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Beautiful Music Format would work now...

S

Stress

New Participating Member
In today's McMusic radio market, would B/EZ work?

Not modern music set to strings and lush orchestrations, but the older music sets of the 90s and before, mixed with appropriate "chill" music from today that isn't too electronic. Include older lounge, swing pop, sunshine pop, easy listening hits of the 60s-80s, some smooth jazz, etc. I've been listening to KLUX, Corpus Christie, online and liking the general music direction. It's fresh in today's market.

The B/EZ stations faded hard. There are only a handful in the nation, kind of like smooth jazz. However, some have strong audience such as KLUX and QZ from Texas. WKTZ went off air a few years back and a wave went up from die hard listeners. I remember the days of the B/EZ stations in the Philly area: WDVR (my fave), WJBR, WMJK etc. and when they changed suddenly to lite pop circa 1981.

Kids these days didn't grow up with the stigma that this is "dad's music" or "old timey" or "elevator dreck". Due to the construction of electronic music, the influence of lounge revival in the mid-90s, and chill-out genres, the youth seem relatively unbiased about B/EZ-type music.

It's almost 2019. What do you say?
 
Stress said:
Not modern music set to strings and lush orchestrations
Click to expand...

But that IS what Beautiful Music was. What you want is soft AC, and it's being done now under the name of "The Breeze."

In the markets where its being done, it's attracting mostly people over 45. Not "kids these days."

KLUX is a non-commercial station.
 
No--now it becomes a game of semantics and definitions. B/EZ 60s-80s where there were lots of Lex DeAzevedo and John Fox and Roy Conniff and George Shearing, etc. Not Cyndi Lauper and Milli Vanillia--Sinatra and Carpenter. Soft AC and the Breeze have a different feel due to lack of orchestrations and reliance on vocal hits to fill out the entire schedule.
 
Stress said:
No--now it becomes a game of semantics and definitions.
Click to expand...

Maybe. There were lots of vocals in the BM of the 60s. You mentioned Ray Conniff and he had singers in his band. In addition original BM used Sinatra and Dean Martin records, and other vocal bands of the era. The only difference I see in what you're suggesting is incorporating smooth jazz. Not sure that would be an improvement.
 
I gather from the initial post, the idea is a blend of easy or relaxing music, not comprising beautiful music but rather softer material that might appeal to today's cross-section of listeners. In other words a format that would reach the same sort of demographic Beautiful Music did when the format hit attractive numbers. I gather it is the appeal would be about like an Album Oriented Rocker in Dallas that was decidedly shewed more toward the more mature rocker back in the mid and late 1970s that seemed to do very well with a 10 pm to Midnight jazz mix. It was sort of the 'rocker's' easy listening then and likely a early version to what would evolve to become smooth jazz. Lots of Michael Franks, John Klemmer, George Benson, Grover Washington and such.
 
I've listened to the B/EZ format all my life. It is what I heard when my relatives and
family listened to the radio. STRESS, the kind of format you speak of is alive and
well here in Prescott, AZ. KAHM, FM 102.1 has evolved over the years. While it still
plays some old instrumentals, there are also vocals, jazz and much newer hits.
The station was sold after the original owner passed. Rather than change formats, the
new owner decided to keep and update the existing B/EZ format. It seems to work
well here and is quite popular but most importantly, they make enough money to
pay all the bills..................
 
Beautiful music at its most successful was with the Schulke and Bonneville formats of the 70s and 80s. An echo of those lives on in Sirius XM's "Escape" channel - an excellent station. Interestingly, a few years ago, the satellite operator discontinued the channel. Fans' outrage was significant enough that Sirius XM soon restored the channel and it continues to this day.

Escape was programmed by the last great Beautiful Music programmer, Marlin Taylor, who was a pioneer in the earliest days of the format, specifically WDVR, mentioned above. He retired at 80 when Escape was taken off and did not return when the channel was restored. Nevertheless, you can still hear the Marlin Taylor touch on Escape today.

Like most of the satellite music channels, Escape is not advertiser-supported. Could the format on FM ever consistently gather a critical mass of "demographically desirable" listeners, even an eclectic variant as the OP describes? Doubtful. KAHM may be a rare exception, but that would be difficult to duplicate in markets of any size.

Personally, I've always enjoyed the format. In fact, my first radio gig in 1970 was on a station which broadcast a homegrown version of B/EZ. Today I don't nurture a hope that some FM station will make a quixotic run at re-inventing the format. I'm quite content to enjoy its commercial-free descendant on Sirius XM.
 
In the 80s, you just weren't going to get younger people interested in instrumental covers of pop hits. That's why the format aged out and died. Some of those BM stations did indeed become soft A/C. There was also Transtar's Format 41, which focused on the musical taste of the generic 41-year-old of the time (who'd have been born in the mid 40s)
 
Nick Seneca said:
Escape was programmed by the last great Beautiful Music programmer, Marlin Taylor, who was a pioneer in the earliest days of the format, specifically WDVR, mentioned above. He retired at 80 when Escape was taken off and did not return when the channel was restored. Nevertheless, you can still hear the Marlin Taylor touch on Escape today.
Click to expand...

As a rule, the "good music" programmers of the late 60's when what was later called "Beautiful Music" were mature. Marlin Taylor appears to be the last surviving one of the well known programmers.

I programmed my first major market Beautiful Music station in 1966, and it rose to be #2 in its market within a year and I followed the rise of the format as a syndicated product at the beginning of the 70's. I later produced a syndicated format that was in some pretty big markets...

