I see your point but I think of it as more of a time of day thing .during morning and afternoon drive you want to play more shorter songs but at 11:00 at night why not play in 8 minutes song what's the harm
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The Fox playing short versions?
- Thread starter Directional Ray
- Start date
Perhaps the only version in their library is the edit.
I think Q-102 used to play an edit that was even shorter than any of those. It sounded like they had their hand on the turntable when it started up.
And what I heard from one of the DJs at one of the current corporate destroyers of radio that the edits came down from on high, NOT the record companies, so that they could squeeze more commercials into an hour. I literally heard a song on air that literally had an entire verse cut out of it. The way things are going you'll soon just hear them sing one sentence: "And here's Tony Orlando & Dawn...'Tie A Yellow Ribbon round the old oak tree'....and that was Tony Orlando & Dawn, we'll be back after these 28 short commercials." Since it's all on computer now, I'm surprised that they just don't speed the songs up and do some pitch correction to make it sound OK. Unlike the old days when we used to put tape on the drive spindle to make the songs a wee bit faster, it's a lot easier nowadays. Of course, someone somewhere would say "Hey, I thought that song was 3 minutes 28 seconds years ago. My ears must be listening faster cause it was done in a minute 20 seconds!."
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That's what everyone says whenever this subject comes up. It always gets a big laugh on the anti-radio boards. If you go to all the threads about stations speeding up songs, that's the theory. They're speeding up songs to squeeze more commercials into an hour. But if you read the financials at all these companies, you see a very different story.
These radio companies don't have an over-supply of advertisers right now. If anything, there's a shortage. They're talking about CUTTING commercials because there isn't enough advertising to fill the entire day. That's especially true in the evenings, weekends, and overnights. But it's also a problem in mid-days. So it may be popular to blame corporate for this, but the facts don't bear that out. There's a shortage of advertising, and that's why they're laying people off. Because that's the other side of the advertising coin. If there was so much money pouring into these radio stations, they wouldn't be laying people off. That also goes for Sirius, Spotify, and even NPR. That's one of the reasons why these companies keep selling their stations to religious groups. They're the only ones now with money.
The other thing is that the DJs really don't know where the music comes from, other than it's loaded in the automation system. That's the extent of their involvement.
That is one of the oldest and least truthful examples of the kinda' stuff that unmoderated web sources, going back way before FaceBook and Twitter et. al. to the pre-Internet newsgroups. Stations don't do this because the gain from tiny edit would not change available commercial time (which is mostly determined by audience flow).
If a station wanted to run 20 minutes of ads, they could; nobody sits around timing each hour.
And there are, as BigA has mentioned also, a variety of record label edits. Many are our heritage from the time when stations did not like songs much over 3 minutes, so labels often did radio edits and put them on radio-only 45's or CDs given to stations.
And about all you can do without sounding like Mickey and Minnie is something like 2%. That barely gives you an extra 3 to 4 seconds per song. Per hour, it is nothing.
Back when tape on the spindle was done the reason was to make songs sound "crisper" and "brighter" on highly compressed AM stations. That ended about 50 years ago.
Isn't song length the reason Casey Kasem gave for expanding AT40 to four hours? Songs, especially disco songs, were getting longer in the late 70s, and Casey didn't want to have to edit songs to make them fit into the countdown's previous three-hour window.
Actually, the reason why AT40 was expanded to 4 hours had to do with getting more commercial inventory for the show, which was mostly paid for by the national advertisers who financed Watermark. Stations, at the most, paid a moderate charge for "shipping and handling" but gave up about half of the commercial time to Watermark.
Further, a lot of stations wanted more hours of the show as it was a cheap way to get some revenue and to avoid having to pay a DJ to do one of those weekend shifts where stations ran the show.
Casey did not make the decisions on song count, song length or show length. He was the talent for the show. Tom Rounds, and for some years, Ron Jacobs, did the management formatic decisions. Much of what Casey said on the air was scripted by producer Don Bustany and writers.
The web is filled with articles and messages that Bustany and Kasem "co-created" AT40, which is an absolute falsehood. Rounds called in Jacobs and they created the concept, including the novel idea of doing shows on a barter ad-financed basis. Tom and Ron were Drake's PDs at KFRC and KHJ and veterans of some the earliest pre-Woodstock huge outdoor shows and together they created the concept and then hired a voice and a producer to give it life.
Thank you for the information! I used to listen to AT40 frequently but I had no idea how it was put together.
Well, maybe not that infamous rant, LOL!
The Millennials who grew up listening to one-minute edits of Britney Spears and NSYNC on Hit Clips are now in radio's prime demographic. So excuse us if we don't care to hear a seven-minute organ solo.
They can't very well say the short version is the version people remember if it was something that the big stations around here never played in the first place.
I remember a lot of songs that were big national hits that Q-102 would never play. I don't mean all those songs that peaked down at #38 or something. I'm talking about big top 10 hits here.
I remember a lot of songs that were big national hits that Q-102 would never play. I don't mean all those songs that peaked down at #38 or something. I'm talking about big top 10 hits here.
I've mentioned an AT40 Twitter chat (I know, Good Lord) and it's easy to pick out Casey's catchphrases like "girl singer" and "from England". If you catch a guest-hosted episode, you hear the same catch phrases.
If you say commercial counts are down you must not listen to WEBN. On that station they interrupt the Ads to play a song.
Commercial loads down? Do you listen to WEBN?
Wall to wall ads.
All of this is fine and interesting, but the bottom line is Classic Rock stations should be playing the long, album versions of songs. I know some stations edit for profanity. I get that. But Classic Rock is supposed to respect the music, not fade out classic guitar solos or fade out songs that should end cold.
In the case of money for nothing I sort of get it why antagonize the powerful lgbtq Lobby?
Most of the people who would be offended by it are straight. It's called having empathy.
Ummmm.....I was still doing it 30 years ago. If it started sounding like Mickey or Minnie and even if it sounded Goofy [pun intended] I just backed off some layers of tape till it didn't sound too bad. Never really bought a CD player till Pioneer came out with one I could cue and do lots of other stuff with. Liked it so much, I ended up buying two of them which still work to this day. Was going to load all my CDs/tapes/45s/LPs on my computer but when less than 5% of my music filled up a 500 gig drive, I gave up. Guess I'll wait till a supercomputer comes down in price and goes on Ebay.
I didn't even know you could get a ½tb drive any more. I just took advantage of Amazon's Prime Day to get six 20tb drives for my new build when the Threadripper 6000 is released!