Posted by Steve Green on August 17, 2008 at 13:37:04:
In Reply to: Re: Re: Re: Oldies: The New Hot Thing posted by Fred Clemens on August 17, 2008 at 12:29:05:
Jim, did you buy 'My Girl' when it was #12, 8, 9, or 1, etc ? :-)
And Fred: I don't think it's foremost so much the work involved in performing an actual analysis such as your fine suggestions. The bigger priority is blasting apart that giant, stagnating mountain of marketing bias and ignorance which has accumulated just as malignantly over decades. THAT messy paradox was placed there by those who figured it was profitable to convince station owners to legislate creativity and, duh, 'streamline' -- decades ago. Worse yet, these wingtip geniuses were having someone else do their work FOR them *already* : The exact same charts used well before their own glorified radio-doctor arrivals.
Man, it so easy to criticize others' work, isn't it? After all, that's what I'm doing right now! But I point out that mine is a critique of the work of auditorium-test ministers who stamped their own individual gut feelings and philosophies on the archived tastes of previous generations in the first place and did so for their own career good and no one else's. They certainly did not enter the field to forward Music Appreciation in the least.
I realize, Mike R., that this is probably closer to a 'radio' thread than a music thread has reached in recent pages. But it does touch both approaches. In context, more importantly, it addresses how this music is perceived now, by generations outside the ridiculously stifled cardboard-box pigeonhole into which the genres have been stuffed.
Great points, Marty and Fred .... about the relevancy to non-music sales Now, and the one about the shift of chart emphasis from singles to albums. (Arguably, one could maintain -- and I do -- that the subsequent 'maintainence' of the album era charts can be blamed as one of the reasons AoR lasted only 6 or 7 years before imploding under its own lost credibility).
Radio programming and management screwed up in the three major nostalgia formats responsible for perhaps this country's greatest export. Blessedly, this forum is aloof from most of the speed bumps placed there in caution by boardroom lizards whose life depends on up and down charts and graphs.
Rock on Riccio, Shannon, Radil, Piazza, Sauter, et al!