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Thursday, July 12, 2007
7/13: Can oldies return to Atlanta?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
CBS in New York City, after two years, brought back its classic oldies station WCBS-FM Thursday. The interim format, something called Jack, was jockless and ran a variety of music, mostly from the 70s, 80s and 90s with a heavy emphasis on rock. It drew significantly fewer viewers than CBS and lost a lot of revenue but ratings had started to improve before CBS reverted back.
Here’s an MP3 of the actual switch back.. It ends with Journey’s “Dont’ Stop Believin’” like “The Sopranos,” then does a long retrospective of the 1960s and ’70s with old soundchecks and news clips. First song: “Do It Again” by the Beach Boys.
Atlanta has not had an oldies station since 2005 when Cool 105.7 switched to Hispanic. Does New York’s move mean oldies isn’t as dead as a commercial format as many people think? And can it come back to Atlanta?
The problem: the closest to a heritage “oldies” station in Atlanta was Fox, which lasted from 1989 to 2003. It had huge numbers and revenues in the early to mid 1990s as the Baby Boomers gorged on the Beach Boys, the Supremes and the Beatles. The Ultimate Fox oldies concerts would fill the Georgia Dome.
But those listeners aged out of the desirable demos advertisers tend to favor. And Atlanta is far younger than New York. So formats such as hip-hop, rock, top 40 and country work better. Fox started losing steam here in Atlanta in the late 1990s when radio consolidation began and the station went through a series of owners. Cox was the station’s final owner but its effort failed to perk up ratings or revenues with more focused playlists. Listeners complained that it had gone from “good times and great oldies” to “good times and eight oldies.” Nowadays, advertisers don’t value the core oldies listeners (who are mostly over the age of 50 now) as much as younger listeners. So even a decent number of listeners doesn’t necessarily translate into commensurate dollars. And that’s why oldies stations have disappeared nationwide.
97.1/The River is the closest to an “oldies” station but its core music is the 1970s, not the 1960s. And as we noted a few days ago, it keeps a far tighter playlist than most oldies stations.
Even stations in the ‘burbs which have more potential oldies listeners than downtown Atlanta have dropped the format e.g. Sunny 100 in Canton, Lake 102.3 out near Gainesville.
One theory why New York brought CBS back: Arbitron, which measures ratings, is starting to drop those decades-old paper diaries for a “people meter,” which is a pager-like device that can “hear” what people are actually listening to, rather than relying on them to write it down. In Philadelphia, the first city to get these meters, rock and oldies did much better than under the old system.
Interestingly, WCBS in New York always had a tradition of playing 70s and 80s cuts and the new version skews a bit more toward those decades than they did a few years back. But plenty of ’60s cuts survive, too. You can scan the playlist here..
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7/12: Mara’s “Palm” arrival
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Getting a drawing of your face on wall of the Palm restaurant in Buckhead is kind of like the Atlanta version of getting a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame — except you don’t have to pay any money for the privilege.
Mara Davis, Dave FM mid-day host, got hers last night at a party and she was thrilled. “This is better than my bat mitzvah!” she joked, grinning ear to ear. She signed her drawing with the words “Extra Cheese Please!” referencing her daily “cheese” during her all-request, thematic lunch hours. (At 12:25 p.m. every day, she’ll play a song that doesn’t fit Dave’s format and she’ll often sing along, too, in cheese-like fashion.)
Oddly, the team of Chicago illustrators who do all the Palm headshots made Mara look blonde, when in fact, her hair is very dark. Apparently, the photo they used made her hair look a lot lighter than in reality. Has Mara ever actually had blonde hair? “No way!” she said. “Never!”
