monkey nonsense

noooooo!!! not another one of my favorite radio stations!! whyyyyyyyyyy!??! first whfs, then z104 (though i hadn’t followed them as closely after high school) and now oldies 100! grrr, i still listen to oldies and i’m not 50!!!

boo, i’m sad. i won’t even make it back to my car by 5pm to hear the last song.

Posted at 10:22 AM ET, 04/ 3/2006
Goodbye Oldies, Hello What…More ‘Classic Rock?’

The current incarnation of Washington’s oldies radio station, Big 100.3, is in its final hours. By 5 p.m. today, the station will die, to be replaced, according to executives at competing stations, by the market’s second classic rock outlet.

The new station will carry the same name and call letters, but a different selection of music, seeking to appeal to a different audience.

1 PM UPDATE:

Here’s how the station is describing the change, billed as an “evolution” to a lineup of tunes that dumps Motown, Elvis, anything pre-late 60s, and pretty much all black music. What you will hear: Mostly 70s pop rock–think Billy Joel, CCR, Elton John, the Eagles. Here’s the station’s promo for the new format.

And here’s what has been playing earlier today on the oldies station:

You’ve Got a Friend James Taylor 10:10am
My World Is Empty Without You Diana Ross & the Supremes 10:07am
I Shot the Sheriff Eric Clapton 10:03am
Hooked on a Feeling B.J. Thomas 10:01am
Sweet Caroline Neil Diamond 9:57am
Shoop Shoop Song Betty Everett 9:55am
Reason to Believe Rod Stewart 9:51am
Piano Man Billy Joel 9:46am
Suspicious Minds Elvis Presley 9:42am

It’ll be interesting to see what tune comes last–the station’s promos say the switchover will occur at 5 this afternoon. Anybody like to hazard a guess the last song on oldies Big 100.3? Winning entry gets a nice musical prize. Slap your guess on the comment board below before 4:30 p.m. today and check back later to see if you’ve won.

Oldies stations are dying across the country, victim of the aging audience. WBIG’s average listener is about 50, which is high for pop music radio, though right in there with the audience for all-news, sports and public stations, all of which do quite nicely in the revenue department. If the industry rumors are true and the switch is to classic rock, that doesn’t exactly bring down the average age of the audience.

But oldies stations are dying because the coalition that came together around disparate forms of pop music in the 1960s and 70s ended right there. The generations that followed that era grew up with much more segregated and finely tuned categories of music–you were either a rocker or a dance music fan. You either listened to the pop station or the light rocker, the black hits station or the harder rap outlet. Once traditional Top 40 radio splintered into a slew of narrower niches, oldies radio was doomed; a new generation of listeners grew up without the experience of listening to a little bit of everything. Oldies flits from Motown to bubble gum pop to Beatles to Elvis to 70s silliness to disco to 60s crooners, and its audience says ok, fine, if I don’t like this song by Bachman-Turner Overdrive, I’ll stick around because I know Fleetwood Mac is coming up soon. Younger audiences never learned that kind of commitment to a blend of music; they were trained to get their kind of music, all the time. So the new Big 100 later today will offer a narrower range of tunes.

Let’s see. Your nominations for last song?

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This entry was posted on Monday, April 3rd, 2006 at 1:49 pm and is filed under Music/Movies/TV. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.