As the Earth Turns.

DavidEduardo said:

... KRTH, that is.

The last check of KRTH BDS data shows no songs remaining in the on-air library from the 1960s.

The oldest song is "Maybe I'm Amazed" by McCartney, from 1970. And from there, the library jumps to 1972 (3 titles), 1973 (2 titles), 1974 (4 titles), 1975 (4 titles), 1976 (7 titles) 1977 (9 titles), and 1978 (9 titles). It isn't until 1979 that there are ten or more titles from any given year ... and even then, just barely, with 11.

Even 1980 only has 12, before going to 20 or more per year beginning in 1981. KRTH has also dumped a lot of post-1990 titles, so the era map is really firmly in the 80's.

KRTH's 5.3 in 25-54 is the highest target demo share during the last 13 books. It also makes them #2 in that demo, behind only KBIG.

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Why would they drop most 90's that they had incorporated earlier this year and last year? Too soon to air that many nineties? Not accepted as classics yet by their audiences? It's good that they are playing the 80's (even if it's just a few needles in the haystack regarding that decade), but I believe it's too soon to dump that many mid-late 70's. How many total 80's titles do they air regularly?

I only ever hear the live version of Maybe I'm Amazed from 1977. Is that the version they are actually playing?

oldies76 said:

Why would they drop most 90's that they had incorporated earlier this year and last year?

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Perhaps it conflicts with one of their co-owned stations in the market.

eriedj said:

I only ever hear the live version of Maybe I'm Amazed from 1977. Is that the version they are actually playing?

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That was the hit version, reaching Top 10 in 1977.

The 60s are so 1928. I'm a late 70s HS graduate and no, I probably wouldn't have listened to a lot of 50 year old music. Approaching the 60 year mark, I've heard enough of the big 60s songs already. And the 70s sucked the first time! Bring on the 80s.

joebtsflk1 said:

The 60s are so 1928. I'm a late 70s HS graduate and no, I probably wouldn't have listened to a lot of 50 year old music. Approaching the 60 year mark, I've heard enough of the big 60s songs already. And the 70s sucked the first time! Bring on the 80s.

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But oldies radio stations in 1978 were not playing 50 year old music from the 20's either. Today some are, because 50-60 year old rock and roll songs have stood the test of time and sound much better than a scratchy inferior recording from a cylinder or a 78 of the time. Different times, different music, different quality.

DavidEduardo said:

There is really no overlap of significance, unless you look at the pop sounding alternative of the early 90's. But KROQ has its own problems, being beaten in ratings and billings by KYSR.

In any case, KRTH is the Entercom market leader, and the attitude has to be the same as we jokingly assume in regards to where the 800 lb. gorilla sits.

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A couple of thoughts...

1. The core audience for classic hits today seems to be the same folks that the Kabrich "Point" stations went after circa 2001; they're just at the upper end of 25-54 now. The songs that did best with that group were centered in the mid-80s, with spill into the 70s and early 90s. So it's not surprising to see the same people today still happy with that music.

2. With Jack in the cluster, it makes sense for Jack to take over where KRTH leaves off and titles to move to KRTH as the audience grows older. After all, the target remains the same, it's the songs that reach the target that change over time. I would suspect that they're less concerned about cutting off KROQ's oxygen as they are with giving KCBS room to play.

DavidEduardo said:

The "oldies stations" in the 50's, 60's and into the 70's were MOR stations. They played standards and only a few more current songs, culled from the pop charts but which sounded like the prior era had spawned them.

MOR, an acronym for Middle of the Road, was not Adult Contemporary. It was a format for adults, and generally included a good helping of talk and information. The music was intended to be familiar favorites, with just enough more recent material so as not be seem stale.

Those MOR stations were AM. Most of the music, while being from the pre-vinyl era, had been mastered on fairly high fidelity disks, called Electrical Transcriptions or ETs. It was relatively easy to reissue the best of the 30 to 40 years past on vinyl just by using the original masters. If you want to find such things today, you don't have to look very hard to find very clean sounding remasters of In the Mood or Moonlight Serenade or Begin the Beguine or Deep Purple. And those songs are about 80 years old now, and were approaching 40 years old back in the 70's.

