WKFY

[Garrett Wollman]

<<On Wed, 21 Aug 2013 11:26:58 -0400 (EDT), Mark Connelly <markwa1ion@aol.com> said:

> When DJ's do talk now, it's often the silly morning stuff which is
> loaded more with celebrity gossip / Hollywood pratfall stories than
> any news, traffic, weather, or business the listener really needs.
> Apparently it's OK to reduce the amount of music selections during
> morning drive so we can all figure out what the Kardashians or
> Lindsey Lohan are up to.

There's certainly a market for that. (Thankfully it's not the whole
market!)  Lots of people have "news fatigue" in AM drive and just want
to be entertained, not lectured earnestly about Something Important
Happening In The Rest Of The World (and for that, there's always NPR).

> The problem of designing a "50+" music station is that the main
> "river" of Top 40 that the majority of listeners followed started
> breaking off into various "streams" around 1965 when both the
> Beatles and Bob Dylan set Album Rock in motion.  By the late '60s
> there were two distinct radio audiences in high schools and
> colleges.

This was still true in the mid-1980s.  The kids who listened to WIZN
and the kids who listened to WXXX were totally different crowds at my
high school.  Things really didn't start to fragment further until the
late '80s when hip-hop broke into the mainstream.

> But weren't just as many of those '50s / early '60s top 40
> aficionados on a harder rock track by their college / early work
> lives in the '70s?

Yes, but those are the people classic-rock stations are programmed
for.

-GAWollman