposite is happening with examples being WCBS-FM in New York, and The Wave and K-Earth in Los Angeles.
 
scanman1 said:
Seems they're adding back songs from their "Jack-FM" era.
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No. As the audience ages, one year as a time, the prime targets of most transactional ad campaigns cuts off one year of birth at a time. In 2010, KRTH targeted, primarily, 35-54. Today, they still target 35-54. But 65% of those 2010 targeted listeners are no longer in the station target today.

So if the bulk of the songs 13 years ago were 1970-1985, now they are going to be more like 1980-1992, with just a few outliers.
 
DavidEduardo said:
No. As the audience ages, one year as a time, the prime targets of most transactional ad campaigns cuts off one year of birth at a time. In 2010, KRTH targeted, primarily, 35-54. Today, they still target 35-54. But 65% of those 2010 targeted listeners are no longer in the station target today.

So if the bulk of the songs 13 years ago were 1970-1985, now they are going to be more like 1980-1992, with just a few outliers.
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And the '60s outliers seem to have dwindled to two -- "Sweet Caroline," for its association with good times at sporting events across the English-speaking portions of North America and Europe, and "Brown Eyed Girl," for reasons that continue to elude students of popular music history to this day. It wasn't a big hit originally and wasn't featured in a major movie at any time, so why does it survive on commercial radio in 2023?
 
I am currently listening to CBS sister station WOCL 1059 Sunny FM in Orlando and Spirit In The Sky by Normal Greenbaum is on. I haven't heard Sunny play this song in probably a decade. An enjoyable surprise and delight!
 
vw86 said:
I am currently listening to CBS sister station WOCL 1059 Sunny FM in Orlando and Spirit In The Sky by Normal Greenbaum is on. I haven't heard Sunny play this song in probably a decade. An enjoyable surprise and delight!
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The largest markets, particularly those with dissimilar ethnic compositions, will have separate music tests and the song list may be different. Orlando is strange, because much of the adult population grew up somewhere else.
 
DavidEduardo said:
What does that mean? Are you saying that rating are dropping or decreasing for stations that play tight, researched playlists? The fact is, the opposite is happening with examples being WCBS-FM in New York, and The Wave and K-Earth in Los Angeles.
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time will tell
 
dr.luke said:
time will tell
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They're adding and dropping songs all the time. They're changing rotations all the time. As others have said, they're shifting the core from 70s/80s to 80s/90s/and early 2000s. So your characterization is wrong. This is a station that has been consistent in its ratings, always in the Top 5, and always reaching it's target audience.
 
CTListener said:
And the '60s outliers seem to have dwindled to two -- "Sweet Caroline," for its association with good times at sporting events across the English-speaking portions of North America and Europe, and "Brown Eyed Girl," for reasons that continue to elude students of popular music history to this day. It wasn't a big hit originally and wasn't featured in a major movie at any time, so why does it survive on commercial radio in 2023?
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I thought I heard at one time that Van Morrison refuses to even sing “Brown Eyed Girl”.
 
TheBigA said:
He did it last year, but not this year. The old songs he always sings are Gloria and Into The Mystic.
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Gloria is from his days with Them. Into the Mystic was on the Moondance album, which introduced the more reflective, jazz-influenced Morrison style that's stayed with him in some form through his career. I'd be surprised if Into the Mystic is the only song from that album that's still on his set list today, unless he's disowned the others to include more of the angry or cryptic songs that have marked (or marred) his work in the current millennium.
 
Ah, I dunno. I'm well out of any sensible advertising-target demo (by a few months). And yeah ; I've got too many analog radio experiences to matter nowadays on a contemporary radio broadcast forum....... but what the heck. The weather never stopped my complaining.
A few years back I'm on a long drive to see some relatives, and realized that I was going through the signal area where some new station or format flip I'd read about was aking place. The stories (plural) I'd read spoke glowingly about a 'bold new direction' for area radio .... a heavily scrutinzed market evlaluaton .... eager preminary response to the proposition ..... long-range search for appropriate air-talent : the whole 27 feet that we've all heard before. So I tuned them in.
First thing I hear is a liner/separator, glitzy and modern and quick, straight into ....
'Hotel California'.
THAT is the best introduction they could manage? That interminable dirge, made popular by requesters asking to hear a long song they could embrace as an anthem like their older brothers and sisters had?
'Click'. Off went the car radio. The whole dial.
I should have felt sorry for those who got passing grades on that auditorium test. Maybe they weren't told that they were helping compile a Stunting Music playlist designed to blow off any existing listeners.
* * * * * * *
And STAY off my lawn! I'm having outdoor speakers installed to play nothing but Broadway musicals and polkas at you whippersnappers !!!
 
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