Casey Kasem

[Howard Glazer]

----- Original Message -----
From: Maureen Carney <m_carney@yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: Casey Kasem


> Well, I do have the Osmonds on CD, so I don't have to depend on the radio
to hear them. No way on Leif Garrett, however. For me the pop music of the
last 15-20 years is lost.
>
> I did hear a best-of Casey Kasem show on either Sirius or XM playing in a
restaurant back in March. Mostly 80s stuff - it was just strange hearing
Culture Club, Duran Duran and even Michael Jackson on a countdown.
>
> Maureen
>

Sirius and XM's decades channels are now identical, and are using Sirius'
shallower, safer, better-testing playlists. There's really very little
difference between what you'd hear on WODS and what you'd hear on '60s on 6
or '70s on 7 right now -- maybe a few more '60s titles than 'ODS, but
nothing you hadn't heard jillions of times over the years when Oldies 103.3
basically meant the biggest hits of the '60s. The '80s channel, staffed (via
voicetracking most of the time) by old MTV VJs, is focused narrowly on acts
like Culture Club, Duran Duran, Van Halen, etc. -- just the music you
remember from MTV, with none of the crossover content that used to bleed
into Casey's American Top 40s every week.

XM had a much looser approach to the decades, apparently much too loose for
the big-chain programmers hired by Sirius, and as a result, except for the
weekly Casem shows, every song played is 100 percent familiar to 100 percent
of the listeners as the result of airplay on FM. Sirius' thinking is that
what oldies fans want is FM without the commercials rather than content that
goes beyond the standard FM playlist. They're most likely right -- as I
think back on the broad-playlist challenges that have been squashed by the
tried-and-true on FM over the years (WROR vs. WZLX, circa 2003, comes to
mind.), I realize that the average listener is using radio as a pure
background medium and wants to know and  like, or at least not be distracted
by, every song played. It's just sad for oldies geeks like myself who
enjoyed being surprised by radio every so often when XM's programmers were
in charge.

Howard