[BC] Early FM Growth. Its Cause

[Dana Puopolo]

Yet, in the early '70's, WMEX under John Garabedian BEAT WRKO as a rock
leaning Top 40 that even ran "Album cut days".  

Boston had pretty good rock radio back then. Why? COMPETITION, that's why!

Now no one competes, everybody 'cooperates' and we have PABLUM MUSH for
radio!

-D



------ Original Message ------
Received: Tue, 13 Feb 2007 07:10:04 PM EST
From: SteveOrdinetz <hykker at grolen.com>
To: <broadcast at radiolists.net>
Subject: Re: [BC] Early FM Growth. Its Cause

  Donna Halper wrote:
>Also, the music scene was changing too-- album cuts by a lot of new 
>bands who were not interested in top 40, songs that were like poetry 
>(early Dylan, Simon & Garfunkel, etc), songs that were not 2 minutes 
>and 52 second long, movements like folk/rock and psychedelia... 
>songs that protested the escalating war...  and top-40 didn't know 
>what to do with any of it.  When the FCC had ruled that AM stations 
>could no longer simulcast on their FMs and they had to come up with 
>original programming, a lot of young adults with a desire to hear 
>new music and a frustration at the restrictions of AM top-40 started 
>trying to get all the new music heard on FM, where long songs were 
>just fine and controversial lyrics were too (as long as you didn't 
>drop the F bomb).

Yet when AM stations experimented with album cuts it generally 
bombed.  Witness WRKO's experiment with rock-leaning Top 40 in the 
early 70s.  There were "AM listeners" and "FM listeners" ....the AM 
crowd didn't especially want to hear 12 minute songs by the Grateful 
Dead, Allman Bros, etc, and those who DID want to hear those acts 
didn't want to hear them on AM.



>There was already a fledgeling experiment with "free form 
>progressive" (later re-named Album rock) in New York and San 
>Francisco on FM, and it was just a matter of time before that new 
>format (and later, others like urban/dance music) spread to other 
>cities.  FM provided something new and interesting.  Who knew that 
>eventually it would lose its uniqueness and no longer be cutting edge?


  Everything loses it's edge eventually and either fades away or 
becomes mainstream.  I recall reading an article in Billboard  back 
in the early 70s that predicted that the "underground" FMs would 
eventually evolve into hit music stations, only a different set of 
hit songs than the Top 40 stations were playing.  Sounds a lot like 
what AOR became by the mid-ish 70s.  Very few listeners are willing 
to sit thru a bunch of obscure songs to hear one they like. 


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