Those oldies stood the test of time just as well as songs of the 60's or 70's. But as those who were passionate about them moved into their 60's (in an era when life expectancy was shorter), they dropped off the radio. Just as the 50's and 60's songs, and now the 70's, get dropped today.

As evidence of their appeal, the syndicate Music of your Life from Al Ham got huge numbers on many, many stations right from the beginning in 1978; the songs sounded good and most were 30 to 40 years old (although some more recent late 50's and early 60's songs were there, too). Those songs stood the test of time, and only faded away as the audience aged too much for stations to sell or the listeners went to live in Batesville.

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David:

I know MOR wasn't your thing (either as a listener or a programmer), so I'd like to chime in with a gentle correction:

MOR stations of the 1950s, 60s and 70s (the WNEWs, KMPCs, KFIs, KGILs and KSFOs of the world) played very little non-current music...usually one, maybe two songs per hour. Twenty years of collecting airchecks has borne that out. Of course, when you're only playing six records an hour, two is a third of your content. But 66 percent current and 33 percent gold is a fairly low gold balance by today's standards. There was remarkably little living in the past on these stations, which were aimed at adults in their 30s and 40s at that time.

The schizm in that format came in the early 70s as Sinatra retired (briefly), many of the mainstays of that generation lost their recording contracts due to poor sales and the ones that survived (Andy Williams, Johnny Mathis) largely abandoned recording original music and filled albums with cover songs of Top 40 hits that stations could just as easily play the original of. Why not just play the Bee Gees "How Do You Mend A Broken Heart" instead of Andy's cover? Increasingly, the stations simply played the hits and the oldies of the rock and roll era (KMPC played "Chantilly Lace" by the Big Bopper in 1973), and became first-generation Adult Contemporary (as opposed to the 80s "Continuous Soft Hits" AC).

AC played all but the hardest of the Top 40 (another example from 1973---KMPC played Curtis Mayfield's "Freddie's Dead"), and as the 70s wore on, alienated the upper part of the demo that had been with the stations since the MOR days. The first beneficiaries were the FM beautiful music stations, and then Al Ham cleaned up much of the remainder with "Music of Your Life". In a way, that was a foreshadowing of what we've seen since with oldies, classic hits and classic rock---an audience that spent most of its life listening to current music aging to 50 or so and embracing an all-gold format.

oldies76 said:

But oldies radio stations in 1978 were not playing 50 year old music from the 20's either. Today some are, because 50-60 year old rock and roll songs have stood the test of time and sound much better than a scratchy inferior recording from a cylinder or a 78 of the time. Different times, different music, different quality.

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Fewer and fewer are, Oldies. Sound quality is irrelevant if the listener doesn't relate to the music and/or the times in which it was produced. Again, a quick time check: Center of the 25-54 demo is 39.5 years old. That person graduated high school in 1996 and college in 2000. Elvis and the Beatles are historical curiosities...if they're curious. KRTH is moving in the right direction---aiming a skosh higher than the center of the target, and winning.

michael hagerty said:

Fewer and fewer are, Oldies. Sound quality is irrelevant if the listener doesn't relate to the music and/or the times in which it was produced. Again, a quick time check: Center of the 25-54 demo is 39.5 years old. That person graduated high school in 1996 and college in 2000. Elvis and the Beatles are historical curiosities...if they're curious. KRTH is moving in the right direction---aiming a skosh higher than the center of the target, and winning.

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When you phrase it that way, even 1980s music sounds old. LOL.

I am confused. Playing mostly 80's and no 90's music seems to targeting the very high end of the 25-54 demo, not the middle of it. I think of the age between 12-25 as the time people hunger for new music the most. I was born in 1959 so 1971-1984 was my peak new music era. Indeed, that is my favorite "oldies" music to listen to. By that math, playing 1976-1989 music would attract a lot of 54 year olds...barely in the 25-54 demo.

