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Donny Osmond's station list

H

HawkeyeST

Frequent Participant
Actually, I have only one-- KBYG from Big Spring, TX, which airs '8-track Playback' at 6:25am CT. Unfortunately, I'm having some trouble finding any stations that carry his other short-form feature 'Donny's Datebook'.

That said, I should mention that one of the 8-track playbacks was John Lennon's 'Woman'... Wasn't that an 1980s song? Also, today's song was Phil Collins' remake of The Supremes' 'You Can't Hurry Love' which I'm sure WAS an '80s song, which begs the question: How often does Donny play early '80s on '8-track Playback'?
 
HawkeyeST said:
That said, I should mention that one of the 8-track playbacks was John Lennon's 'Woman'... Wasn't that an 1980s song?
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"Woman" was released late in 1980 and reached it's peak in early 1981.
 
HawkeyeST said:
Actually, I have only one-- KBYG from Big Spring, TX, which airs '8-track Playback' at 6:25am CT. Unfortunately, I'm having some trouble finding any stations that carry his other short-form feature 'Donny's Datebook'.

That said, I should mention that one of the 8-track playbacks was John Lennon's 'Woman'... Wasn't that an 1980s song? Also, today's song was Phil Collins' remake of The Supremes' 'You Can't Hurry Love' which I'm sure WAS an '80s song, which begs the question: How often does Donny play early '80s on '8-track Playback'?
Click to expand...

Phil Colllins version of the Supremes' "You Can't Hurry Love" was from 1982. It was from his second solo album and was in Heavy Rotation on MTV during late 1982/early 1983.

8-Tracks were still available in 1980 and 1981. It was at the end of 1981 and early 1982 that most of the record labels started phasing out 8-track tapes. So "Woman" by John Lennon would have be available on 8-track but by the time Phil Collins second album came out (Hello, I must be Going" was the title I believe), most record labels had stopped releasing music on 8-tracks.
 
Yeah, I seem to recall 1982 being the last hurrah for 8-track tapes. Which probably pissed off a lot of folks who bought them in their heyday in the '70s, since 8-tracks often cost well over a dollar MORE than the LP version of the same album!

Seems like most tape-based formats never really had any staying power, whether it was reel-to-reel tapes, 8-tracks, or cassettes. And DAT never really caught on!
 
firepoint525 said:
Yeah, I seem to recall 1982 being the last hurrah for 8-track tapes. Which probably pissed off a lot of folks who bought them in their heyday in the '70s, since 8-tracks often cost well over a dollar MORE than the LP version of the same album!

Seems like most tape-based formats never really had any staying power, whether it was reel-to-reel tapes, 8-tracks, or cassettes. And DAT never really caught on!
Click to expand...

DAT was just coming around when I did my stint at KWVE in '91 or '92. From what I recall, it did not last long, although the quality was great, since I had to actually air some programs off them. I still use RR tape at home and it's fabulous, sound is great! Never caught on to 8-tracks or cassettes, since the quality was inferior to RR tape.

Columbia House 8 tracks and RR tapes, those were the days! Did BMG ever have tapes? I recall CD's.
 
I remember giving a demonstration in speech class arguing why cassettes were superior to 8-tracks. It was the summer of '78. That train left the station a long time ago!

And in the summer of '88, I was working PT at the college NPR FM station, playing back digital audio recorded on Betamax video cassettes. I thought a good analog RR tape sounded better, but saying you had a digital recording played on the "wow" factor.
 
oldies76 said:
DAT was just coming around when I did my stint at KWVE in '91 or '92. From what I recall, it did not last long, although the quality was great, since I had to actually air some programs off them. I still use RR tape at home and it's fabulous, sound is great! Never caught on to 8-tracks or cassettes, since the quality was inferior to RR tape.
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The station where I was working back during that same time frame was still using reel-to-reel tapes on its automated FM station. They changed formats soon after I left, but I suspect that it was because the supplier (Broadcast Supply West out of Seattle) discontinued manufacture and distribution of those reel-to-reel tapes.
 
firepoint525 said:
Yeah, I seem to recall 1982 being the last hurrah for 8-track tapes. Which probably pissed off a lot of folks who bought them in their heyday in the '70s, since 8-tracks often cost well over a dollar MORE than the LP version of the same album!!
Click to expand...

