I like "Lay Down (Candles in the Rain)" more. I hope if you had a special on 1970 you'd play it, plus maybe "Look What They've Done to My Song, Ma" (Safka's version and/or the New Seekers').
ixnay
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Where the hits REALLY came from. Two books that tell the truth.
I like "Lay Down (Candles in the Rain)" more. I hope if you had a special on 1970 you'd play it, plus maybe "Look What They've Done to My Song, Ma" (Safka's version and/or the New Seekers').
ixnay
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I like "Lay Down (Candles in the Rain)" more. I hope if you had a special on 1970 you'd play it, plus maybe "Look What They've Done to My Song, Ma" (Safka's version and/or the New Seekers').
ixnay
Miley Cyrus did an outstanding cover of that song on her "Backyard Sessions". Of course, if you use radio as your source of information about songs, you've never heard it.
Only our generation thinks our music is timeless. They said the same thing about Frank Sinatra when I was a kid and beyond. Utter the words "timeless music" to your kids and see if they say "Frank Sinatra". Utter the same words to your grandkids or parents and see if they think the 60s and 70s are "timeless". The general response I got in the 70s was that the music was a letdown from the 60s.
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There are some "timeless" songs, but the performances of songs tends to reflect certain tendencies of the times. Janis Joplin and Big brother & The Holding Company had a major hit with George Gerswhin's "Summertime", though they made it sound very, very mid-60's. Interestingly, the guitar intro was based on Bach's "The Well Tempered Clavier", according to the guitarist who played it, Nick Gravenites.
Regardless of how good or bad the general run of popular music was, there will always be some recordings that will be evergreens, that will sound as fresh today as they did 20, 30, 50 or more years ago. But, as someone whose name I never knew once said, "99% of everything is crap".
The only Big Brother & the Holding Company single that did well was "Piece of My Heart" coming in at #12. "Summertime" was a track from their #1 album, "Cheap Thrills". Regarding your "99% of Everything..." quote, here's what you want: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon's_law
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I remember hearing "Summertime" on the radio quite often back in the day. I suppose not too many middle schoolers ran out to buy the 45, but as songs go, it's a genuine classic.
And thanks for the listing. I genuinely believe in that principle, though by setting the bar at 90%, I think Sturgeon set it nine points too low. Or maybe in his time 60 plus years ago, it was too expensive to produce things, so not so much crap snuck through. Nowadays, anyone with a PC, a semi-decent microphone, and some shareware software can produce a multi-track music recording that's technically superior to anything that came out of Abbey Road in the 60s, but is pure and total crap anyway.
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All this wrangling over payola or not as a factor in launching a hit record, what constitutes "timeless music" or even music, period; overlooks the ultimate fact that the public decides what records they are going to buy. You can play a record on radio all you want, but you cannot shove down the audience's throats anything they won't accept. Nobody puts a knife to anyone's back and orders them to buy The Doors or Tony Orlando or, for that matter, Britney. The public buys the music it wants; whether you as an "expert" likes it or not is immaterial. It may not always be correct to assume "the public is never wrong," but it's fatally smug to assume they are never right!
I've posted this elsewhere, but whether it's Sinatra, Elvis, the Beatles or whoever; they all were met with scorn and ridicule by self-proclaimed music experts who "knew better" and felt the audience was made up of morons. So who got the last laugh?
I've posted this elsewhere, but whether it's Sinatra, Elvis, the Beatles or whoever; they all were met with scorn and ridicule by self-proclaimed music experts who "knew better" and felt the audience was made up of morons. So who got the last laugh?
I agree. One guy who never gets respect from critics is Neil Diamond. He certainly put the time in, laboring in the Brill Building on Broadway. Neil had a bunch of mushy pop hits, including Sweet Caroline. The critics never liked that one. But I was in a ball park last week as that song was played, and the entire place was singing the chorus. Neil not only sang it, but was the sole writer. He gets all the publishing money. Who got the last laugh?
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How could anyone who works in radio, that depends on people believing that advertising a product makes it sell better, deny that playing a song on the radio is a form of "advertising" that makes the record sell better? If airplay and exposure don't make a record sell better, then how can you expect anyone who has a product to sell to give you money for airing a commercial to make their product sell better?
Great song. Yes I'd play it on a 1970 feature. David might cringe though.......
You're welcome. What I was trying say was that their version of "Summertime" wasn't released as a single.
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That doesn't surprise me. It was a great song, but it didn't have a great beat so you could dance to it.
