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Looking for an AOR station

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placebo1969

Okay, this is my first topic outside of the Seattle-Tacoma board.

My username is a clue to my age. Around 1980, I started listening to KISW and occasionally KZOK. By the mid '80s The X burst onto the scene. For years, if music wasn't played on those stations, I didn't hear it (unless watching MTV).

What I enjoyed were the DJs who seemed to actually listen to the music they were playing and of course the music itself. You could hear a Beatles song right next to Judas Priest. There was breadth and depth in what was played. Old, new, fast, slow, bluesy, and on and on. While I still listen to KISW, it's a shell of its former glory in my opinion. Same with KZOK.

Are there any stations that have true AOR vibe out there? I do listen to WDHA and WMMR online. They seem to a little more variety than KISW.
 
placebo1969 said:
Are there any stations that have true AOR vibe out there? I do listen to WDHA and WMMR online. They seem to a little more variety than KISW.
Click to expand...
The real trouble with that concept is that the format has splintered so much since those days, and commercial stations have researched their way into deciding that Beatles fans don't like Judas Priest - and vice-versa. All of this has made that traditional AOR sound not viable commercially, even though us radio nerds on radiodiscussions.com would love to hear that big variety.

I'm betting what you want exists somewhere on a listener-supported station. Maybe not as a full-on format, but between a few of them I bet you find what you need. That creative human choosing music that doesn't necessarily fit a format, right? Try this: Go to

𝙎𝙋𝙄𝙉𝙄𝙏𝙍𝙊𝙉

Trusted by over 200 non-commercial stations, Spinitron supports playlist logging, reporting, web publishing, automation, push and much more.
spinitron.com spinitron.com

and check out the recent spins. Find something that suits your fancy and listen to that station for a while. Then maybe go back and do it again with a different station. Or a different show on the same station. Most of those stations are programmed by volunteers with a real passion for music & radio. If you happen to stumble across something you really like you might consider becoming a member of that station & support their ongoing efforts.

Dave B.
 
DaveBayArea said:
The real trouble with that concept is that the format has splintered so much since those days, and commercial stations have researched their way into deciding that Beatles fans don't like Judas Priest - and vice-versa.
Click to expand...
Keep in mind that music research does not test artists; it tests songs. So people are asked to score how much they like each song on its own, not by artist and not compared with other songs and artists. The idea is to play songs that are not negative to any significant portion of the audience.
DaveBayArea said:
All of this has made that traditional AOR sound not viable commercially, even though us radio nerds on radiodiscussions.com would love to hear that big variety.
Click to expand...
And to the average listener, "variety" does not mean "lots of songs". It means "only the songs I like, one after another".
DaveBayArea said:
I'm betting what you want exists somewhere on a listener-supported station.
Click to expand...
Very correct. There are people who want lots of different songs and many "new discoveries" and deep tracks. It's just that there are not enough of them to make a commercial station successful because one person's perfect blend of that type is likely not the next person's list of songs.
 
placebo1969 said:
Thanks for the replies. I know AOR like the ‘80s and ‘90s will never come back but trying to find the next best thing.
Click to expand...
"Everything that was ever recorded since the beginning of time" wasn't the AOR format in the 80s and 9-s either. It was the top tracks from a given album. If you want a heavy emphasis on new material, I'm not sure what to tell you. The closest format is Adult Album Alternative.

You might try WXPN in Philadelphia.
 
placebo1969 said:
Are there any stations that have true AOR vibe out there? I do listen to WDHA and WMMR online. They seem to a little more variety than KISW.
Click to expand...

KISW is primarily a talk station that plays music. Just like WMMS in Cleveland. A lot of these heritage rock stations have had to deal with the splintering of the music and the audience. People don't listen to radio the way they did in the 70s and 80s. Music isn't the attraction it once was. In addition, music isn't made the same way. At one time, artists made albums. That's the first letter in AOR. Album Oriented Rock. That doesn't exist anymore. Artists make music and post it on the internet. They don't sell albums, except to collectors. The money in recorded music is made by licensing, not physical product. So every aspect of what led to AOR is now gone.
 
placebo1969 said:
Are there any stations that have true AOR vibe out there? I do listen to WDHA and WMMR online. They seem to a little more variety than KISW.
Click to expand...

I'm sure a handful still exist, but they're probably in smaller markets, either in terms of number of stations or market size. As has already been mentioned, the rock format really changed in the late-80's/early-90's, and most of your heritage AOR's got squeezed out of the market by the end of the 90's. A handful of them, like KISW, changed with the times and went either active or classic, but the damage to your average AOR wasn't immediate. Most of them didn't seem to see a need to find a lane and stick to it because the format still worked for a few years after the new, more focused competitors arrived. Gradual attrition and sampling of the new competitors became more and more until that audience stopped listening to the heritage stations.

Good chance KISW would be gone by now, too, had KXRX not been sold to someone who didn't want to do the format in the mid-90's. A handful of others, like KSHE in St. Louis, bought their competitors, changed their formats, and basically assumed their competitors' formats while pretending they were what they always were. The vast majority of big AOR's from the 80's and early 90's, however, have been doing completely different formats for the last 20+ years and bear no trace whatsoever to the stations they once were.

Not sure if you'd say they bear a solid resemblance to the old AOR, but KZRR 94.1 in Albuquerque and KMOD 97.5 in Tulsa are a few heritage rockers that are still around. KZRR seems to me to still be a classic rock/new rock style station, but I don't regularly listen to it. KMOD seems more active than AOR to me these days, but the playlist has more older rock than I had expected. The Keg in Northwest Arkansas seems pretty similar to what it used to be, though it's been on 98.3 for a number of years instead of its original home at 92.1 and has been through Cumulus ownership for roughly the last two decades. Been a minute since I've listened to that one, too. I've listened to KQRC out of Kansas City a few times lately, and it doesn't seem like the edgy active rock station it was 20 and 30 years ago. Last few times I've listened, it seems like it hasn't figured out that the second Bush administration has ended. It reminds me a lot more of the heritage AOR it chased out of the format in 1997 than the station that took it down.
 
Thanks for the additional replies. I'll take a lot.

Back to my original post, I guess I know AOR is dead. Maybe I should have asked for stations that play a little larger library. New and classic rock is fine.

A guy can hope, can't he? In the meantime, I guess I need to reconfigure my Apple Music algorithm.

Anyone got some good KISW and KXRX air checks from the golden era? ;)
 
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