No one catering to boomers

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No one catering to boomers

Postby whalley radio » Mon May 27, 2013 8:25 am

It would be nice to see and hear a station playing oldies (on FM) in Vancouver.

http://m.youtube.com/#/watch?feature=pl ... Q3Ha1JRFt0
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Re: No one catering to boomers

Postby pave » Mon May 27, 2013 11:13 am

Essentially then, that would be an oldies station that plays the tunes of the '60's and '70's. (Although, I contend a "boomer" audience would still respond well by including the '80's.)

It could be a cash-cow format for many years, but unfortunately, anybody who has ever tried it fails miserably when it comes to presenting talent.
They cheap out and try to make it on music sweeps and a significantly subdued "boss-jock", mechanical presentation. The dumbest part of the format comes from the programmers who still daypart the tuneage. (It's okay. We grew up. We can take it. Honest.)

To repeat: We (the audience) grew up. Radio did not. And that, by the way, has been the reason for the demise or unsatisfactory returns from many other "oldies" stations that tried to resurrect the base audience -- including the now-failed efforts of the old-line, former powerhouses. (CHUM simply re-played the old programs and died - openly and miserably.)

Management also fails to remember - or find out - that audiences responded as much, if not more to the personalities than they did to the severely constricted playlists of the day. Such a project would not be acceptable by applying strategies that, at the time, were designed, essentially, to generate "kiddie-cumes".

Still, it's a magnificent idea! This could be done - gloriously!
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Re: No one catering to boomers

Postby skyvalleyradio » Mon May 27, 2013 12:20 pm

the biggest problem doing a 'boomer oldies' station here in Canada is the hopelessly outdated & unneeded CANCON rules. Every oldies station that gets a groove on, is stuck inserting endless Anne Murray, Gordon Lightfoot, Rush, April Wine, Guess Who etc etc which gets SO overplayed, listeners burn out quickly. A 'boomer oldies' station done right, NOT "cheaped out on" or ignorant of the crucial role experienced air TALENT plays in a successful station, would be welcome in our listening area.
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Re: No one catering to boomers

Postby Mike Cleaver » Mon May 27, 2013 1:49 pm

Which gives me time to restate the fact that CANCRAP was enacted to promote new Canadian "talent."
Why should an oldies station that plays nothing beyond, say, the '80s, be forced to play that burned out s**t when all they're doing is adding to the pension checks of those still alive?
How long do these people need to be sucking at the public teat?
And how many times do we have to be forced to listen to stuff shoved down our ears for decades?
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Re: No one catering to boomers

Postby pave » Mon May 27, 2013 2:34 pm

I think you might agree, boys, that our hearing the same 100 cuts of CanCon from oldies outfits is just a representation of laziness and a lack of imagination on the part of programmers.

From that 30-year span, there are thousands of cuts and/or material from albums that could be dredged up.

Hell, might even make for a number of interesting reformations of some of those older bands.

(I don't mind that Canadian recording artists have access to some kind of a pension.)
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Re: No one catering to boomers

Postby Blabbermouth » Mon May 27, 2013 2:51 pm

I think we have to rethink these tired old formats. Who says a Gordon Lightfoot song can't live next door to a Pink Floyd song? Aretha Franklin next to the Rolling Stones. Johnny Cash, meet Led Zeppelin. They're all hits. Baby Boomers growing up in the 60's and '70s were exposed to a lot of great music and are now at an age where they can appreciate it all. Going 1 or maybe 2 songs deep from the same old collection of Classic Rock albums just doesn't cut it anymore.

Throw in some intelligent personalities to give it all some context and you've got a fresh new format.
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Re: No one catering to boomers

Postby jon » Mon May 27, 2013 3:12 pm

While I do believe that CanCon rules cripple Oldies stations, I found it telling that, after listening to Oldies stations for several years, I had assumed that certain songs were CanCon because I had heard them so much.

When, in fact, they weren't CanCon. Which tells me that the Oldies format suffered far too often from repetition.