The main reason most people bought 8-track tapes in early to mid-70s was for their car's stereo system. That was my main reason for buying 8-tracks because my first home stereo and my first car stereo had 8-track tape decks, so if I wanted to listen to anything other than what was being played on the radio, you had to have an 8-track tape deck in your car. I know that Radio Shack started selling tape converters in the late 70s to insert in your 8-track tape deck so you could play cassettes on your 8-track deck, but I believe most car stereo makers stopped offering 8-track tape decks by that time, anyway.
 
jwk1979 said:
The main reason most people bought 8-track tapes in early to mid-70s was for their car's stereo system. That was my main reason for buying 8-tracks because my first home stereo and my first car stereo had 8-track tape decks, so if I wanted to listen to anything other than what was being played on the radio, you had to have an 8-track tape deck in your car. I know that Radio Shack started selling tape converters in the late 70s to insert in your 8-track tape deck so you could play cassettes on your 8-track deck, but I believe most car stereo makers stopped offering 8-track tape decks by that time, anyway.
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Absolutely. It was the convenience factor. I first saw pre-recorded cassettes at K-Mart as far back as 1976, but they were in a very small case at that time. I last saw 8-tracks in the store about 1982. Convenience was the main driving force behind the popularity of 8-track tapes back then.
 
jwk1979 said:
The main reason most people bought 8-track tapes in early to mid-70s was for their car's stereo system. That was my main reason for buying 8-tracks because my first home stereo and my first car stereo had 8-track tape decks, so if I wanted to listen to anything other than what was being played on the radio, you had to have an 8-track tape deck in your car. I know that Radio Shack started selling tape converters in the late 70s to insert in your 8-track tape deck so you could play cassettes on your 8-track deck, but I believe most car stereo makers stopped offering 8-track tape decks by that time, anyway.
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I bought just such a cassette adaptor in the early 80's when I bought a ten-year old Chevy. It worked as well as the FM converter I bought for the equally old pickup truck I drove in the 70's.

I also knew only one person who actually had an 8-track recorder who would make his own mix tapes on 8-Track from vinyl. It didn't work very well, nor did the finished product sound very good.

The one thing I cannot really fathom is worrying about the possible anachronism factor of using 8-tracks as an iconic metaphor to describe an era in pop music. People I knew who had older vehicles with 8-track players in the dash, and a collection of 8-track tapes that they enjoyed kept plugging them in and playing them until the cars or trucks just plain wore out.
 
joebtsflk1 said:
I remember giving a demonstration in speech class arguing why cassettes were superior to 8-tracks. It was the summer of '78. That train left the station a long time ago!
Click to expand...
The advantage that 8-tracks had over cassettes (at least at first) was that 8-tracks were available first. Pre-recorded cassettes, as I said earlier, did not start appearing on store shelves until the late '70s. 8-tracks had already been established MUCH earlier.

The main disadvantage of 8-tracks, even in their heyday, was the splitting of songs over multiple tracks. Cassettes never divided the same song over both sides of a cassette tape. They would have silence at the end of a side (usually side 2) before they would do that. 8-tracks usually never had any long passages of silence. Seems like it would have made more sense to have silence at the end of the fourth channel of an 8-track tape, rather than split a song over multiple channels. The silence could easily be "covered" by just listening to another channel. Maybe it was because 8-track tape machines never had any fast-forward or rewind, at least none that I ever recall. And of course, such a feature might tear up an 8-track tape. I am sure that we have all had 8-track AND cassette tapes get gobbled up in a machine!
 
firepoint525 said:
The advantage that 8-tracks had over cassettes (at least at first) was that 8-tracks were available first. Pre-recorded cassettes, as I said earlier, did not start appearing on store shelves until the late '70s. 8-tracks had already been established MUCH earlier.
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I looked some things up. The first pre-recorded cassettes were sold in 1965. That was within weeks of the first sales of automobiles with 8-track players installed. The last new release of a pre-recorded 8-track was in 1988. There are still some artists releasing special versions of their albums on 8-track, though that appears to be more of a publicity stunt than anything else.

I also dug through an old collection of electronics stores' catalogs. There were several different compact stereo systems with both turntable and stereo cassette recorder built-in for sale in the late 1960's. Similar systems to record 8-tracks weren't as common. While 8-tracks had an edge in popularity for buying entire albums in portable form to play in the car, "roll your own" mix-tapes were usually put onto cassettes. And, with cassettes being less than half the size of an 8-track, being able to put twice as many into a glove compartment was another feature that helped make cassettes become a more popular format.
 
Avid Listener said:
I looked some things up. The first pre-recorded cassettes were sold in 1965. That was within weeks of the first sales of automobiles with 8-track players installed. The last new release of a pre-recorded 8-track was in 1988. There are still some artists releasing special versions of their albums on 8-track, though that appears to be more of a publicity stunt than anything else.

