(Okay, okay, I know Scott Muni was at WNEW, not WCBS, but none of the jocks at WCBS had a name that makes such a handy pun. So, New Yorkers, please forgive me for being unable to pass up a cheap joke.)
There’s a truism in my preferred business of broadcasting: when you change formats, you will only get negative phone calls. Why? Because the only people who were listening were fans of the old format. And, usually, rabid fans, since they were all that were left when ratings drop so low that you need to flip a frequency.
We’re seeing this now with the big, surprise flip in New York City of WCBS-FM from its long-standing oldies format to what’s known as “Jack,” the current format-du-jour in broadcasting. What has really shaken up the radio world, however, is that this isn’t just any other flip. Infinity Broadcasting (soon to go under the CBS name again) had other stations in New York that were underperforming, but it flipped its heritage oldies outlet instead. This is being seen in the business as the beginning of the end for Oldies, something I predicted three years ago.
(Maybe I should take time out here for a disclaimer. I’m partial to the Jack format because…well…I invented it. Or at least its immediate predecessor. In 1999, Bill Gravino and I set out to create a brand new format for WVLT. Our basic rules were: a 30 year window, broad spectrum playlist, lots of recurrents, and a song library of not less than 1200 songs, at a time when most radio stations only played 200-300. We were stumped for a name for our new outgrowth of what we had seen as a dying Adult Contemporary market. Finally, I just threw my hands up and said “call it Fred, if you have to.” So, in a report to trade journals, we described our new invention – “Fred” – to the broadcast world. It mutated into “Jack,” but the rules are the same now as they were then. Anyone who wants to flip a station to a Jack clone, call me – I’m in the book – and I’ll fly out for a few months and consult for you. Anyhow….)
Oldies radio, as it exists today, has been attempting to struggle along with a changing set of rules. In the beginning, there obviously weren’t any oldies, because everything was new. Late 1960′s and early 1970′s, all the rock, pop, and MOR hits before the British Invasion were “Solid Gold” and “Golden Oldies,” stuff before the current dominant sound. During the disco and punk years, it was everything up to 1969, and the breakup of the Beatles. That made sense.
This started a long standing rule: “Oldies” were anything from “Rock Around The Clock” through ten years before. If it was more than ten years old, it was an Oldie, otherwise it was a “classic.” This basic formula worked very well because of one of the basic rules of radio that I’ve always espoused: the Greatest Music Ever Recorded is whatever you were listening to in High School.
I’m serious. The mid-and-late teen years, the time you spent in High School, will always be the period that you are nostalgic for, and the music that you heard during that time will always be what pushes your buttons. Most people attend High School between the ages of 13 and 18. The “money demographic” in broadcasting is 25-54; that’s the age range that advertisers want because under 25 you’re not likely to have a lot of disposable income, and by 55 most people are set in their ways with Brand Loyalty, and less likely to be swayed by advertising. If you’re playing a 25 year window starting with ten years ago, you’re going to attract listeners from 27-52 by playing the music they grew up with.
When did this all fall apart? I can tell you the exact year: 1990. The same year that “Top 40″ radio disappeared when Billboard and Soundscan changed the way charts were compiled and Country made its resurgance. In 1990, the magic “oldies” window crossed into a zone almost no one was going to want to allow: the ’80′s. People who were willing to accept disco being oldies couldn’t accept Blondie, The Knack, and other New Wave acts as being “golden oldies.” So the line in the sand was drawn: first at everything before “Saturday Night Fever,” then to 1969 again. Eventually, in the mid 1990′s, it started settling down to around 1975, but only certain songs from the 1970′s; never punk or disco.
With that line in the sand set, the window started passing the money demo. Today, only six years of that 30 year demographic window are represented by oldies stations; if you were born after 1957, Oldies doesn’t want you. The problem is, if you were born before 1951, advertisers don’t want you, and won’t pay stations to deliver their commercials to you. Oldies found itself a shrinking audience.
