If you listen to classic rock (personally, my musical tastes got frozen somewhere in the mid-80s) on Spotify, or SiriusXM, or FM radio…you may have noticed that some songs get done to death while others have been forgotten. For instance:
Stones:
No more “Satisfaction”. “Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby…” instead.
The Who:
No more “I Can See For Miles” or “Won’t Get Fooled Again”. How about “Call Me Lightning” or “Happy Jack” or “Pictures of Lily” (which I don’t think I’ve heard since the 60s)
Van Morrison:
For god’s sake no more “Moondance”. How about “Cleaning Windows” or “And It Stoned Me”
Kinks:
No more “Lola”. “Dedicated Follower of Fashion” instead.
This isn’t anything new, of course; the “classic rock” format has stuck largely to the same 40 or so artists, and the same 3 to 10 songs by any given one of those artists, for as long as I’ve been listening to the format (i.e., since the late '80s).
Trust me when I tell you that station programmers – even for stations with a really set format like classic rock – do indeed research what songs their listeners want to hear. I can guarantee that the same tired songs keep coming to the top of the list, and even lesser hits by those artists aren’t as popular, much less “deep cuts” which were never released as singles, and never got much airplay back when they were new.
The one change that I’ve seen is that some stations in the format now incorporate bands and songs from the '80s and '80s (and less from the '60s, except for a handful of the biggest groups), but again, even for those newer ones, it’s a pretty tight list.
The programmer’s goal is to keep the listener on their station, and not switch to a different station when they hear a song that they don’t know or don’t like; in the unfortunate case of a format like classic rock, it means that they play the same 100 or so songs to death. (FWIW, stations which play “holiday music” during the Christmas season run into the exact same problem; there’s a pretty damned small list of songs which most of their listeners like and want to hear.)
On some classic rock stations, there’ll be shows which feature “deep tracks,” and lesser-played songs and artists which still fit into the general format, but those shows tend to not run during the drive-time periods (often running later in the evening).
For some reason, my Pandora station plays this song all the time. My only option is to tell it to “never play it again,” which isn’t exactly what I would like.
I haven’t listened to Classic Rock radio since the dawn of streaming music. The closest thing I listen to is Little Steven’s Underground Garage on Sirius/XM. They play a lot of 60s and 70s deep cuts so no complaints there. What does bother me is that there are a lot of great songs with a strong riff (mostly surf instrumentals) that the use portions of for bumpers and background. I want to hear the entirety of “Church Key” by the Revels, not just the first 20 seconds. I wish they had a program called “The Bumper Show” where you could hear these earworms in their entirety.
Indeed; Warren Zevon is one of those artists who gets some play in the classic rock format, but largely just the one song, though several other tracks from that same album – Excitable Boy – may get some play, but much less often. It puts Zevon in the same camp, in the format, as acts like Red Ryder (“Lunatic Fringe”) and Rick Derringer (“Rock and Roll, Hoochie Koo”).
I’ve never heard “Werewolf,” but this band had a great follow-up to “Signs” called “Absolutely Right.” I still have the promo single sent to radio stations in my collection of obscure 45s. It only made it to #26 on the Billboard chart in the fall of 1971, and they fell off the map after that. Too bad. They appeared at my college around that time. They had potential. But at least they had one song that still gets radio play 54 years later.
In the classic rock era, we used to listen to a station with a playlist of 10. But that playlist would include one new and one old, and was constantly evolving.
I wish that the classic rock station I listen to didn’t have such a flat playlist.
There’s a story about an oldies station that did rigorous research into what its listeners wanted to here. The listeners said they wanted “more Motown.” The station responded by adding more Motown artists and more hits into its rotation. Ratings dived.
The station went back to the same focus groups that said they wanted more Motown and asked why they weren’t listening. It turned out that the listeners had very specific (and limited) ideas of what songs and what artists they wanted, and “more Motown” meant the station should play three Motown songs per hour instead of two.
I’m pretty sure that if a station is playing Satisfaction and not Have You Seen Your Mother Baby it’s because they’ve figured out that listeners only want X percent of music to be the Stones, and the songs will be “Satisfaction,” “Brown Sugar,” and maybe three others.
Goodness, most of the bands that I like have songs that are overplayed on the radio.
Like Van Halen: No more “Janie’s Crying” or "You Really Got Me’, and just about anything else.
My favorite band is Blind Melon, and I could do with just about any song other than No Rain. No Rain is a good song. It just sounds better when it’s surrounded by other Blind Melon songs.
But then you got bands like The Hollies. I’ve been listening to Long Cool Woman and He Ain’t Heavy for 40 years, and I still ain’t sick of them.
Or Skid Row. Play anything you want, but why not play Wasted Time a little bit more often?
Oh god yes. That’s the thing that enrages me about that station. I’ll yell “YOU GUYS TALK OVER THE BEST SONGS YOU PLAY” and then change to something else. Yes, I know that an instrumental rock station would be a hard sell. I’m just asking them to play them once in awhile without talking over them.
And yeah, @kenobi_65 pretty much nailed it with regard to the classic rock format. SiriusXM’s classic stations do a bit better than most with regard to variety, though.
But I did hear “If 6 was 9” on good ol’ terrestrial KXT the other day.
Oh hell, a thousand times this. It was bad enough when the song was nearing its end when they started talking over it, but what was worse was when a song began with a good instrumental intro ( a crunchy riff…a “hook” if you will ) and the sleazy sounding DJ would just blah-blah over it right to the beginning vocals on the first riff. It was as if the only part of the song worth listening to was the chorus, as far as they were concerned.
Eminem: Instead of playing “Love the Way You Lie” and “Lose Yourself” 20 times a day, play “The Way I Am,” “Stan,” “Berzerk,” and “Till I Collapse” every once in a while.
Goo Goo Dolls: Instead of playing “Iris” 100 times a day, play nothing at all.
