WOGL an 80s station?

Sorry if this has been discussed before. I haven't checked in in awhile.

So is WOGL now mainly an 80s station? I just gave them a listen for about 40 minutes for the first time in awhile and I heard almost all 80s. The handful of songs I heard from the 70s were from '79 and '77, which is close enough. And I heard Holiday say "nobody plays more 80s" twice, apparently a new branding line I never heard before.

So is this mainly an 80s station now? Not complaining. I think it actually sounds good. Just curious.

Pretty much so.

Route 222 said:

Sorry if this has been discussed before. I haven't checked in in awhile.

So is WOGL now mainly an 80s station? I just gave them a listen for about 40 minutes for the first time in awhile and I heard almost all 80s. The handful of songs I heard from the 70s were from '79 and '77, which is close enough. And I heard Holiday say "nobody plays more 80s" twice, apparently a new branding line I never heard before.

So is this mainly an 80s station now? Not complaining. I think it actually sounds good. Just curious.

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The ghost of 96.5 The Point weeps silently, knowing they were just way ahead of their time.

But the Point was way more Rock Alternative Hair intense.

Gunsmoke said:

But the Point was way more Rock Alternative Hair intense.

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Hmm. I didn't listen to the Point super-regularly when it existed. I remember hearing a lot of New Wave when I did, before their eventual morph into Hot AC.

I could definitely be wrong though. Anyone remember what the Point's website URL was to look up in the Wayback Machine?

The station started in 1987 and played nothing older than 1955, that's 32 years. They are much older today than they were when they started. They are trying to get the demos decent so yeah they should be playing mostly 80s music. I've heard Jennifer Lopez on cbs-fm, 1999.

Funny that they are playing the music that they killed when they switched off WCAU. This is the one radio station that I personally will never be able to enjoy 80s music on because of the history. They killed a very unique and special radio station that just needed to be fine tuned at the time. You can't say that the first 7 years of WOGL were more successful, they weren't. The station hit its stride and had its best years as oldies starting around 94 or so.

Thirty years....numerous managers, owners and other people in positions of power....might be time to let the issue of hearing songs from the waning days of 'CAU-FM (and post waning days) go. Formats change--they killed one format to make way for Hot Hits...circle of life and all that.

I'm not sure why seven years would be an arbitrary figure for being "more" successful, nor what metric is being applied to determine "success."

What all this hand-wringing over WOGL's music mix boils down to is, once again, that the '90s are a huge, HUGE problem for the oldies/classic hits format as we've known it since the '80s. The fragmentation of CHR, and the utter contempt that many rhythmic fans have for rock and vice versa, may just render the format unsellable in the not too distant future.

A challenge is not necessarily insurmountable. People can have tastes that broaden and evolve over time—research will show where a good path forward may lie, and perhaps it isn’t in the heretofore heavily decade-based mindset.

DOB said:

The station started in 1987 and played nothing older than 1955, that's 32 years. They are much older today than they were when they started. They are trying to get the demos decent so yeah they should be playing mostly 80s music. I've heard Jennifer Lopez on cbs-fm, 1999.

Funny that they are playing the music that they killed when they switched off WCAU. This is the one radio station that I personally will never be able to enjoy 80s music on because of the history. They killed a very unique and special radio station that just needed to be fine tuned at the time. You can't say that the first 7 years of WOGL were more successful, they weren't. The station hit its stride and had its best years as oldies starting around 94 or so.

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Did the consolidation of oldies on 98.1 and flipping 1210 to sports talk have anything to with it?

ixnay

You said "flipping" and "1210" in the same post?!?!?!

Quick scan of their playlist, today they played:

The Joker (1974)
Crocodile Rock (1973)
Tiny Dancer (1972)
Mercy Mercy Me (1971)
Stuck In The Middle (1973)

Several from 1975-1977, but for the most part, yes, 1980s.

eriedj said:

Quick scan of their playlist, today they played:

The Joker (1974)
Crocodile Rock (1973)
Tiny Dancer (1972)
Mercy Mercy Me (1971)
Stuck In The Middle (1973)

Several from 1975-1977, but for the most part, yes, 1980s.

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"Mercy Mercy Me" is a fantastic song. But it feels oddly out of place on WOGL now. The times they are a-changing (and then a-changing back, and then a-changing again).

CTListener said:

What all this hand-wringing over WOGL's music mix boils down to is, once again, that the '90s are a huge, HUGE problem for the oldies/classic hits format as we've known it since the '80s. The fragmentation of CHR, and the utter contempt that many rhythmic fans have for rock and vice versa, may just render the format unsellable in the not too distant future.

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Either radio will find a way to sell older demos or the format will have to drastically change. People live into their 80s. People in their 70s today are buying the latest media devices and downloading apps, this radio advertising is not cost effective past 54 is antiquated.

I think that there is such a problem with finding a strong mass appeal playlist of 90s titles that I think you need to add songs 2000-2010 also to have a viable playlist that wont burn too quickly. Also, you will need to find a way to play all the best testing titles from Nirvana to J-lo to Biggie. It really is a whole new format at that point.

