Adding a twist to station's familiar refrain


PAUL WILSON
The Hamilton Spectator
Feb 13, 2008



The radio is always on at our house. I have a Panasonic portable that gets carried from room to room. And the compact wood-cabinet Tivoli on the kitchen counter can fill the whole house with good sound -- even on AM.

In late December, I got a call at home from the BBM, the outfit that measures radio audiences. Radio stations use those numbers to sell time to advertisers.

The BBM had gotten to my name in the phone book and wanted to know if I would fill out a diary for a week. Being a radio junkie, I told them I'd be glad to.

My booklet soon arrived, along with a shiny toonie for my troubles. I did my job dutifully and sent the book back on time.

We listen to CBC out of Toronto most of the time. In the comments section of that diary, I wrote that Hamilton is way overdue for a station of its own -- we're the largest city in Canada without one.

But I do twist the dial a little, too. So my diary showed spurts of CHML. And Toronto's Q107. And CKOC, Oldies 1150, Canada's oldest station, second only to CFCF in Montreal.

I like CKOC every now and then because it sounds like the radio I grew up with in the '60s. That would have been CKLW, the Big 8, the powerhouse Top 40 station in Windsor; it was number 1 across the river in Detroit, too, heavy on the Motown.

CKOC, established 86 years ago, shook the city by switching to rock 'n' roll -- the devil's music -- in the spring of 1960.

And on Valentine's Day, 1992, CKOC announced it wasn't going to play one more new song. They were going back to The Beatles and Elvis and the Supremes. The slogan: "The station that played them then plays them again."

No more Clearasil ads. It's age-spot removers now.

I got an e-mail from CKOC the other day saying it was going to do something new, one time only.

Instead of the Big 500 -- the countdown that always sees songs such as Pretty Woman, Satisfaction, Hey Jude at the head of the list -- it's going to do the top 1150 songs.

CKOC has a short playlist. If you hear a favourite -- House of the Rising Sun, for instance -- you won't have to wait long to hear it again.

So how is it going to come up with 1150 hits?

To find out, I've parked myself in the office of Ted Yates, music director at CKOC.

He's 55. When he was a lad, working the bread and cookie aisle at Dominion in Toronto, he used his earnings to buy 45s -- 12 every week, 66 cents, plus three cents tax. He still has every one of those records -- about 6,000.

He knows every song, every artist, every date. I get nowhere trying to stump him.

But he clams up when I ask how many songs are on the hot rotation, the A-list, the big, big hits that get played over and over.

It seems that's proprietary information, like Colonel Sanders' secret herbs and spices.

"But playlists are much shorter than they were 10 years ago," he says. "Research shows the listener wants familiarity more than ever.

"You can't take the risk of someone tuning into another station or turning you off altogether."

But they'll step away from the formula a teeny bit during this countdown, which starts this Friday at noon and continues for three extended weekends until reaching number 1 sometime on Sunday, March 2 -- which happens to be the last day of the current BBM rating period.

A couple of hundred listeners respond with e-mails, each nominating three songs for the big list.

Yates knows enough about music to massage the rest of the list. He'll throw in a fistful of what he calls "spice gold, something for variety." Songs like Deck of Cards, Mother-in-Law, Pied Piper, Sixteen Candles.

There will be lots of one-hit wonders, but not Disco Duck. Or Dominique, by the Singing Nun.

No argument with him on those, but he admits Baby Sittin' Boogie is not on the list -- a serious omission in my view.

He won't play Etta James' At Last. "Maybe if we were doing the Top 2000."

He won't play the Crewcuts' Sh-Boom, from 1954. "Sounds too dated."

One more big omission. Yates admits that missing from the Big 1150 will be one song we really need to hear this week. It was recorded by New York doo-wop group The Jamies in 1958 and it's called Summertime, Summertime.

StreetBeat appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

pwilson@thespec.com 905-526-3391

http://www.thespec.com/article/324191

The death-knell of any station that is playing Oldies/Gold is encapsulated in the report: "Research shows the listener wants familiarity more than ever. You can't take the risk of someone tuning into another station or turning you off altogether."

That, dear readers, is a description of programming paranoia... and it's all based on anecdotal responses that have been boiled down 'till the bottom of the pot is scorched and blackened with ash. Not to mention that what remains is tasteless, imminently boring and eventually, utterly unappealing.

(Nice to see John Mitter's face on the Busy Bee chart. )

Aren't ALL the songs on an oldies station "familliar"?   If I were programming this station, I would play all the songs that ever made the charts.  Just like they do on the Internet ...  

Indeed, formerly_bob, if a station plays a song that somebody doesn't "like" or is "unfamiliar" and that listener leaves in a huff - there's a dynamic there that has more to do with the rest of the station than it does with that one tune.

I mean, if all it takes is one track to drive a listener away - perhaps, forever - then that would suggest the station has no other components being aired to keep that listener around.

"Station Loyalty" was more than some half-baked concept.

It was a combination of a station's on-going features, content and personalities that made a subjectively-shitty song tolerable. This, because there was always an understanding that something else worthwhile would be coming up - shortly.