Re: Thursday Night Countdown Chart)

[SteveOrdinetz <steveord@wavewizard.com>]

At 10:23 PM 3/15/00 -0500, Martin J. Waters wrote:
>
>        A few months ago, I heard the WCBS-FM weekly countdown show one day
>and it sounded like it really used the list from the year it was doing,
>which was around 1957-58-59. The reason I think it was some real list or
>another from then is that the songs were mostly so bad and so obscure.
>Actually, it was so bad it was tough to leave it on.

(some snippage)
>
>        On the WODS list: Heck, instead of starting with the Billboard
>list, they should use the old WRKO weekly list, and for the earlier years
>the WMEX and/or WBZ list, as their starting point. Back then, there were
>still regional hits and definitely regional tendencies in terms of some
>songs being more or less popular in particular regions than the national
>ranking.




Aha, herein lies the rub...if someone who's a radio nut could barely stay
tuned in because of the obscurity/general awfulness of some of these songs,
how do you expect your average oldies station listener (who actually looks
forward to hearing "Sherry" again) to stick around?  The whole idea of
specialty programming is to provide a change of pace without alienating
your core listeners.  A second problem with using a local survey (WRKO
excluded for the most part--their playlists seemed to be a committee effort
between all the stations in the RKO-General family) is actually FINDING a
lot of these songs. The Changin' Times' version of "Pied Piper" isn't on
any CD collection I know of, let alone songs like "Come Share The Good
Times With Me" by Julie Monday which peaked at #99 (I think) in Billboard,
but reached the top 15 on WBZ (and was a fave of mine in the summer of
'66...oh, for a clean copy!!!!)