I agree, and especially in rock radio, too much old stuff period... cancon or otherwise.  You don't hear new rock anywhere on top 40 radio and even most rock stations.  It seems as if new rock and harder music was banned by radio about 20 years ago.  Many rock stations like Q are the classic variety and don't play any new music.  FM96 in London still plays a fair bit.

If a station has a gold or classic format there isn't much you can do about new music since that isn't the format.  But certainly it is a mystery why rock music has been absent from top 40 over the past 20 years or so.  Rock used to always be a part of any top 40 chart, not now.

I don't listen to a lot of country radio, but checking out the new Hot 93.9 in Brantford over the weekend, they are heavy into new music and music from the past few years, including a lot of new cancon.  Good for them.  And what i heard on the the station sounds great.  It was a change listening to radio where I didn't know many songs or even artists.  A lot of the music I didn't mind at all and the imaging for the station was contemporary, similar to hot a/c or top 40.

Cancon should be modified to encourage the play of new music or up and coming artists.  Many receive no airplay now. Maybe the easiest way would be something like they do in Australia where stations that play current music or top 40 do need to play a certain percent of new or up and coming artists. I do like your idea for more credits for a new song or group, actually I believe this is what they do in OZ. It would be interesting to see how they monitor and handle this.

We did sort of have this years ago with the hit/non hit for FM that still applies to Montreal and Ottawa.  Some make it sound like it was a big burden and FM radio didn't have decent ratings until the 50/50 hit non hit was dropped.  Wrong.  CHUM FM was number one in Toronto during many years of the hit/no hit regulation, and FM had overtaken AM across the country for the source of music on radio, and were becoming dominant in the ratings.

What a lot of stations did was obviously play the hit song from an album and the record company would tell music directors what the next two singles would be released later.  Stations would play not only the hot new song from Splunge-adelic from their new album but also play another cut, which in reality was going to be the next single release in three or four months.  Stations in Ottawa do this all the time and it sounds great. 

One solution might be to reduce cancon back to 30 or 25% across the board.  For stations that play current hits, one third of the songs can be from the last five years and the remaining all current with an emphasis on new or upcoming artists.  Sounds complicated but easy to put in the computer.

But the 35% burnout for cancon gold is mostly the fault of radio stations who just don't play a lot of material that was popular and are sticking with groups like the Hip, Blue Rodeo, Triumph etc.  Stations like FM96, CFNY who play some new music don't have this issue. 

Last edited by paterson1 (September 11, 2020 7:45 am)

If you're going to try to do this through regulation, it has to be an incentive, not a condition. Forcing Q to play emerging artists is ridiculous. You can't legislate what people want to hear, and it isn't emerging artists on Q. You'll only push more people online, defeating the purpose.

I really like the incentive of emerging tracks counting for more than a single Cancon point. Q wouldn't bite, but Edge might.

Stations that don't play current music like Q or Boom the incentive for emerging artists doesn't apply since that is not their format and they don't play current music.  

I do go back to the burnout of songs and artists is as much the station's fault as the regulation.  Some stations do the bare minimum and tend to overplay certain songs and artists and not just cancon.

My local gold station plays Winds of Change by Scorpions all the time and have for over 20 years.  Does it get a pass since it is not cancon? This song is overplayed and to me just as annoying as hearing Here for a Good Time by Trooper.  And there are many others and artists like Ram Jam and Black Betty that seem to always be in their rotation.  A group that only had one semi hit, 43 years ago and for some reason the station plays this one hit wonder constantly. 

These are the things that radio people focus on, does the audience care or notice?  That is another question and does this repetition actually hurt ratings or is the repetition of songs a necessary evil to remain popular? 

Stations do need to play the hit and familiar gold since this is what people seem to like.
Is the repetition of cancon an issue with the audience?  Or is much of the problem with how stations are actually managing their cancon gold?  Or do they even manage it at all?  I still maintain that there are plenty of songs that were popular 5-35 years ago that have vanished and never get any play. 

Anyway I think that cancon should be revised and updated, with a level of 25-30% and formats that do play current music given credit for playing new or upcoming artists. Could see how Australia broadcasters do this.  The thing is you will still hear lots of Beiber, Mendes, Drake, Celine Dion etc since much of their older hit material doesn't qualify as cancon.

It would also be nice if they started covering local news and sports again instead of parroting news releases, scalping newspaper articles and reading scores.

Seems to me - Lee Abrams was the guy who took all the originality away from a very creative Free Form FM radio. In fact what I think I am hearing him say is - he now is recommending it be put back. 

Guess he ran out of things to do............................lol

Last edited by Marsden (September 13, 2020 2:14 am)

Yes Mr Marsden I read a few years ago that Lee Abrams had a conversion away from the type of format he helped to usher in and Kevjo I never thought about the analogy to  Drake and what happened to top 40 but that' is a good one.

The contrast in this area between the two competing currents on FM at the time were what was heard on the original 97 Rock ( which I believe Abrams had a hand in) and WBUF FM. 

A lot of people prefered the 97 Rock approach but I was not one of them and in retrospect their previous incarnation as a top 40 station was probably more creative and it did have a wide playlist as far as top 40.

Here is a prime slice of WBUF FM as I recorded it in 1975

While I'm on the topic of WBUF. I was wondering if anyone remembers an automated soft rock format for a very short while on the future WNED FM at 94.5. I think it was WEBR FM at the time.

I remember listening to the infamous Bon Allan before the launch of WBUF and he was on the station talking about the upcoming launch and he referred to the WEBR type format at the time as "chicken rock." That soft rock format was not one that we think of now and stations such as EZ rock and such. Was an acoustic based format featuring the likes of CSNY. I enjoyed that music and what I remember hearing on WEBR FM is the Persecution and Restoration of Dean Moriarty by Aztec Two Step. I tried to look up info about that format on WEBR but did not find anything.




 

Last edited by Fitz (September 13, 2020 6:36 pm)