Q107 plays Bon Scott-era AC/DC? One would think that Q's sleepy pothead boomer army would be outraged.

Programming at ALL oldies stations is destined to fail because it is done incorrectly/stupidly by fools with no long term plan.  Burn out your core library and you're toast.  It is not the current top 30 mentality that works here.

Mind you the whole top 30 thing is ever-so-poorly done as well.  The first thing a potential p d has to have going in their favour in order to find favour with those hiring?  You have to be a complete, no-holds-barred nincompoop. 


And guess what?  You qualify.

Old Codger wrote:

Programming at ALL oldies stations is destined to fail because it is done incorrectly/stupidly by fools with no long term plan

Please post a half dozen titles that qualify as CanCon (Beach Boys Pet Shop doesn't) AND are recognizable by Q-107's target audience/demographics
 

By the way...I am NOT referring to once a week specialty shows.  I'm talking about ongoing, daily, rolling, 24 hour a day programming.

Sure.  What's the format?  Q?  Now?  Or classic Q?

I don't know what they're including these days really.

First...go to the better selling lps and LISTEN to them.

From American Woman, Guess Who...Proper Stranger
From The Best of A Foot in Cold Water...Isn't Love Unkind In My Life
From Rooftops and Satellites, Colin James...Johnny Coolman [Or is that too new?  It shouldn't be.  2009]
From Hot Shots, Trooper...Baby Won't You Please Come Home  [Isn't this the biggest selling CDN Rock album ever?]
From Stink, McKenna Mendelson Mainline...Better Watch Out  [Big BEFORE the regs wasn't it?]
Sloan, Believe In Me  [too new again?  2008]

There are umpteen songs available to play from Crowbar who dominated the stages of Southern Ontario for a solid chunk of years.  David Wilcox has recorded tons of great tunes.  Pick 5.  Bruce Cockburn is still gettin' 'er done.  Who has time to do all of their work for them?  Go back to 3 or 4 songs from the Ugly Ducklings...The Hawks with and w/o Rompin' Ronnie for goodness sake.  Bring it up through a few Stampeders [Wild Eyes get any airplay anymore?] and Ian Thomas [Liars anyone?]  tunes.  Prism, Saga, Steppenwolf, The Paupers, Kensington Market, Red Rider, King Biscuit Boy, The Downchild Blues Band, Dr. Music, Fludd, Gowan [Isn't he at least good enough for Styx?], The Mandala/Dom Troiano, Rhinocerous, Rock/Hyde/Payolas...

This is easy...IF you have any ears...and don't depend on the narrow and evaporating slim pickins' of what's 'safe.  Rush and Hip poisoning anyone?  'They' did those 2 groups a disservice.
 

grilled.cheese wrote:

I love Rush but I cringe when I hear "Coming up next is a favourite from Rush....Tom Sawyer!"

Moxy Fruvous had a terrific drummer - why isn't it on anyone's list?
 

Yes and No Ig.  Yes you HAVE to offer comfort zone listening to your core and potential audiences.  NO you can't get by on X 100 songs forever.  You burn out the most key components of your library and the audience will ultimately up and leave before you realize that you shouldn't have gone that route after all.

How do you program around that and extend the life of your key songs?  I'm not giving that away for free.  But in order to pull it off you better be a far more talented programmer than this Logan guy.  That kind of lazy programming is short term gain for long term pain.  The people that want that are already listening to their own playlists and radio won't get 'em anyway.

The thing is...what I'm proposing won't work for every radio station.  Why?  They won't hire the right person/people to actually make it work.  Logan and his ilk are the millstones who are slowly rendering radio obsolete.

Don't know.  Whatever it is it isn't a big enough number to be resting on past laurels. It's a cume that has to grow.  Q listeners WERE CHUM FM listeners at one time.  'Cause CHUM FM stopped playing ANYTHING that I would EVER want to hear on a daily or even ongoing basis.

But I'm not a girl.

All I know is *I'VE* done the research...exhaustive research...and THAT point of view is a limited and time-limiting 'take' on possible reactions by a non committed potential audience.  Playing bits and pieces of songs ONLY works when you're sampling Dave Clark 5 fans.  What you play before and after impact on the REAL reaction too.  This half arsed testing approach radio has used for eons is crap.  Pure, unadulterated horse shit.

How do I know?

Is everyone in the radio biz tied for #1?
Is Q 107 still the MIGHTY Q?
Is 1050 CHUM still servin' up the oldies?

Too many losers and not enough success stories...even on sirius which specifically can wear out it's welcome in as little as 3 weeks.

Somebody's research sure sux.

I rest my case.
------------------------------------

Or not.  At no time did I ever say that any radio station should "play everything" by the way.  Not a chance.  That's why I have ALWAYS said you need to hire the RIGHT programmer.  One who uses his [or her] EARS...and virtually never their eyes.

Last edited by Old Codger (April 15, 2016 6:36 am)

Fitz wrote:

I think you got the wrong man IG. I have heard  very few positive things about Abrams. He was to FM rock what the Drake format was to AM. Drastically narrowed playlists and central direction vs PD/MD/DJ

To be blunt as I used to read his directives  I found it hard to believe these were coming from the same person.  I honestly got the impression, and I certainly wouldn't pretend to speak for him, that this was seen as his chance to un-fuck up (fuck down?) what was done to FM radio.  The memos, guides, orders, formats etc. all seemed to directly contradict what had happened to FM.  

From one of his initial meetings..  "FM gave up on music -- or just tested it to death."  (ummm....!!!)

In a machiavellian world, imagine someone getting to completely screw up a medium, so that a new medium would be a viable alternative.  I don't believe that was the case, but it was a textbook execution of it.  Listen to the FM stations that were slowly smothered to death, then turn on early XM and you'll hear these FM Stations once again, pre consultant.  

