Posted by Allan Sniffen on August 02, 2007 at 08:09:18:
The rap music thread below demonstrates how it gets tougher and tougher to program "hit" music as you move into the 80's (and beyond). For years I made the argument you can't really program 80's on an "oldies" station because much of the music is too polarizing. You can't just "play it all" which is what most oldies stations did when they featured 50's through 70's music.
CBS-FM is now trying to play 80's music in an effort to appeal to somewhat younger demos in an advertising world that is obsessed with youth. As we can see, that's hard to do. I don't think Rap, as a music genre, belongs on CBS-FM (although, as with almost anything, you probably can find an occasional exception). I also don't think the hair band rock songs from the 80's belongs either (Def Leppard, Poison--a lot of the 80's rock JACK was playing).
Hit music became more and more polarized in the 80's. It didn't always cut down the middle as it had previously. A lot of that was the result of the fragmenting and niching of radio. Rather than one or two stations playing all the hits, five or six each played a niche within the hits. In New York both WNEW-FM and WKTU (the first one) played "hit" or popular music. But their playlists were totally different.
For CBS-FM, the problem comes up with music at the extremes of what became popular. On one end you had Rap. On the other,"hard" rock. The station really can't play either to any significant extent because listeners to a broadbased station in the tradition of oldies radio (whether you call it that or not) won't tolerate it. So, with the 80's, you have to try and program down the middle. That means a lot of 80's hits will be ignored... more so than other eras.
I worked in CHR ("Top 40") radio in the 80's. Even then we struggled with this. The playlist would swing from one extreme to the other as the mood of management seemed to change. Suddenly it was hard to figure out what to play even though everything was a hit.
This discussion is somewhat similar to the "Long Versions" discussion below. There is a lot of discretion that goes into programming a station like this and it gets more and more difficult as you get into later eras. Because a song (or version of a song) was a "hit" does not necessarily mean it should be played on this station under these circumstances. Certainly when you're dealing with polarizing music, which the extremes of what became hits frequently was, it's very tricky. You have to be careful not to push away more listeners than you bring in. Rap has the potential to do that. So does the Hair Band Rock songs. And then, on top of that, you don't want the station to be overloaded with Whitney Houston type ballads (an error the station made several years ago). 80's music is *very* tricky. One reason why the radio industry is following CBS-FM is to see how well the station reconciles all of this. Program Director Brian Thomas certainly has his hands full.