I know KRTH does 90's at nine during the week but when are they going to increase the 90's to once or twice an hour? They have 90's here and there but not consistent. KOLA has the same format but spins 2 or 3 90's an hour. 5 years ago KOLA introduced 90's once an hour. Probably time for KRTH to do the same. Just make certain they test well over the 70 percent ratio on auditorium testing.
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K-earth and those 90's. When are they coming more regularly?
- Thread starter 34james
- Start date
It's not necessary for members of a cluster to "own" songs exclusively. It's what else you play that defines the audience.
The first cluster I worked at (with 5 stations), back in 1963, shared over half the titles on its two Top 40 variants and both were highly rated.
Think of the current titles KROQ plays. Would a KRTH listener like them a lot? But listeners to both KRTH and KROQ might both like some of the 90's stuff. And the KROQ listeners would like not like the 80's songs on KRTH!
It sounds like you want KROQ to aim younger, and it appears the station management want the audience to be a little older. By that I mean people in their 40s. Part of it may be there is more radio loyalty in older listeners. It could be older listeners identify more with the morning show. In any case, if they're going to aim younger, the time to do it is after 7PM.
Well I know this all subjective but I gotta say the 90’s were not a great decade for pop music. Sure the rock alternative scene was very cool with the Seattle scene. That said, very few pop hits in this decade or atleast hits that get played today though I would challege those to offer some titles in this category
Fogeys like me used to say this when "Oldies" radio started getting heavily into the 70s. And the 80s? Don't get me started.
Actually, if I look at my music library, a whole lot of it is from the 80s, despite my advanced age. All decades have great music, and a lot of stiffs. And it's probably not accurate to talk strictly in decades. For example, I look at what we used to consider "60s" rock and pop, and really it was mostly music from the British Invasion (1964) through 1973, or so.If past experience is any guide, it seems like the "decades" do best on the radio when they are at around 30 years out....so maybe that would be 2020 - 22 for 90s music? I recall that the first all 70s station here in the Bay Area (K-Big) did not do well when it premiered in the early 90s, and KFRC killed it in the ratings with their 60s-70s playlist. So K-Big added in a lot of 60s, ane even some early 80s, though the 70s stayed the main focus. But still, they ultimately flipped to another format by 1997. Then, by about 2004, KFRC had made the switch to primarily 70s "Classic Hits." 80s music didn't get big in ratings here until a couple of years ago...in fact, the station is called "iHeart 80s."
So maybe there is something about a 28 - 30 year spread, and 90s just needs a couple more years to percolate.
Obviously...this is silly speculation on my part.
I'll preface this by saying I'm in my upper 40s...
But I've always loved 80s pop/rock, even the rhythmic stuff. When the first all 80s formats started popping up around 2000, I couldn't get enough.
As pop started to crater in 1990 (in other words, when CHR either had to pick between going soft or going rhythmic) CHR kind of lost me. Yes, I liked some of the funky stuff, but there was a lot of terrible music out there. My favorite station growing up flipped to playing Fleetwood Mac and America. Its competition played a bunch of forgettable songs because they didn't want to be known as the "rap" station (primarily because the CHR in town that was very rhythmic had terrible billing.) I drifted to alternative for awhile; it was sonically closest to what I liked about 80s music and they played new wave for gold.
Then alternative kind of lost me as the 90s moved on. Nirvana and Pearl Jam were iconic. Papa Roach? Eh, I'll pass. The harder alternative got the less I listened to it. I've never fully come back to alternative radio.
The thing with the 90s is as more radio stations popped up as they were rim-shotted into the cities, you ended up with a bunch of stations chasing narrow niches and no real pop chart. There were two CHR charts. Two AC charts. Two rock charts.
The 90s mean so many different things to different people. Where do you find consensus, especially in years where mainstream CHR was effectively dead? I can turn on the 90s channel on XM now and not recognize songs that were big chart hits while I was in college, simply because the stations I listened to during those years were following a different chart. I know every song on the 80s channel because, even though every city had local hits, there was for the most of the decade only one Hot 100.
I suspect that a lot of the music that became modern AC will endure now that it's had a chance to rest a little. I can listen to Alanis again without cringing; the Lyft driver we had the other night punched out of her immediately because he's still burned on Hand In My Pocket. I'm intrigued by the new Pop Rocks channel on XM and find a lot of that stuff sounds pretty good up against Imagine Dragons. But radio leaned so hard on those titles for so long that they need a little rest before they sound fresh again.
Not how I remember it, at least not here in the Bay Area. In the early 80s, we had an AM/FM Oldies combo (KSFO/KYA-FM). The AM ran 50s, while the FM ran 60s, so fifties was still getting airplay in the 80s. Then KFRC was 60s-early 70s up into the early 2000s, when it flipped to primarily 70s Classic Hits. If I recall correctly, K-Earth in LA was the same...it was sister stations with KFRC, so the playlists were similar.
80s were tried on a couple of stations in the early 00s, but didn't really catch on until recently when iHeart flipped "The Bay's 103.7" from primarily 70s with a few 80s hits - to all 80s as "iHeart 80s@ 103.7" That was two years ago, at most...no earlier than 2015.
