I live in the Washington, DC area and, as such, have to suffer with Washington, DC area radio stations.
Quite frankly, they stink. They stink like a pile of pile of three day-old horse leav’n's mixed with limburger cheese. Yes, it’s that bad.
Here’s the deal. I’m a major jazz-head. Of course, nowadays, when you say “jazz” and “radio” in the same sentence, what you get is “smooth jazz”. Folks, I don’t care what Eric Metheney records, “smooth jazz” isn’t jazz. It’s prozac set to music. Repeat after me. Kenny G isn’t jazz. Jazz is Trane and Bird and Dizzy and Miles and Gerry Mulligan and Chet Baker. That’s jazz! But, there is an option. That option is called WPFW, which is a small station that’s part of the Pacifica Radio network. This is not a great option. Unless it’s the weekend, what you get is a couple or three hours of jazz and blues and 19,000 hours of political screed that makes NPR look like Richard Mellon Scaife’s personal diary. I swear. I once heard a DJ on one of their “news” programs say that the President was trying to take over Uzbekistan like the Nazis took Czechoslovakia. Urgh. At least the weekends have some superlative music: jazz, blues, and old-school R&B.
I also love oldies. I grew up on them. Unfortunately, the only oldies station around here (WBIG) plays a Top 40 sort of rotation that’s heavy on “hippie rock”. You know what I mean – stuff like that stupid song about going to San Francisco with flowers in your hair, or the Jose Feliciano version of “Light My Fire” (TANGENT ALERT! Can we just find every copy of this album and destroy them forever? Please??). I guarantee you’ll hear at least a dozen songs every single day, no matter what days you tune in. The Temptations recorded more than one or two songs. Smokey Robinson and the Miracles have more out there than “Tears of a Clown”. But this station won’t play them. I couldn’t tell you why. To it’s credit, WBIG is the one place I’ve found recently that will play both parts of the Isley Brothers’ “Shout”. They get slack from me for that, but not much.
WBIG also commits a cardinal sin. They play “oldies” that aren’t. Look, folks, I don’t care what you say, “Uptown Girl” is not an oldie! “Candle in the Wind” is not an oldie! If the record was made before 1972, it’s an oldie. Otherwise, folks, it’s Classic Rock. Play your Elton John there or make a 70s genre station. Better yet, keep that stuff on a Mix station.
Oh! Did I mention Mix stations. Well, by my count we have four or five of the darned things. You want a soft rock mix, you got it. How about “the best mix of the 70s, 80s, and today”! Oh it’s there! Want a Top 40 mild mix? Tune right in! That’s all well and good but it’s crap! Crap, crap, crap, crap, crap!
Look, if you want to make a mint in the DC area, I have three radio station ideas.
First, let’s have an all-80s music station. The group of people who lived their teenage years in the 1980s are right now in their 30s. They spend a lot of money and they’d listen to your station all day long. I certainly would tune in while I was at work.
Second, make the oldies station a real oldies station. Don’t play anything made after 1972. Play the hell out of the old R&B and doo-wop groups. Play the Vietnam protest music, especially from 1969 and 1970. Play the old folk-rock stuff from those two years. Make each day a different theme if you want. Just play the oldies and don’t clutter it up. You’ll have a lot of great songs. Guess what? That’s good! Make sure that you don’t play the same song twice in each week unless you run a request show or something (and you’d better do a request show at least once. Make it last two hours, at minimum).
Jazz. Real jazz. Please? I’m begging here.
And don’t even get me started about DC talk radio.
Dude, you forgot to mention the local “classic” rock station (WARW) that plays stuff from the eighties! “Flock of Seagulls” is NOT classic rock! They need to find the old DC101 and WCXR playlists and play those!
And when are the Voodoo Priests keeping Cerph alive going to fail and let that man moulder into dust, finally?
Rest assured, Jimmie, you’re not suggesting anything they haven’t thought of already. Fact is, radio is a business just like any other, and they exist to make money. If the kind of stations–or format shifts–you suggest would make more money, they’d be on them like a Lite station on Celine Dion.
They don’t. Or, at least, they don’t do so in a provable, consistent fashion.
Radio stations aren’t run by morons. Those little annoying quirks–playlists too small, out-of-era music, etc–those are all heavily researched, and designed to appeal to the stations core listeners.
Listeners always think they understand something the radio station doesn’t, but radio does’t spend millions of dollars on research to help out their brother-in-law at “The Brother-In-Law Research Firm”.
Still, I understand why it’s annoying to listeners, though.
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Oh no, I understand that, Jon. I spent a litle time in my youth at a small AM station here locally and I got my fill, even at that level, of market studies and ratings and all sorts of format surveys and such.
I suppose what I’m after is a station that plays what I want to hear. I can’t imagine I’m the only person who feels that way, though I admit it’s possible. Format shifts don’t happen very often. The only times I can recall them happening, at least in this area, is if the ratings are completely in the tank or if the station changes owners. Neither of those things are very likely in my particular market (especially given that Clear Channel owns a few and isn’t intent on giving them up), so I’m pretty much stuck with what’s there.
A station that plays what you want to hear? Well, since there aren’t 280 million radio stations in the US–and that’s what it would take–you’ll have to settle for one of two things:
1: The middle-of-the-road stuff available.
2: CDs.
The latter, of course, is a “station” that always plays exactly what you want to hear.
Seriously, I know it’s frustrating, but it’s frustrating for the radio stations, too. You think you’re tired of those same old songs? Imagine working there.
Oddly, people everywhere think radio stinks in there town, but it’s great elsewhere. I think HFS and DC101 are pretty great stations, for example. I’d love to have that many news/talk stations.
I’m in Richmond. It’s probably pretty similar down here, but downsized a bit for the smaller market.
Jon, I have worked in a radio station. It’s hell having to play the same stuff over and over again. And I know that radio programming is pretty much an automatic science. You pick the format and you get the whole package down to the minute of airtime. It’s been gone over by marketing guys and radio managers until pretty much every ounce of “real” is pretty much gone. I just don’t know that it has to be that way. Sometimes it isn’t. That’s where the talk format has been so successful, I think. It’s not prepackaged pap, for the most part, and people like that.
We have a relatively good market here in DC and I know my complaints could easily be said in just about every other market. That’s part of the problem though, isn’t it? You could get a format change, perhaps, but those almost never happen outside of the circumstances I mentioned before. It’s the inertia of the “radio station machine” that keeps it really from happening. As long as the station gets some ratings, it won’t go anywhere.