For example, I do agree that a friend's success formula of playing a CCR tune every 90-180 minutes is a good idea, but I strongly disagree with limiting the rotation to just a few CCR songs. 20 CCR songs made the Billboard Hot 100, pretty much all got Top 10 airplay on the West Coast. Songs like "Born on the Bayou" got Top 10 airplay in the West, but never even cracked the Billboard Hot 100. Why not play them all?

Admittedly, Music Directors had got mixed messages from their audiences. Listeners say they are sick of a very popular group when, in fact, they are sick of one of their songs.

Back when Oldies stations were typically #1 rated in their U.S. markets -- about 15 years ago -- the success formula was always touted as playing familiar songs frequently, to catch a listener who was dialing by. But to turn them into a nice long TSL (Time Spent Listening) statistic, familiar songs help, but they can also hurt, if the listener gets tired of the song, or never liked it in the first place.

I have long argued that the familiar artist is more important than the familiar song, though both are necessary. And I'm certainly not advocating playing a lot of stiffs by popular artists.

The Bottom Line remains, to me at least, that Oldies cannot be simply treated as a clone of the Top 40 format of the '60s. Top 40 had fresh new material every week. Oldies doesn't, though great old songs can be introduced to listeners who have never heard them before. It just has to be realized that it doesn't have the excitement that new material did when it first came out. All of which means that you have to work a lot harder at an Oldies format because you don't have new material "selling itself" like you did in the Top 40 era when these songs were first released.

As a postscript, I should add that I don't believe that you limit yourself to listeners who were listening to the music you are playing when it was new. Otherwise, if most people turned on their radio at age 14, no one under 72 years of age would listen to "Maybellene" by Chuck Berry. Not to mention the fact that, in most radio markets, no one was playing Chuck Berry in 1955.

Although interest ebbs and flows over the years, there is always some interest in "what came before" in the same musical genre.
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Re: No one catering to boomers

Postby isthisthingon » Mon May 27, 2013 3:53 pm

If no one strays from the original topic by introducing boards, turntables, transmitters, microphones, R to R or cart machines, or long-gone jocks - this could become one of the best discussions in years.
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Re: No one catering to boomers

Postby groundskeeper willy » Mon May 27, 2013 6:52 pm

Cancon is definitely the component that kills "oldies" in this country. But for a city like Vancouver, that had a rich history of pop stations in the 60's & 70's, why couldn't a smart programmer get a copy of the "Vancouver's Charted Songs 56-78" book (which can be had by clicking on the rotating sponsor link on the RW main page) and then spend time researching and sourcing a uniquely local music library? Yeah, tracking down some of the regional hits would be tough, but there are enough collectors in the area who are passionate enough about the music that once word got out in regards to what the station was trying to find, you'd most likely have a number of hardcore music "geeks" who'd be more than willing to volunteer their time to help assemble a library that would resonate and have meaning for those who grew up here. Granted, some of the songs would be unfamiliar to a portion of the audience, but by celebrating a musical heritage that's mostly been ignored, at least the station would have a sound and flavour completely different from the identical cookie-cutter "oldies" formatting heard in every city. And as a bonus, you wouldn't be subjected to the same degree of Anne, Gord & The Guess Who every day.

Of course, to assemble all the necessary material, it would take time, effort, energy and money, all of which are things that none of the current corporate station owners would be willing to spend.
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Re: No one catering to boomers

Postby RationalKeith » Mon May 27, 2013 7:15 pm

Well, over in LaLaLand (Victoria) we can get KIXI AM880 OTA. (Streamed from http://kixi.com/.)

Bigband and smooth oldies most of the time.

And... Saturday evenings 6-8 and Sunday afternoons 2-4 is oldies, primarily late 50s and early 60s, significant doo-wop and girl-group, a bit of country flavour recently.


For OTA oldies on the lower mainland, check if Red Robinson is still on Sunday afternoon 12-4. (I haven't listened for a while, the signal is not great in Victoria. His pattern used to be relatively older music early in the program. Red likes Rockabilly.
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Re: No one catering to boomers

Postby RationalKeith » Mon May 27, 2013 7:19 pm

One tactic to cope with Cancon is to look for covers.

CISL did that in better days, perhaps when Red Robinson had great influence there.

