Excellent chronology, Jabba, but CHR was making a roaring comeback in the early '80's, led by the Hot Hits format and the launch of MTV.
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April Ratings
- Thread starter TheBigA
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1980 was dismal, 1981 not much better other than "Jessie's Girl" and maybe a couple of other songs. MTV launched in the summer of 1981 and began to influence radio significantly in 1982.
Back in 1974 going back to town from the Dallas-Fort Worth Airport there was a billboard IIRC “while you were out of town, we were Kissing your wife: Kiss FM”. *
*It’s been over 40 years and I am not sure which frequency was Kiss back then. I wasn’t married so I didn't worry.
1981 was a big year for AOR, and 96 Rock took a lot of listenership from Z-93 at the time. Z-93 never returned to its market prominence even once the music came back. Power 99 was pretty much the last nail in Z-93's coffin.
That time period from the first couple months of 1980 until mid-late 1982 is well-known as a weak time for CHR. The Hot 100 was dominated by country crossovers, R&B crossovers, AC, and even some chartable AOR during that time. Also it seems like novelty songs got more chart action during that time (Bob & Doug McKenzie, "Pac-Man Fever", and numerous medleys spawned by Stars on 45).
While that time period holds a lot of gems for "lost hits" geeks, there's a reason Classic/Variety/Adult Hits stations don't dig deep in that time period. Charlene anyone? Even a big hit from the time period like "Physical" by ONJ gets a little bit of cringe these days.
Compare the charts from the first half of 1982 with the second half. The whole "sound" is totally different. When MTV launched, it seemed like MTV was in one lane and mainstream CHR was in another. They didn't start to merge until the second half of the year.
My comment referred to the poster mentioning "the infamous CHR doldrums of the early eighties," and 1982 was the early '80's. And really, 2 Hot Hits stations, WTIC-FM, which launched in 1977, and WCAU-FM, which kicked off in September, 1981, were already getting big numbers by the end of 1981.
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And then there were the always amusing attempts at 96Rock in the early 80's to see if their audience would let go of Skynyrd and try out The Human League and A Flock of Seagulls. The audience didn't just say no...they said Hell No.
When listening to the randomized classic AT40’s each weekend (not played on Atlanta radio) there is a huge noticeable musical difference between the countdowns in the early 80s versus the ones from the mid-80s. The songs from the early 80s sounded like most of the Hot 100 chart should have been on the AC chart. The songs on the mid-80s charts had so much more energy and were faster moving. I really didn’t start to listening to CHR until 1984 but I have stuck with it since. The other weak time for CHR would have been the early 90s when CHR stations couldn’t figure out if they were going to play rap or not. Hence giving birth to Country’s golden era, alternative radio, and the explosion of the Hot AC format.
If you hear the Classic AT40 shows* from the late, late 70s until spring of 1980, there's a lot of energy. Then it falls off considerably for about 2 years. The same thing happened from about mid-1990 to mid-1992, which opened a big door for the 1990s country golden era and the birth of alternative as a, well, alternative to traditional AOR (which had its own issues at the time, versus 1981 which was a strong year for AOR).
Sean Ross has written extensively about the early-80s Top 40 doldrums:
*There's a Classic AT40 channel on iHeartRadio. FWIW, my favorite shows are the ones from 1977-1980.
MTV wasn't in anywhere near every market in 1982, and they were in smaller ones, that already had cable, first. The early MTV VJs talk about not being able to see the channel they were working for in New York
The biggest cable operator in Atlanta (Prime Cable) balked at MTV's carriage fees, and instead went with a homegrown alternative (the Atlanta Video Music Channel, or VMC) for 2-3 years until the pressure to carry MTV got too big.
When Prime Cable picked up MTV, the VMC went over to Channel 69, which had just dumped OTA scrambled pay-TV movies.
I want my, I want my, I want my ... grandaddy of MTV
Thirty years ago today MTV debuted on those few cable TV systems that had signed up for what they thought was largely an untested idea: wall to wall video music clips played by "veejays" in a sort of "Top 40 radio on TV" format. The concept quickly caught on and more and more cable systems started…
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