It seems like that it takes two decades for a period to become fashionable, and then three for it to arrive on oldies stations. In the 2000s, the 80s become hip again with bands like the Killers, but didn't hit oldies stations until this decade. There's both iHeart 80s and KBAY in the South Bay, which is classic hits, but majority 80s with the occasional 70s and 90s thrown in.
I also wonder what will happen when it's time for the 90s to cycle in to oldies formats. The 80s work well because different genres work well together, and were very pop-oriented. A new wave band like Duran Duran, a pop-metal band like Def Leppard, and an R&B/hip hop act like Bobby Brown all go well together, because those genres were pop friendly. There was some pop oriented music in the 90s, but perhaps not as much, and alternative and hip-hop were not as pop friendly, at least not until the late 90s. I wonder if it will splinter more, the Bay Area has two stations that play a lot of alternative 90s, and then a classic hip hop which is 90s focused.
Personally, if a 90s or classic hits stations play a lot of Hootie, for example, I might tune out.
My age and experience are very similar to yours. I never wanted to be the old guy telling anyone who would listen how the music I grew up with is so much better than today's, I went to school in the snow everyday and it was uphill both ways, etc. I like new music and I like both rock pop and some alternative, going back to the 40's to the 90s. There is no doubt in my mind the 30 best years for music was 1960-1989.
But as we turned into the 90's and grunge started taking over on the rock side and gangsta rap and pop stars with auto tuned voices and really bad songwriting came into vogue, I started gravitating to the different sources of music that became available then that were not available in the previous generations such as satellite, internet, etc. that provided the music I liked. We have always had disposable pop music, but in the 60s 70s and 80s it was kinda fun - a lot of one-hit wonders were novelties in their own way. But now when I listen to the CHRs in town, all the songs, whether by established artists or one-hit wonders sound more or less the same. Almost all rhythmic, very little intelligent song writing or true musicianship. Stevie Wonder and Earth Wind and Fire couldn't get played on today's hit radio. It is depressing because I would really like to be up on the current music scene, but every time I try, I end up just getting frustrated and going back to what is familiar. They have done a lot of studies on musical taste and they invariably find that most people's musical taste are nearly fully developed in their teen years and few move on substantially from those tastes. I guess I am (reluctantly) in that group.
Separate topic rant: (gotta get this off my chest, but don't want to make a full post out of it) - Starship's "We Built This City". This is one of the worst pop songs ever; very cringeworthy - I think so (even though I love 70s era Jefferson Starship and even some of their later 80s stuff); public surveys show that a lot of other people think so, and yet nearly every 80s formatted station I listen to plays it a lot including XM's 80s on 8. Who is listening to it? Who are the PDs playing it? I don't understand. Everyone is said to hate "You Light Up My Life" which was a 10 week #1 that gets virtually no airplay on 70s channels. I would think "We Built this City" would be treated the same. I don't get it.
I admit it. I love "We Built This City" and just about all the other fun pop of the mid-'80s. It was a period of dumb but catchy, feel-good music on the radio and on TV and I liked it almost as much as the fun music of the late '60s. If you block the fond memories of the folk/psychedelic Airplane and just take "We Built" for what it is, you might not find it as repugnant. I do understand the distaste for "You Light," although I found that an OK ballad, not half as bad as, say, "Feelings" or "Honey."
The only reason to listen to that song is to hear Les Garland talk about looking out over the Golden Gate bridge on a sunny Saturday. The city that rocks...that NEVER sleeps. YIKES! I'm getting goose bumps just thinking about how good KFRC sounded!
The story goes that Drake did not want KFRC to play "hippie" music and had considerable "discussion" with Tom Rounds. Rounds prevailed, but soon went off to do concerts after the success of Fantasy Fair (along with his Fair organizer and co-producer, the KFRC promo director, Mel Lawrence, who went on to put Woodstock together).
KFRC sounded best when sticking to its Top 40 roots. There were a number of PD's who wandered off course by playing album cuts, but they eventually were shown the door due to sagging ratings. Drake was right..and so was his understudy, Paul Drew.
And now, Ladies & Gentlemen, we return to those 90's, and why they keep coming up, on Kay Earth One Oh One!
And now, Ladies & Gentlemen, we return to those 90's, and why they keep coming up, on Kay Earth One Oh One!
Totally agree.
Here is probably the best radio station commercial ever done (IMO):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbovY8rQKRQ
That Debby Boone smash is not as bad as people make it sound. Thankfully, I was only ten that year and didn't get caught up in the bash and hate in 1977 / 1978. But yet it sold and stayed on top until the Bee Gees knocked it out. Back then, it really was all about Saturday Night Fever. I've heard that song numerous times, even on KRTH, back when any song was game in the 1980's. It does not bother me and I certainly don't "hate" it. But what cringes me more is that silly traffic reporter near the end of that Starship song. It's annoying. How THAT song became #1 in 1985 is a head scratcher. "Sara" is far more appealing. Frankly, that 10 weeker from 1977 should air more.
That is not what core listeners to the classic hits format tell us in research. The song is hated. Period.
The peak and duration of a song on a chart that is full of defects as a programming tool is irrelevant. What matters, and the only thing that matters, is the answer to the question, "How much would you like to hear that song on the radio today?"
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