... but the tail end of the 80's became a brick wall that we could not get over. Production of new music was nearly at a standstill, current pop music did not lend itself to instrumental covers and the age of listeners was beyond the increasingly specific 25-54 buying range of agencies. Station owners, except for some small operators, did not favor the format as it was mostly not profitable.

Even in the markets where I programmed, where sales were based on listener socio-economic level rather than age, advertisers began to shun the format as being out of date and out of touch. In particular, I had insisted, somewhat like Shulke, that commercials not be loud or strident, but agencies did not want to have to do "calmer" versions and simply did not buy.

Thirty years later, all those issues are many times more prominent. There is no chance for a comeback.
 
Nick Seneca said:
Beautiful music at its most successful was with the Schulke and Bonneville formats of the 70s and 80s. An echo of those lives on in Sirius XM's "Escape" channel - an excellent station. Interestingly, a few years ago, the satellite operator discontinued the channel. Fans' outrage was significant enough that Sirius XM soon restored the channel and it continues to this day.

Escape was programmed by the last great Beautiful Music programmer, Marlin Taylor, who was a pioneer in the earliest days of the format, specifically WDVR, mentioned above. He retired at 80 when Escape was taken off and did not return when the channel was restored. Nevertheless, you can still hear the Marlin Taylor touch on Escape today.

Like most of the satellite music channels, Escape is not advertiser-supported. Could the format on FM ever consistently gather a critical mass of "demographically desirable" listeners, even an eclectic variant as the OP describes? Doubtful. KAHM may be a rare exception, but that would be difficult to duplicate in markets of any size.

Personally, I've always enjoyed the format. In fact, my first radio gig in 1970 was on a station which broadcast a homegrown version of B/EZ. Today I don't nurture a hope that some FM station will make a quixotic run at re-inventing the format. I'm quite content to enjoy its commercial-free descendant on Sirius XM.
Click to expand...

There wasn't much Beautiful Music past the early 80s. Most stations evolved to Easy Listening at that point, which gave them a few more years(and ears).
 
Stress said:
No--now it becomes a game of semantics and definitions. B/EZ 60s-80s where there were lots of Lex DeAzevedo and John Fox and Roy Conniff and George Shearing, etc. Not Cyndi Lauper and Milli Vanillia--Sinatra and Carpenter. Soft AC and the Breeze have a different feel due to lack of orchestrations and reliance on vocal hits to fill out the entire schedule.
Click to expand...

By the 80's, Beautiful Music was not Ray Conniff and Shearing and the others you mention. It was not Sinatra, either. It was far more contemporary with Richard Clayderman, Jean Paul Borelli, Francis Goya, Caravelli and Paul Mauriat and loads of custom music. And, whether the 70's or the 80's, vocals were generally one song out of a four to five song set and were selected for mood and flow more than anything else.
 
A couple of things:

B/EZ does live. But it's gone underground, on the blogosphere and Facebook communities. But appreciated by a rebellious younger national hipster audience that was born around the time this music began disappearing off the radio. Who want dangerous, sinful music that is absolutely everything the Establishment hates in 2018. There are collectors that host shows on KBOO and KFAI playing just whatever comes off the loading dock at the local Goodwill.

It's probably not enough anywhere outside of major senior citizen pockets to be of any value to a full power commercial station. The younger audience is too scattered.

But here's another interesting thing about B/EZ; Much of the various '50s, '60s and early '70s output (if not from big acts and big hits on big labels) exist in a twilight zone of copyright law known as "orphan recordings" (where if current recording ownership of long out of print records/tapes cannot be determined, the recording is considered public domain.) It's part of the new Music Modernization Act, which, through a process and over time, will likely unleash a flood of old B/EZ recordings. Labels themselves will probably clean their vaults of unmarketable old recordings.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/...major-fix-older-recordings-will-belong-public

Here's what they have thus far on Internet Archive. Granted, it's from vinyl, some of it with audible scratches. And the selection is as bona-fide thrift store as it gets

https://archive.org/details/unlockedrecordings

But B/EZ was literally everywhere in the '50s and '60s and it would not surprise me if the great bulk of it outside of the more famous major-label stuff is orphan by now. Or will be.
 
Bongwater said:
But B/EZ was literally everywhere in the '50s and '60s and it would not surprise me if the great bulk of it outside of the more famous major-label stuff is orphan by now. Or will be.
Click to expand...

Orphan music is not likely to get any radio airplay because it's not officially licensed any more. That puts it into a strange legal category.

Only licensed music can receive airplay.
 
TheBigA said:
Orphan music is not likely to get any radio airplay because it's not officially licensed any more. That puts it into a strange legal category.

Only licensed music can receive airplay.
Click to expand...

I wasn't expecting radio to pick up on that, just any EZ fans.
 
Bongwater said:
But here's another interesting thing about B/EZ; Much of the various '50s, '60s and early '70s output (if not from big acts and big hits on big labels) exist in a twilight zone of copyright law known as "orphan recordings" (where if current recording ownership of long out of print records/tapes cannot be determined, the recording is considered public domain.) It's part of the new Music Modernization Act, which, through a process and over time, will likely unleash a flood of old B/EZ recordings. Labels themselves will probably clean their vaults of unmarketable old recordings.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/...major-fix-older-recordings-will-belong-public

Here's what they have thus far on Internet Archive. Granted, it's from vinyl, some of it with audible scratches. And the selection is as bona-fide thrift store as it gets

https://archive.org/details/unlockedrecordings
Click to expand...

I wouldn't be surprised if some of those orphan recordings on the Internet Archive were among those records David Letterman played in his occasional "Dave's Record Collection" segment of unusual recordings (during both his NBC and CBS days).
 
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