Cover do vary of course, some quite good (I like Stand By Me by Little Eva - punchier than the original, but a fast doo-wop version of Unchained Melody make me sick).
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Re: No one catering to boomers

Postby pave » Mon May 27, 2013 8:56 pm

Given that the programmer of this phantom station was not a bonifide frozen-by-dogma chowderhead, the music format could be decided in about 20 minutes, maybe 30... tops. Here's The Format: From these three decades, there are thousands of hits from rock, pop, country and R&B. Play 'em. (No charge.) :)

The key to such a station - any station, for that matter, but especially this one - would be in the on-air "live" presentations - jocks, promos, spots, promotions etc. And that would be very, very difficult. Not an impossibility, but not a gimme either.

This, gents, could be done. The trap would be in getting caught up in the implementation of a music format while on-air presentations suffered or got only a superficial amount of attention. The tunes roll-out represents the easy part.
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Re: No one catering to boomers

Postby jon » Mon May 27, 2013 9:35 pm

I never heard satellite radio until 3 years ago. Before that, I had the mistaken impression that it was just music with no announcers. While some channels are like that, though even most of those have splitters, most of the most popular channels have excellent personalities for all but all nights.

Which proves pave's point, in my opinion. Doubly so given that people are paying for this service. Conventional wisdom within the ranks of Program Directors is that people want nothing but music. SiriusXM is proving them wrong. In fact, the most popular announcers are the ones that have the most to say on air. And who play the widest variety of music during their show, harking back to what many of us have said.

Did I mention that announcers on Sirius/XM pick their own music? Again, going against conventional wisdom among Music Directors.

Admittedly, very, very little of satellite radio is Live, at least on the music channels. But neither was it recorded two weeks ago Tuesday, as I often hear references to News from the last few hours, especially deaths of musicians.
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Re: No one catering to boomers

Postby crs » Mon May 27, 2013 9:40 pm

Radio MAX in the Fraser Valley (which eventually became the STAR-FM of today) used to do something interesting to address the Can-Con issue. They would play a whack of nothing but Can-Con in the off-peak hours...sometimes entire hours of nothing but BTO, Trooper, Loverboy, Stampeders etc., to justify doing the morning show with very little or no CanCon (heavy up on the Stones, Beatles, etc). It basically sounded like the programming dep't was GIVING UP on that period between 9pm and 11pm and made for REALLY crappy listening. (After awhile you got TIRED of hearing the same Gino Vanelli song every other night...

As for a possible solution to making an Oldies format "work", you can't do it with a tight 150 song format as the repeat factor is WAY TOO HIGH. There's no reason with the TB hard drives of today you couldn't make that a 500-600 song playlist and maybe on occasion cherry-pick through the rotation and park some songs for a few weeks/months then bring them back, park some other songs & repeat. (It's what I do with my iPod BTW and it works very well)

AND you'd have to convince the corporate hacks to bring back the old-style delivery where jocks used to talk over intros/extros and between each song. Oldies Radio is MADE for boss jocks and NOT for a redundant Station ID coming on after each song reminding you which station you are listening to.

Creativity was the hallmark of Top 40 radio in the 50s-60s-70s, not the liner reading and reality show banter that passes for good radio today.
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Re: No one catering to boomers

Postby Toomas Losin » Mon May 27, 2013 10:06 pm

I may be very naïve (yes, really!) about cancon realities but in the late 70's early 80's I was growing up listening to CFUN and I remember hearing some great Vancouver-area bands, not just Canadian bands, so there must be lots of Canadian product available. Why can't some genius simply use Canadian bands (whatever counts as cancon) in an AOR-type format to satisfy cancon without being boring and supplement that with non-cancon material? Basically, don't wear out the Top-100 Cancon list, have some variety. Oh, and have some personality like I remember from the Good Old Days.

Now, if that were to happen would I like it? I'm not the same guy I was back then. I now appreciate music from all parts of the world and can easily listen to it thanks to the net, although it is very irritating to listen to a European or South American station and hear the Top-40 American pop that I want to avoid by listening to a foreign station!
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