Pre-1970 Music on Seattle FM dial

Too bad KZOK doesn't play Weird Al's version. On a tangent how much say do PD's have in programming local artists who've mad it big. In other words would a similarly programmed IHEART classic rock station outside of Washington play Nirvana on a constant loop.

bobdavcav said:

Then, what about those younger listeners who actually want to hear older music? Shawn Ross wrote just yesterday that country PDs are hearing excitement from younger listeners when they add older titles. Of course we can't forget a couple summers ago when Running Up That Hill, a 35 year old record, suddenly was everywhere thanks to a Netflix series. Outside of this, I know several people my age and a bit older who love music older than they are.

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That can come from exposure like the example you give ("Running Up The Hill" becoming a hit again because it was featured on "Stranger Things"), but to some extent it is also a matter of what was getting played on the radio when we were teenagers.

Right now there are Top 40 stations that are playing quite a few older songs, sometimes going back more than twenty years. To the extent that young people still listen to the radio, that means those older songs are part of what teenagers are hearing today. They may still like those songs twenty or thirty years from now.

That's my own personal experience. When I was in high school and starting college, there was a lot of older music being played on the FM Top 40 stations that I listened to. Since I recently digitized a whole bunch of old radio recordings, I've been reminded of that. As an example, I have recordings from July of 1981 from 'The New 93' (the station that later became KUBE) right after they went to their live format that include "I Saw Her Standing There" from the Beatles -- a song that 17 years old. A recording from KNWR (TM Stereo Rock automated Top 40) a month later includes the 16 year old "Tell Her No" from the Zombies. "Stairway to Heaven" and "Nights in White Satin" were regularly heard on multiple Top 40 stations in the area in the late seventies and early eighties. My classmates who preferred AOR-formatted KISW could expect to hear quite a bit of sixties rock in that same time frame.

Some of that music stuck, and those of my generation still like those songs -- even though radio programmers never quite seemed to believe that those of us who grew up with Top 40 radio liked those songs. Even when those songs tested well, they were dismissed as "not fitting the format".

If radio is still around in 25 years, programmers who see good test results for something like "Running Up The Hill" will dismiss those results the same way.

You hit the nail on the head as to one of the biggest things wrong with radio today in my opinion. Having not been born until 1993, I didn't know that top40 had a significant gold component even well before then. Am I just biased because I'm younger, or is there really more opportunity for today's young people to be exposed to older music? That's really what it seems like to me, as my favorite station was KBSG, and as I've said before, I know at least one other person who loves older music that's hard to find on radio today, and several more who love classic rock, all of whom are within a couple years of me in age.

Texas Tom is correct. I lived through the 80s (best decade of music in my opinion) and many Top 40 stations leaned into the 1970s from time to time. The extent varied depending on the station. Magic 108 played music from the 60s, 70s and 80s.

The irony of Running Up the Hill is that's happened in other decades as well. Think Ferris Bueller's Day Off and Twist and Shout or Ghost with Unchained Melody. Movies and television certainly have a way of reinvigorating an old song.

They say music is timeless. Judging from YouTube comments one could draw an opinion that millennials and Gen Z like listening to music from back in the day.

"Dear Future Survivors,

We did all we could.

But try as we may, we utterly could not stop this radio aging conveyor belt. Once the last Slipknot fans were courted by KIXI, The time/space/music continuum simply snapped when there was nobody left to replace it. I mean, the scientists are baffled. There were back room discussions on hopefully having Lady Gaga, Psy, Foster The People, Carly Rae Jepsen, Imagine Dragons and Taylor Swift help continue on the Oldies cycle for at least one more generation. But it was no use. The radio aging conveyor belt snapped and threw everybody against the wall. There were no survivors and I'm the only one left to tell about it....- B.W."

Lol. I think you might be a generation early on that though given the success of CHR a decade ago.

Props to BW for some well timed levity. Vinyl sales outpaced CDs again. There maybe hope for humanity after all.

DMK said:

Props to BW for some well timed levity. Vinyl sales outpaced CDs again. There maybe hope for humanity after all.

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The biggest lie in the history of the recording industry is "Vinyl went obsolete".

It never did. Ever.

Not as long as there are indie fans, hipsters, collectors and people who are just plain cool.