AM FM listener said:

I am confused. Playing mostly 80's and no 90's music seems to targeting the very high end of the 25-54 demo, not the middle of it. I think of the age between 12-25 as the time people hunger for new music the most. I was born in 1959 so 1971-1984 was my peak new music era. Indeed, that is my favorite "oldies" music to listen to. By that math, playing 1976-1989 music would attract a lot of 54 year olds...barely in the 25-54 demo.

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Maybe stations are afraid to move the target down for fear of adding polarizing grunge and hip-hop to the playlist and driving off much of that upper half of the demo while not really attracting the lower half, who generally like either rock or rap, but not both.

CTListener said:

Maybe stations are afraid to move the target down for fear of adding polarizing grunge and hip-hop to the playlist and driving off much of that upper half of the demo while not really attracting the lower half, who generally like either rock or rap, but not both.

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Interesting point, CTL. CHR really fragmented in the 90's. This will present quite a challenge to Classic Hits stations going forward. Shall we lean rock or rhythmic with 90's hits?

DavidEduardo said:

The "oldies stations" in the 50's, 60's and into the 70's were MOR stations. They played standards and only a few more current songs, culled from the pop charts but which sounded like the prior era had spawned them.

MOR, an acronym for Middle of the Road, was not Adult Contemporary. It was a format for adults, and generally included a good helping of talk and information. The music was intended to be familiar favorites, with just enough more recent material so as not be seem stale.

Those MOR stations were AM. Most of the music, while being from the pre-vinyl era, had been mastered on fairly high fidelity disks, called Electrical Transcriptions or ETs. It was relatively easy to reissue the best of the 30 to 40 years past on vinyl just by using the original masters. If you want to find such things today, you don't have to look very hard to find very clean sounding remasters of In the Mood or Moonlight Serenade or Begin the Beguine or Deep Purple. And those songs are about 80 years old now, and were approaching 40 years old back in the 70's.

Those oldies stood the test of time just as well as songs of the 60's or 70's. But as those who were passionate about them moved into their 60's (in an era when life expectancy was shorter), they dropped off the radio. Just as the 50's and 60's songs, and now the 70's, get dropped today.

As evidence of their appeal, the syndicate Music of your Life from Al Ham got huge numbers on many, many stations right from the beginning in 1978; the songs sounded good and most were 30 to 40 years old (although some more recent late 50's and early 60's songs were there, too). Those songs stood the test of time, and only faded away as the audience aged too much for stations to sell or the listeners went to live in Batesville.

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Thanks for this information. I totally forgot about the MOR stations back then. I can only imagine the few that really exist today and what they are actually playing today. There is a station nearby "Legends 810" KLVZ out of Brighton, Co (near Denver) that plays pop classics and I have heard an early 50's tune or even a late 40's tune once in a while, but mainly they are all over the place.

DavidEduardo said:

If you look at 25-54, it's really not a single demographic... it is two generations wide. So most stations target somewhere along the spectrum, such as 25-44 or 35-54. Or they target even more specifically, such as the CHR target of 18-44 Women.

If you look at the ten or twelve highest billing stations in the US, you have high-enders like WTOP, KFI, WINS, WBBM and WSB. There mid-range ones like KBIG, mid-to-high ones like KOST and WLTW and young leaners like KIIS and WHTZ.

While there are some formats that really cover the full spectrum, such as sports (but it is men only) or country (in certain markets) most stations aim at one part of the "sales demo". Agencies, who are, collectively, the reason we do ratings, know that they have to buy within the demos of their clients. And if they want to cover the whole spread of 25-54, they need to buy multiple stations to reach all groups including age, gender, ethnicity and even lifestyle.

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Ah, that makes sense, thank you, David. Even for the "high-enders" though, it seems to me that Classic Hits stations, like KRTH, are going to have to add more 90's songs pretty soon. That will be a challenge though, due to the fragmention issues that began then, as CT Listener mentioned earlier.