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WLIT, Chicago, Now 80s/90s AC

G

Gregg.

Star Participant
If like Rip Van Winkle, you've been asleep for the last two decades, the new sound of WLIT is perfect for you! Looking over the playlist for the last hour, every song was from the 1980s or 90s except for the Soft AC hit "All of Me" by John Legend from 2013. Lite-FM isn't exactly Soft AC, as you might hear on co-owned KISQ San Francisco (although KISQ isn't always soft either). In fact, Lite is fairly uptempo. But it is aimed at the upper limits of the 25-54 demo. (If you graduated high school in 1985, you are 50.)

1pm hour - 12/26/17

Blondie--Heart of Glass
Eric Carmen--Hungry Eyes
Madonna--Holiday
Billy Joel--Uptown Girl
Bon Jovi--I'll Be There for You
UB 40--Red, Red Wine
The Go-Go's--Vacation
Michael Jackson--Bad
Joan Jett--I Love Rock & Roll
Prince--Little Red Corvette
Roxette--Listen to Your Heart
Whitney Houston--So Emotional
John Legend--All of Me
Aerosmith--Crazy
Shannon--Let The Music Play

There was speculation, with the success of KISQ, that iHeart might try the same thing in Chicago after WLIT finished its Christmas format. Add the fact that the station is using the word "Lite" again (even though this playlist is hardly light) and the syndicated Delilah show (from Premiere Networks, an iHeart subsidiary) is now being carried at night. But apparently management didn't want the station to sound too soft.

Apparently only once an hour will Lite-FM play a song from the post-2000 library. The previous hour, "Play That Song" from Train was aired, a song from 2016.
 
Apparently WLIT was just introducing the station with mostly 80s/90s songs. Checking the playlist on this, Day Three, it is still mostly 80s/90s but a post-2000 song is heard about 25%-30% of the time. The slogan is "The Best Variety of The 80s, 90s and Now."

I still don't hear any current songs.
 
Gregg. said:
If like Rip Van Winkle, you've been asleep for the last two decades, the new sound of WLIT is perfect for you! Looking over the playlist for the last hour, every song was from the 1980s or 90s except for the Soft AC hit "All of Me" by John Legend from 2013. Lite-FM isn't exactly Soft AC, as you might hear on co-owned KISQ San Francisco (although KISQ isn't always soft either). In fact, Lite is fairly uptempo. But it is aimed at the upper limits of the 25-54 demo. (If you graduated high school in 1985, you are 50.)

1pm hour - 12/26/17

Now that Christmas music is over I have no use for this station even since they will also be playing Michael Jackson, I hope that they enjoyed their high ratings as it will fade away.
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They may not get a 12 share again, but if they can thread the needle between WLS and WTMX, they might do better than they did before the holidays.
 
As someone in my 40's, I see nothing wrong with this mix. It's pretty much everything I listened to when I was younger. As long as the currents don't suck this could do pretty well.
 
I'd listen to this, too, and I'm in my 60s. I was listening to current pop regularly until hip-hop started to dominate the charts, and I can still listen to a lot of non-hip-hop '90s and '00s music today. This decade, not so much, so currents had better be kept to two or three an hour.
 
Looks a lot like the former Rewind 100...point 3. (I always hated that pregnant pause in their IDs!)
 
Some very valuable insight offered here, hope that WLIT management is paying attention. Don't play any Micheal Jackson or any songs from the last 15 years and they will be able to win that most desirable demo of male radio geeks in their 60s. On their way to being the top biller in the market!
 
DOB said:
Some very valuable insight offered here, hope that WLIT management is paying attention. Don't play any Micheal Jackson or any songs from the last 15 years and they will be able to win that most desirable demo of male radio geeks in their 60s. On their way to being the top biller in the market!
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You are being sarcastic, right?
 
Not at all. Every major market full market signal should take the wishes and comments of 60+ year old male radio geeks. I mean yeah Micheal Jackson may have made some of the most mass appeal music of the last 30 years that even has appeal in younger people who weren't even alive during his heyday, but let's take out his entire catalog of work because of our personal feelings of him being weird and thinking that all those sick things said about him must have been true.
All kidding aside I understand the nostalgia part of the comments made here. I loved the way radio was done and sounded from '64 to '88. Here, this is a medium that is loved and made a major impact on the contributors. I can see how if you weren't involved in some way with the business today that you would have a distorted view of what was so great years ago can be brought back today. You come here and crush dreams with reality but I do appreciate David how you do it with gentility and love. I'm just glad that at least I get to hear Broadway Bill Lee doing a perfect mix of past excellence with an understanding of today's formatics. I will enjoy it as long as its available. I just see the on coming brick wall of when we have to deal with classic hits post 1989 and with the demos that make money now there is no way to continue the format. The fragmentation of tastes will render it impossible. How can you have a station that plays Biggie Smallz, Nirvana, Real McCoy, and Train?
 