In 2001, when I was working for Dick Taylor at WOND/WTKU, I had a chance to sit in on a meeting about the future of Oldies radio. I was there with Dick and Jerry Beebe, who was then the program director of “Kool 98.3,” our oldies outlet. I was listening to them arguing back and forth, and when Dick asked my opinion, I said “do you realize that under the old rules of Oldies radio, the ones that always delivered the best numbers, you’d be playing Nirvana’s ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ in your ‘A’ rotation?” They were shocked at the idea, but had to admit that I was right. And under the old rules today, Weezer’s “Buddy Holly” would be playing on stations like the old WCBS. After all, it’s what the Class of 1995 were listening to when they were getting ready to graduate — and they’re 27-28 now and firmly in the money demographic.
The “line in the sand” thinking ended up being what drove my entire generation, and the one after, away from radio. As we entered our mid 20′s, we couldn’t hear the stuff we grew up with any more. It wasn’t new enough to play on the “hit” stations (with very few exceptions) and it wasn’t old enough to be on the oldies outlets (and, as it turned out, never would be). Adult Contemporary stations were too soft and the ‘classic rock’ stations too hard to play the entire variety. So, we all retreated into our own little world of mix tapes and CD’s to hear the music we liked and wanted to listen to. The radio became less and less relevant to us.
Today, people are finally catching on. The “Jack” format uses (as I said before) a 30 year window; the songs you hear on a “Jack” station are all from 1975 through yesterday afternoon, with a particular emphasis on 1975-1995. In short, it’s Oldies Radio for today’s money demo, with a little bit of new stuff thrown in. It also crosses a lot of the artifically-built boundaries of “formats” that radio has thrown up over the last 15 years, and emphasizes variety like the FM stations of the 1970′s and ’80′s that we all grw up with and fell in love with.
There was a long standing joke in broadcasting that the declining numbers for “Adult Standards” and “Beautiful Music” stations were due to their audiences dying on them. It wasn’t that far from the truth. Today, the prime range for fans of oldies stations are between 51 and 68 years old. Within five years, that audience will start to cross the average life expectancy of an American male and literally be dying off. So it’s logical to see Oldies stations pulling the plug today. Sure, there’s still a market for oldies, but it’s a declining market and one that can’t support the current supply of stations. A lot more are going to disappear.
And don’t cry for them, because once we start rethinking “oldies” and luring the disaffected back into the radio fold, we might just save our industry. So, sic transit gloria mundi; thus passes away the glory of the World. The format is dead, long live the format.
In 1964, a man named Gene Roddenberry created the outline and pilot script for a science-fiction, action-adventure television show for Desilu called Star Trek. It ran on NBC for three years before being cancelled. Eventually, the concept and format was revived in 1987 as Star Trek: The Next Generation, and in one form or another ran continuously for 18 years before the last incarnation, Star Trek: Enterprise was cancelled in 2005.
Doctor Who was more than just a television show; over the course of a generation, it literally became a British cultural icon. Children who had watched the show in 1963 grew up to have children of their own who watched with them. But by the time the show went off the air in 1989, it had grown stagnant. More and more stories were rehashes of old enemies and old concepts. Scripts became increasingly self-referential; in fact, one four-part story in 1988 entitled The Greatest Show In The Galaxy was a thinly-veiled satire about the show’s history and its decline. Fans had became disenchanted, and deserted the series in droves.
In 1996, Universal Television and the Fox network joined with the BBC to try and revive Doctor Who. Casting British actor Paul McGann in the lead role with Eric Roberts as the latest incarnation of archnemesis The Master, the pilot film was little more than a typical American action-adventure show with just the trappings of Doctor Who. None of the real core elements were there, but lots of little nonsense (like the concept of the Doctor being half-human, which Davies ridicules in a joke in the last episode of the new season of the show) was thrown in. It flopped, badly, and was generally rejected by fans and non-fans alike. Again, Davies put it best in a scene in the original British Queer as Folk. One character (rabid Who fan Vince, who became comic-book geek Michael in the American adaptation) challenges another to name all of the men to play the Doctor. The second character ratttles them all off in rapid succession: “William Hartnell, Patrick Troughton, Jon Pertwee, Tom Baker, Peter Davison, Colin Baker, and Sylvester McCoy.” “What about Paul McGann?” “Paul McGann doesn’t count.”
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