I also dug through an old collection of electronics stores' catalogs. There were several different compact stereo systems with both turntable and stereo cassette recorder built-in for sale in the late 1960's. Similar systems to record 8-tracks weren't as common. While 8-tracks had an edge in popularity for buying entire albums in portable form to play in the car, "roll your own" mix-tapes were usually put onto cassettes. And, with cassettes being less than half the size of an 8-track, being able to put twice as many into a glove compartment was another feature that helped make cassettes become a more popular format.
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I had a Channelmaster "Quad" matched stereo system with a 8 track recorder in the early 70's and I recall it sounded decent for what it was, the thing is 8 tracks sucked in general and yes I do recall cassettes coming out before 8 tracks but for some reason I think it was the music industry that pushed 8 tracks at the time.
 
R_F_Burns said:
I had a Channelmaster "Quad" matched stereo system with a 8 track recorder in the early 70's and I recall it sounded decent for what it was, the thing is 8 tracks sucked in general and yes I do recall cassettes coming out before 8 tracks but for some reason I think it was the music industry that pushed 8 tracks at the time.
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You recall correctly about cassettes coming out before 8-tracks. However, the earliest cassettes were so low-fidelity that they were targeted for the dictation market. It's hard for those not old enough to have been around then to remember when in most businesses, male executives would dictate letters and memos onto recording machines, then the girls in the steno pool would type the documents. The original cassette recorders were envisioned as a replacement for the dictating machines that used plastic belts. It wasn't until teenagers who listened to music on little AM transistor radios found that the earliest cassettes had the same sort of fidelity as a portable AM radio that cassettes were seen as a medium for pre-recorded music.

I suspect you're right about the record industry pushing 8 tracks, since even though you had an 8 track recorder, most people didn't. 8 track as a format was almost as home-copy proof as vinyl.
 
Yes, the record stores and radio stations pushed 8 tracks, especially in the mid-late 70s.

As for cassettes, banking computers were also operated using cassettes on machines about the size of a stand alone electronic keyboard, and a terminal the size of a television set; and to understand how to use them one went to classes in the Crystal Underground in Northern VA. Half the time was spent getting technicians in to find out why they weren't operating correctly.

8 Tracks came along early on, as I recall them advertised as standard equipment in some cars in the 60s. In the 70s they got pushed harder. Everything under the sun came on 8 track. In retrospect they were going out of vogue and by the 80s they were history...almost. But then, I do not speak as a radio personality.
 
Avid Listener said:
You recall correctly about cassettes coming out before 8-tracks. However, the earliest cassettes were so low-fidelity that they were targeted for the dictation market. It's hard for those not old enough to have been around then to remember when in most businesses, male executives would dictate letters and memos onto recording machines, then the girls in the steno pool would type the documents. The original cassette recorders were envisioned as a replacement for the dictating machines that used plastic belts. It wasn't until teenagers who listened to music on little AM transistor radios found that the earliest cassettes had the same sort of fidelity as a portable AM radio that cassettes were seen as a medium for pre-recorded music.
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My mother had, and probably still has, a portable cassette recorder. I remember that it had a plug-in microphone. It was battery-powered, but there may have been a place to plug in an AC cord as well. I remember using it to record songs off the radio. I held the mic up to the speaker. It sounded like crap, but hey, it was the early '70s, and I was just a kid.

I later had a stereo system with an 8-track recorder, and I recorded quite a few albums off the air. Stations used to play them all the way through late at night, and this was usually the only way that I could hear a whole album without having to buy it first.
 
firepoint525 said:
My mother had, and probably still has, a portable cassette recorder. I remember that it had a plug-in microphone. It was battery-powered, but there may have been a place to plug in an AC cord as well. I remember using it to record songs off the radio. I held the mic up to the speaker. It sounded like crap, but hey, it was the early '70s, and I was just a kid.

I later had a stereo system with an 8-track recorder, and I recorded quite a few albums off the air. Stations used to play them all the way through late at night, and this was usually the only way that I could hear a whole album without having to buy it first.
Click to expand...

Those so-called "shoebox" cassette recorders were a very common item back in the day. Almost every company in the consumer electronics field made a version. Most were exactly as you describe them. There was a semi-standard AC cord port for most of them, though later models used wall-wart transformers as an alternative to batteries. You're also right about taping off a radio speaker with a microphone, though it was also possible to use a patch cord to go straight from an earphone outlet to the microphone input.

I also recall the #1 classic rock station airing new CD copies of hit vinyl albums late at night, though none of the stations in my market did that with new releases.

On of the first electronic components I bought was a stereo cassette deck. I hooked it to my stereo to dub stereo from vinyl to tapes or radio to tape. Mostly, I made mix-tapes for in the car. Among my friends, swapping mix tapes was a frequent exercise. That was the era when I first came to appreciate the huge number of really great songs out there that the suits never pushed for radio airplay. Now, 40 years later, when friends come over for dinner, they still remark on the great background music I play on my MP3 player. More than a few of them have downloaded or bought music from artists that they never heard on the radio, but first discovered at my dinner table.
 
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