Ever heard of a "turntable hit"? That's when a radio station plugs the hell out of a record by endless airplay, but nobody goes into the stores and buys any copies? You must also believe that if you stomp down hard enough on the gas pedal, your car will break the sound barrier...
He was extremely lucky on that one. He wrote it for Caroline Kennedy, who was 11 when it came out. Doesn't matter what context it is anymore, writing any song to, or about, an 11-year-old girl (unless maybe you were 10, 11, 12, or 13 yourself at the time) would be considered EXTREMELY politically incorrect these days, regardless of the context under which it was written.
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If a song is a "dud", you can play it until the listeners ears bleed and it won't sell any better - and your ratings will suffer as well. Bad is bad, no matter how many times you play it. Along the same lines, you can run ads repeatedly for a pizza place, but if the pizza sucks the ads aren't going to fix that.
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Sorry, but that is dead bang wrong. While you cannot turn a total stiff into a hit, if a song gets any airplay, even if it is a total piece of crap, it will sell better than it would sell without airplay. That doesn't mean it will be a hit. But a song destined to sell maybe 1,000 copies at best when the band who recorded it pushes it at gigs would increase sales to maybe 10 or 20 times that with radio airplay. That would not make it a hit. It wouldn't even crack the Top 200. But it would sell better with airplay than it would without.
Along those same lines, if you run ads repeatedly for a pizza place, but the pizza sucks, that pizza place will get large numbers of new, first-time customers who order a pizza. When they discover that it sucks, then they won't come back a second time, but until words gets around that their pizza sucks, lots of ads will bring in new, unsuspecting customers.
There's a story about that principle. A guy is walking along a street and he hears people behind a wooden wall chanting "12, 12, 12, 12, 12". The guy sees a little peep hole, so he looks through, and gets poked in the eye with a stick. As he walks on, the new chant is "13, 13, 13, 13, 13". Good aavertising will get people to look through the peep hole, no matter what's on the other side.
Besides, the real issue is that people working in radio need to convince people in a position to decide where ad money should be spent need to promote the idea that radio advertising works, even if that's a lie. Radio stations don't make money by convincing clients that the client's product sucks. They make money by convincing them that radio will work for them better than any other medium.
What is a blatant lie is saying that radio advertising does not work.
Nationally, most radio advertising is local direct. That means local advertisers who have no agency buying time on local radio stations. These are merchants who can very easily measure the effectiveness of their ad expenditures, and they have used radio for 80 years or so and continues to use it because it moves goods and sells services.
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Isn't it amazing that even though most advertising is "local direct", which means that there are no agencies involved with time-buying decisions, and yet radio stations must turn their backs on listeners over middle age because agencies don't want to buy "older" demographics?
It seems some experts don't mind totally contradicting themselves in order to demonstrate that the didn't even really read the post they're replying to.
It seems some experts don't mind totally contradicting themselves in order to demonstrate that the didn't even really read the post they're replying to.
There are 15000 commercial stations. Most are either not in rated markets or are minor players in rated markets. Those are the stations that depend almost entirely on local direct ad sales.
And even in the rated markets, a significant portion of most station's revenues is local direct. But in the rated, or transactional, markets, without the agency business there is generally no way to profitability. And if a market has ratings, we assume it is because the stations can use them to sell... and that means to agencies. So in those markets, the significant stations will go after some part of 18-54.
Local direct accounts often use money or guidance from a vendor to advertise. That guidance will mostly be just like agency buying criteria. So if a local hardware store sells Black & Decker and gets ad support from them, they will be told to buy a certain kind of format or station per the vendor recommendation.
Or, barring that, the merchant will use a station that brings the most response. Sure some local merchants advertise on the station they themselves like, and that may lean older, but those advertisers generally learn that such decisions are not the most profitable. I have sold in markets as small as Lake City, FL, and know that many local advertisers have quite a lot of information about how and where to advertise and it generally discourages they use of stations with formats that "sound like they are for seniors".
We have been talking, for the most part about rated markets and serious contenders with viable technical facilities. In those cases, there is scant opportunity to make money with an old leaning format. And those that can make a go of it, such as WDUV in Tampa or KWXY in Palm Springs tend to exist in markets where there is a huge "bubble" of 55+ and thus an opportunity... yet these stations significantly under-bill their audience size despite a large potential market.
There is no contradiction here... just your misinterpretation or misunderstanding of the revenue source by market size.[/SIZE][/FONT]
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