Btw, when I say personally I'm talking about me, one irrelevant person so that what I say is not applied in a factual way, that I'm choosing to post my personal opinion and thus should be taken for what it is. I grew up and fell in love with radio thanks to WCAU, KZZP, and Z100 and Hot 103. I personally don't like hearing WCAU music on 98.1 WOGL because that was my childhood station which was destroyed when it just needed to be tweaked. Look at how well WEGX did after 98 left the chr format. I believe that a fine tuned WCAU would batted away the latest chr on 1061 like a fly as they had done before, and could have evolved beyond their Teenie image if they just fine tuned it. The station was destroyed before they switched to Oldies 98 when they gave away the chr audience to the new Eagle 106 by playing a bunch of oldies mixed in with the top 40 which started late spring early summer of 87. KZZP of the 1980s is the best chr radio station in the history of radio, but WCAU was ours, and unless you were lucky enough to hear the amazement that was KZZP, you thought WCAU was the best at that time.

I am 65 and my favorite station is WRFF but am I the only exception to the rule ). Funny thing is contrary to the stereotype thoughts of most advertisers, I spend tons of cash and do listen to the advertisements and patronize their sponsors. Does the age limit really hold any water.

@ DOB :

You make a few fine points.

As to one of your points : I worked with (and competed against) a young-pup PD who took an AoR station and turned it into another form of AoR -- @$$hole-oriented rubbish. There wasn't a single female listener to his station, and the male audience itself was somewhere in that critical 14-17 demo.
The station couldn't be 'sold' to any sponsor unless it was a a cover-band bar, a high-risk insurance place, an abortion clinic or the occasional tattoo parlor.
He saw the handwriting on his career wall, and left to PD.
At a Classic Rock station.
In the meantime, as a footnote : His former station went back to Classic Rock and is doing darned well playing the music that he once found disposable.

As to a second point you made, in an earlier post .....
Considering the erosion of younger people, along with their fading enthusiasm for discovering new music or favorites on the terrestrial dial, radio marketing's candle is continuing to burn at both ends. Radio marketing doesn't want the older folks. But it's no longer getting the younger folks nowadays. My humble guess is that radio's prime slice of the demo pie is now somewhere between 32 and 45. Aside from being 'prime', it just might be the only demo they have left.
So the choice is: Skew older?
Radio management lacks the knowledge or the guts to do that.
Skew younger?
To whom? Less and less of those young pups are available.

The Music Industry is to blame, too, of course. The folks in management there in the boardroom, with those $200 attache cases and bottled water, have had their own wing-tips tied together since years before Y2K. If there was, anywhere, a promising Sinatra, or Beatles, or Presley -- heck, I'd gladly settle for a new Fleetwood Mac -- those tone-deaf barnacles in the board room would know what to do with the trend. The trend wouldn't even be recognized by them. Interpretors would be useless.

In fairness, radio (alone) doesn’t need to find a way to sell the older audiences, though certainly it has a place in the conversation. If the ad buyers, who are the ultimate customers after all, aren’t buying there isn’t much way around that. Sure, someone will survive on the mortuary and colon cleanse ads, but that pie isn’t large or lucrative. If the data shows there is money—real money—to be made with older audiences, content that attracts said audiences will follow. And perhaps as generations change, that will happen. Advances in research into consumer behavior may yield findings that challenge the status quo.

Not sure what titles from the 90s have tested, (or not tested) well. Wouldn't these work on WOGL?

Santana - Smooth
Amy Grant - Baby Baby
Celine Dion - My Heart Will Go On
Hootie & The Blowfish - Hold My Hand
Lisa Stansfield - All Around The World
Marc Cohn - Walking In Memphis

Too A/C?

eriedj said:

Not sure what titles from the 90s have tested, (or not tested) well. Wouldn't these work on WOGL?

Santana - Smooth
Amy Grant - Baby Baby
Celine Dion - My Heart Will Go On
Hootie & The Blowfish - Hold My Hand
Lisa Stansfield - All Around The World
Marc Cohn - Walking In Memphis

Too A/C?

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WHCN Hartford played "Walking in Memphis" a couple of hours ago, no problem fitting in with the likes of "Blinded by the Light" and "What I Like About You" on that station's '70s/'80s/very early '90s classic hits playlist. I can't see the Dion or Grant songs as a good fit at all, and the Santana hit is far too recent. Of course, if WOGL is willing to go all the way to the dawn of the new millennium, "Smooth" might work there, but this thread seems to indicate that the station is pulling back from the '90s.

I'm pretty sure they played Smooth not too long ago. It may have been during a theme weekend or something but it shows that they have it on their radar. The Celine song may be a bit schmaltzy for the overall sound of the station. Walking in Memphis seems like a fine fit though. Not sure why the Amy Grant or Lisa Stansfield songs would be problematic considering they're playing plenty of similar stuff that was on CHR at roughly the same time (Taylor Dayne, Whitney Houston, Bon Jovi, etc).

As for the ratings conversation: The over-55 audience is still an audience they're just low on the totem pole as de$irability goes. There are too many other groups who provide so much more bang for the buck, it's worth sharing with all the other stations trying to reach the same demos. If the saturation got to a point where I had a station that absolutely couldn't turn a consistent profit, I might then consider, as a last resort, a format that targets an older audience. But the likelihood of that happening seems low.

And as for WCAU-FM: I was a young teenager when they flipped to Oldies 98 and it was devastating. Ironically, I ended up loving Eagle 106 even more and I was definitely more devastated when they flipped to Smooth Jazz. But I don't remember WCAU doing anything wacky with their playlist toward the end. I thought it was the same hot hits in insanely tight rotation right up to the end. Am I remembering that incorrectly?