DJs Have No Role in Deciding What Gets Played on Classic Rock Stations

Actually, that's not quite accurate. Corporations, however, might have destroyed something some people used to love.

Of course they do! Most radio stations are a for-profit business that operate based on ratings and ad revenue. They do and play whatever will get them the highest ratings, which in turn will help them generate the highest ad revenue. If most of their listening audiences wanted deep tracks and obscure album cuts, and that's what would help them generate high ratings, they would do it.

 

I worked at a place where they didn't want to pay SESAC. In that format the only affected artist was Gordon Lightfoot so he was verboten.

 

"Corporations" usually get a bad rap--often for good and quite understandable reasons. But corporations are usually good at getting product to the masses at reasonable price. Or at least that's the way it used to work.
In theory, anyway.

 

The only classic rock station worth listening to, in my opinion.

 

Interesting. What I heard from a friend was a very long time ago, I'm sure your info is more up to date and accurate Ron.
Take care my friend.

 

Funny you mentioned this, I was literally just thinking about their A-Z events as I was reading the posts prior to yours. They used to do that once a year, which was quite entertaining.
These days expect "Cold As Ice" and "Jet Airliner" to be played daily. For this reason, I cannot listen to this station at all.

Locally, the only broadcast radio I listen to for music is Ann Delisi on WDET (NPR).

 

I was in radio from 1987 to 2002. Not only did all 5 stations I worked for have playlists generated by the Music Director or PD, but deviating from the playlist was usually grounds for dismissal.
When your St. Louis area Ford dealer, that spends thousands of dollars on commercial spots tunes in, you better not have a rebellious 22 year old fresh out of college with a Mass Comm degree playing a deep cut, or you are in some serious s**t.

 

Could be different in Canada. We don't have rules about playing artists from the U.S. like you have there (playing a certain % of Canadian artists), so it's possible the licensing rules are different, too.

 

The bottom line is that repetition is good and nobody ever gets sick of anything. You want to hear this small handfull of songs until you know every note in your sleep, and then you want to hear them for three more decades.

 

Ha! That reminds me of the first top 40 station I worked at in the mid-'90s. We had a car dealership advertiser insist that we play country music in our rotation--something most top 40 stations had steered clear of after the early '80s. The station owner agreed (because we needed the revenue) and so right along with Ace of Base, Coolio, and Counting Crows, we were spinning Tim McGraw, Joe Diffie, and John Michael Montgomery. These were not crossover pop hits. They were songs that probably no other top 40 station in the US was spinning.

 

I guess that's what the general listening audience wants, yes. Of course, those people don't likely hear the repetition if they are only listening for 30 to 60 minutes a day. Unless the MD messed up and programmed the same songs in the exact same hour day after day, the average listener might only catch "Hotel California" once a month, maybe less.

 

I hope you're right, but I swear I hear the damn thing once a month while actively trying not to.

 

I think the stations should follow a formula where they limit one Stairway/Hotel California type song an hour and the rest is them digging deeper. "Classic Rock" here is now going all the way up to the early 2000s... these stations are playing with 35-40 years worth of music to pick from, and yet they only stick to the same 100 or so songs? Come on... there's a whole world of music out there being ignored just because Joe Sixpack can't live without hearing Sweet Home Alabama every three hours? And they wonder why people are sick to death of so many songs....

 

Ned Grossberg would be pleased.

 

I recall about 15 years ago when there was something called "Jack" radio. It was a somewhat free-form terrestrial radio format that jumped around and played a mixture of musical genres, and sounded promising for a generation that knew what top 40 radio and FM radio used to be like before format segregation of rock, urban, and jazz happened in the mid-70s. I think where it failed is that they also jumped around eras. Having Def Leppard's "Photograph" next to "Hurts So Good" by Millie Jackson worked out too well.

 

I've looked at Mediabase data several times in the past couple years, and I specifically looked at classic rock stations in major markets. From memory, I recall the data showing several stations playing somewhere in the neighborhood of 400-500 different songs in a given week. The top songs would play more frequently, of course, while others may play only once every 7-10 days. A song like "Sweet Emotion," for example, which is one of the top testing classic rock hits, might pop up in rotation 9 or 10 times a week. Many stations use an "overnight repeat" rule, which assumes that people listening in the middle of the night are not the same people that listen during morning and afternoon drive times, and songs played during the day will be purposely repeated on the overnight. So, if "Sweet Emotion" plays 10x per week (probably on the heavy side), it's likely to be played during "daytime hours" no more than about 5 out of the 7 days in a given week. Then, assuming that the songs are properly rotating through those daytime hours, it should only get played in the 7am hour, for instance, about every 17 days or so.

Now, if you listen to your local classic rock station a LOT, you could potentially hear "Sweet Emotion" almost daily. The thing is, most people don't listen for long periods of time, unless you work in a garage and have the same station playing all day every day. Then you're bound to be headed to the insane asylum...or "Hotel California"...very soon.

 

And, why does "Deep Tracks" have to be limited to rock music? There are an awful lot of R&B and jazz deep tracks that its audiences would love to hear.

 

That's right. It's the advertisers who are running the show because they pay the bills. What we need is some multi-billionaire who can afford to absorb the cost of running a station so they can play whatever the hell they want and not have to answer to anyone.

 

We still have a Jack format here in Dallas, and they do seem to have a larger playlist than the other classic rock and classic hits formats in town. The problem is that they are almost always killed in the ratings. Still, they perform decent enough to sell ads and keep the bills paid.

 

You have it right on the money.

There are even songs that were top ten hits not being played anymore, such as but not limited to:Blue Jean by David Bowie, No More Lonely Nights by Paul McCartney, Mixed Emotions by The Rolling Stones, etc.

Even picking some deeper cuts by major artists would be a nice change of pace.

Sadly that won't happen. Thank goodness for other stations that have better playlists and for online formats.

The death of classic rock is the fault of joe six pack.

 

This tells me that the average, common, casual listener only wants to hear what they deem is familiar. That's why I don't bother with terrestrial radio unless I want to hear any contemporary stuff they might be playing on hit radio.

That said, their idea of what is familiar started somewhere down the line. It's too late to change the time (Hint! Michael Jackson!, as in Jackson 5)

Here's what I think happened: Somewhere back in the 80s, someone dictated what their oldies format would play. Most of it was 50s and early 60s music geared toward the aging baby-boomers. The audiences then became familiar with what was played, and an audience, largely forgetful of history, forgot all of those big hits that were once played on hit radio, and settled for someone else's tastes. Then radio was swallowed up by conglomerates and they started doing market research that only reinforced those song preferences.

 

I think that's part of it, and I think the other part is that our musical tastes and favorites vary widely from person to person. My favorite songs are probably someone else's most hated. Terrestrial radio cannot cater to each listener's specific tastes, so they play the "consensus hits"---the ones that are least likely to get the station turned off and most likely to be enjoyed by a majority of the audience.

Good one, sir.

 

we have a local station like that (which is a high school run station that is mostly based on requests, and they will also play lesser known hits from artists), I actually like the genre/era skipping myself. I remember hearing Joan Jett and Earth, Wind And Fire back to back, and I actually like hearing the shuffle like that, to me it makes the station more interesting.

 

They sure didn't worry about that quite as much in the 60s and 70s. If you heard a song you didn't care for, you simply tolerated it for three or four minutes.

 

It's fine if both songs came out in the 80s, but putting a 1974 EWF song next to a 1987 song?

I did not say anything about genres, because I like that too. It's more like how radio was back in the 70s.