by 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.