I completely get that it sounds insane, and if I hadn't lived it, I wouldn't believe it either .   

The secret to being a good radio consultant, much like a good talk radio host, is pick a position and stick to it.  Keep repeating your concepts like they were handed down on the 3 tablets from god on Mount Sinai.  If your concepts don't work, it's not that they were wrong, they just weren't executed properly.   Then, as things change, quietly 're-shape' your 'absolute, unwavering, carved in stone' concepts to adapt.

I believe Lee was correct with his vision for FM radio, BTW.   I've seen so many consultants come in with good ideas, executed by management that didn't understand the concepts but could only read the directives.  This is a recipe for disaster and the consultant is blamed for the flawed execution of their vision.  There are legitimately two sides to every story, especially this one.

Increasingly, as Abrams met with radio stations that he hoped to cultivate as clients, he was getting beaten up by suit-wearing researchers who'd adopted Abrams's research methods, applied higher-order mathematics and statistical analyses and dazzled with their presentations. He was telling station owners and general managers how to combine emotion and science; the researchers were telling the GMs: If you play X song, you will get Y rating and earn Z dollars.  "I think people became a bit addicted to research because it's convincing," Abrams says. "It puts everything in black-and-white with no question marks."

As Lee says, his signature album oriented rock format "shot itself in the foot with over-research, It forgot the roots, the foundation, the natural audience's needs, missing the whole point."

The early FM days were much like the early days of the internet.  A bunch of guys with a bunch of motherboards, power supplies and modems, wired together and sitting on desks, tapping away in a *nix shell, giving out free internet accounts and smoking too much.  The model was slowly choking itself to death, but it sure was amazing to be a part of.  And we hated the conglamerates who came in and tried to make ISP into a viable business.  But it had to be done in order to pay the salaries of the people who didn't want it to be done .

I'd never deny that Lee is a genius, but like any genius' I know (and I know a bunch) they aren't confined to one idea or one concept.  I think that his visions and ideas for FM were as honest and absolute as his visions for XM, even though they may have appeared to be at polar opposites.  If you actually study his concepts, you understand what he was aiming for, how it was bastardized by binary thinkers, (The Hayes and Logans of the world) and how XM was a chance to 'fix' it.   FM offered a platform to 'experiment' with concepts and ideas, and the ones that worked were carried forward to XM, and the ones that failed weren't.  I believe it was as black and white as that.  Flemming killed quite a few patients on the path to penicillin.   

Old Codger wrote:

THIS is why radio isn't turning the profits it once did.  It's being run by fools who take their advice almost exclusively from nincompoops.  I'll betcha dollars to donuts that some radio stations win in the ratings in spite of themselves and others ONLY because the 'competition' simply does 'it' worse.

I agree with that.   The problem with consultants started when they became whipping boys for the poor execution of a format.  If something doesn't work, I can cover my ass and protect the Lexus payments by blaming bad advice on the consultants.

It wasn't always that way, and as you said, there are some exceptional exceptions to the rule .  

But to use the Abrams example, what he was trying to push was a format based on psychography to music,  asking and looking for answers as to 'why' something fit a format, based on research, logic, instinct and heart.  But his concept was taken and pulled apart by the binary thinkers as I labelled them, and completely crushed.  It's like looking at a Van Gough painting and assuming because you can recognize the colors, you can recreate the art.  It's not that simple.  Unfortunately many didn't discover this till they had set up art galleries and tried to pawn of cheap counterfeit shite as legitimate art.   Same story with radio.


 

Dial Twister wrote:

Man, these MBAs and CPAs sure are geniuses, ain't they? 

They aren't stupid.  They were given terrible advice as part of a power struggle, and followed it.  It was never their responsibility to know everything about the business, they needed to rely on the people within it for that, and unfortunately greed and politics won out.  

I believe they are slowly now at least starting to understand what went wrong.

As I've said before, too many times..  There used to be a healthy albeit mercurial relationship between programing and sales.  The PD and the Sales Managers, much like Ralph Wolf and Sam Sheepdog, knew they had roles to play, and pushed against each other hard.   Sales yelled you couldn't have good programing without their money, and programing yelled that sales couldn't sell anything without their product, and life was good.

Unfortunately as more and more shareholders became involved, the scales began to tip in favour of the money generators, without considering the process involved.  Sales Managers were promoted up the ranks and moved into positions of control over decision making.  16 minute commercial clocks, automation, anything and everything that could generate a better bottom line.  Play the hits and people will show up right?  There's no need for all that other 'fill'.  

And so, no longer was there a level playing field and healthy discussion.  It became the sales way or the highway, and many great programmers shrugged their shoulders and took the highway.

Unfortunately we've now come full circle, where the money people are slowly coming to realize that the old guard were correct.  You can't have programing without sales, but you can't have sales without programing either.  The problem is there's been very little peer development over the past 25 years or so while this was all playing out.  So even if you know you need a good programer, where do you find them?

There are some awesome programmers out there, but not enough to go around.  So as was discussed earlier, people are promoted above their level of competence in order to 'keep the lights on' and the environment, not to mention bottom line, gets nasty.

It will all settle itself out again.  It will just take time, and lots of learnin' .
 

i go to sirius/xm's "outlaw country" if i want to go off the conventional path (and yes, they play the ocasional can-con, ok, so it's neil young but they dig deep... this plus the ocasional hank snow tune). i wonder if little steven really has his hands in the programming? the latest from pokey lafarge to the stone's "far away eyes" is a broad spectrum indeed.
 

Last edited by the original hank (April 16, 2016 1:24 am)