DOB said:
I'm just glad that at least I get to hear Broadway Bill Lee doing a perfect mix of past excellence with an understanding of today's formatics. I will enjoy it as long as its available. I just see the on coming brick wall of when we have to deal with classic hits post 1989 and with the demos that make money now there is no way to continue the format.
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As has been commented, there is hope from a number of sources. First is the Internet, which, despite increasing licensing costs, is where programming that can't find advertiser support may find listener support of some kind.

And you have satellite. Have you sampled their offerings and do you have an opinion?

Then there are suburban and smaller market stations that don't depend on ratings and can do OK with a 45-65 focused format. They get their income from local business that does not by "by the numbers". But with the decline in solid local retail, and retailers preferring Internet targeted advertising, that is tough. The big chains don't buy "little local stations" and many don't buy "big local stations" either.

Broadcasters have, largely without success, tried to change the mentality of advertisers by encouraging buying up to 65 years of age. But when we look at the buy specs, we see nearly no campaigns doing that. Changing demographic focus is a major issue for radio, yet I see very little activity in this area.
 
DavidEduardo said:


As has been commented, there is hope from a number of sources. First is the Internet, which, despite increasing licensing costs, is where programming that can't find advertiser support may find listener support of some kind.

And you have satellite. Have you sampled their offerings and do you have an opinion?

Then there are suburban and smaller market stations that don't depend on ratings and can do OK with a 45-65 focused format. They get their income from local business that does not by "by the numbers". But with the decline in solid local retail, and retailers preferring Internet targeted advertising, that is tough. The big chains don't buy "little local stations" and many don't buy "big local stations" either.

Broadcasters have, largely without success, tried to change the mentality of advertisers by encouraging buying up to 65 years of age. But when we look at the buy specs, we see nearly no campaigns doing that. Changing demographic focus is a major issue for radio, yet I see very little activity in this area.
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There is nothing like the feeling of community that you get from an fm radio station. Thousands/millions of people within a 30 mile radius listening to the same thing. When done right it is the sound of that community and it unites people together.

I have spent time with Sirius XM. I love the variety of music on the 60s and 70s stations, a big fan of the classic hip hop station, and the 80s on 8 is a good listen, I just grew up with the decade so I'd really love a great listen. The thing is I can never really enjoy Sirius XM. The sound quality makes it impossible for me to enjoy, same as the badly processed radio stations too. I don't need z100 circa 1987, and I do notice the degraded sound quality of fm hd radio, but I can live with fm hd for the most part, subchannels are another story, like Sirius XM its just too 'muddy'. I'd rather not listen to over compressed audio.

I know a classic hits station that is trying to hold onto the 60s. They are down to 1 or 2 an hour now I believe. More than half their accounts are local but even they have to update. I just think the wall is 1989, after that you can't really do an adult hits format based on pop music. Is the answer to rethink the format for the 90s music or is it to try to get agencies and their buyers to go after older demos? We are going to be finding out real soon!
 
DOB said:
Is the answer to rethink the format for the 90s music or is it to try to get agencies and their buyers to go after older demos? We are going to be finding out real soon!
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They are going after older demos, but not with music radio formats. Older folks who listen to music don't want their music interrupted with endless commercials selling them drugs, insurance, and reverse mortgages. So the agencies direct all that money to talk radio and cable TV.
 
DOB said:
Not at all. Every major market full market signal should take the wishes and comments of 60+ year old male radio geeks. I mean yeah Micheal Jackson may have made some of the most mass appeal music of the last 30 years that even has appeal in younger people who weren't even alive during his heyday, but let's take out his entire catalog of work because of our personal feelings of him being weird and thinking that all those sick things said about him must have been true.
All kidding aside I understand the nostalgia part of the comments made here. I loved the way radio was done and sounded from '64 to '88. Here, this is a medium that is loved and made a major impact on the contributors. I can see how if you weren't involved in some way with the business today that you would have a distorted view of what was so great years ago can be brought back today. You come here and crush dreams with reality but I do appreciate David how you do it with gentility and love. I'm just glad that at least I get to hear Broadway Bill Lee doing a perfect mix of past excellence with an understanding of today's formatics. I will enjoy it as long as its available. I just see the on coming brick wall of when we have to deal with classic hits post 1989 and with the demos that make money now there is no way to continue the format. The fragmentation of tastes will render it impossible. How can you have a station that plays Biggie Smallz, Nirvana, Real McCoy, and Train?
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Maybe rhythmic classic hits and rock classic hits stations will evolve, the way CHR stations did in the late '80s/early '90s. I still remember WTIC-FM Hartford proudly boasting that you'd never hear rap on that station.
 
