Posted by Allan Sniffen on July 18, 2004 at 22:08:40:
In Reply to: Re: Joe McCoy: Another Opinion posted by dennism on July 18, 2004 at 21:55:39:
>>>My feeling is McCoys' demise was due to him listening to the Sniffens<<<
Thanks for giving me credit for such influence. Somehow, I doubt it. That said, I do know that McCoy didn't want this web site mentioned on the air at CBS-FM because of the criticism. And it didn't all come from me.
>>> he had to make his great station sound like the poor imitators over the country. <<<
Wrong. What Infinity wants is a station that appeals to listeners younger than 50. There's nothing wrong with that as a goal. That acknowledged, you could argue that it's just not possible to accomplish that with CBS-FM and you may well be correct. It's a tough challenge for a station so tightly branded and perceived as an "older" oldies station.
It could well be true that the best thing CBS-FM can do is put it back to where it was ten years ago and let it play out until the format completely ages out. And I don't mean that in a sarcastic way. It really might be the right thing.
However, I agree with Infinity to the extent that CBS-FM was aging more rapidly than it should have been. The format has demo issues but CBS-FM's were worse thanks to its insistence on a playlist that dated too far back for too long. Inching it forward from late fifties and early sixtes to late sixties and early seventies is a reasonable goal and should have been a slow evolution that started fifteen years ago.
What I think we all now agree about (and that wasn't always true) is that an oldies station cannot play 80's music to any significant extent. Perhaps there are a few songs that have the right sound to mix in but, generally, the era was different and so was the music. CBS-FM's attempts to move the format into 80's ballads was a huge error. Even I, as a critic of its fifties emphasis, never argued for that.