CTListener said:
Maybe rhythmic classic hits and rock classic hits stations will evolve, the way CHR stations did in the late '80s/early '90s. I still remember WTIC-FM Hartford proudly boasting that you'd never hear rap on that station.
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I picked 1989, it is debatable as to an exact year because like almost everything there is a progression, it didn't happen immediately. The transition is from a pop universe where pop was the center and the flavoring was the rock and rhythmic, to a universe where rock and rhythmic took center stage and pop a back seat. There's so much more to it then this though, for the sake of not typing a novel I will not expand this. What you end up with though is an audience that came of age in an era where there was no pop center, and more so there wasn't universal appeal for such music. Looking back a big part of it was chr chasing the upper demos when the extremes hit but I also see now that there was a lack of pop center product as well.

My answer? Yes a redefining of the format centered on mass appeal music but I wouldn't find much from the 90s, I'd go into the 2000s and then your oldies to classic hits becomes something entirely different but linked on the premise of playing older music exclusively.
 
DOB said:
What you end up with though is an audience that came of age in an era where there was no pop center, and more so there wasn't universal appeal for such music. Looking back a big part of it was chr chasing the upper demos when the extremes hit but I also see now that there was a lack of pop center product as well.

My answer? Yes a redefining of the format centered on mass appeal music but I wouldn't find much from the 90s, I'd go into the 2000s and then your oldies to classic hits becomes something entirely different but linked on the premise of playing older music exclusively.
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You can draw a lot of parallels between 1979-1982 and 1989-1992. Pop was pretty soft. (One decade had yacht rock, the other had Kenny G & Michael Bolton.) You had rhythmic and rock on either extreme.

But when you got to the late 80's, you also had a splintered radio dial. In 1980, the city I grew up in had two AOR stations, 2 CHR stations and 2 B/EZ stations. In 1990, there were 3 CHR stations, one mainstream and two rhythmic. After the mainstream top 40 died trying to chase 25-54 numbers (and going from 10.2 to 2.9 in one book) you had 5 AC stations. Two AOR stations. One classic rock station... one alternative (on AM, but still).

So instead of most people splitting their time between Top 40 and Album Rock, you had people splitting their time between the 2 or 3 types of top 40 stations we had and the 2 or 3 types of AOR stations we had, or 4 or 5 AC stations. In 1990, I was graduating high school, and there are songs from that era that charted but I never heard because I wasn't into that sound and radio helped me avoid those records. 10 years earlier there would have been a chance I would have been exposed to it a little bit because there were fewer radio choices and our CHR and AOR stations of the day would cross some songs over.

In 1990, we didn't try to avoid programming the extremes, we launched formats that celebrated them.

Thankfully, we don't have to stay in our silos looking back, so classic hits (or gold based AC) has the luxury to steal what still tests from everyone even if those songs never co-existed on the same station the first time around.
 
Mostly certainly, the mass appeal chr stations tried to avoid the extremes of rock and rhythmic, so much so that they played some very crappy pop songs and sleepy Bolton crap that had anyone under 40 bolting for a different station. The incredible popularity of hip hop and alternative rock allowed for radio stations to exclusively play these styles. Then you had a resurgence at country with Garth and company. Chr stations saw their ratings crumble. Management chased after the older demos at the expense of the younger ones. The chr stations got sleepy, those that stayed, a great deal of them just bailed from the format altogether. The classic hits stations and oldies before it where about playing older mass appeal songs from a time when there was such a thing as mass appeal. Playing music from after 1989 or so will be tricky. I think there are more mass appeal selections from after 2000, the 90s are kinda like a lost decade. Classic hits stations are dabbing into the 90s now and the compatible songs they are playing from the 1990s actually have less appeal for younger listeners then a great deal of their 80s playlists. Over the next few years it is going to get tricky. I think that ultimately they will need to get advertisers to re-think the appeal of going after older listeners. Sure, you can find some songs from the 90s that are mass appeal and test, but they are few and far between. They will burn out real quickly. That's the 90s. it is why these hip hop throwback stations burn out so quickly. The classic hits model of playing Friends in low places, Hypnotize, and santaria will not work.
 
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