This instrumental was a HUGE hit the winter of 1973–74. I remember hearing it everywhere!
I can only speak for Germany, but not a lot, not on the radio. Maybe they are played for old people like me (though I’ve never liked the song) on oldies parties, but Baccara never got really adopted by younger people (maybe sometimes ironically), unlike many German Schlager hits of the same time.
You mean, like “Wenn der Mondschein Nicht So Romantisch Wär” and “Er Steht im Tor”?
I love that song, and some DJs loved it for the extended bathroom break they could take.
Note that was in the soundtrack of Guardians 2.
1966 had two big hits- The Ballad of the Green Berets and
California Dreamin. One is still in constant rotation on Classic Rock, the other is a one hit wonder that is not played much.
Big Hit of '67 was To Sir with Love- I have not heard that for a long time.
Several hit disco songs went away.
I don’t know “Wenn der Mondschein…”, but “Er steht im Tor (und ich dahinter)” by the oh-so-sweet Wencke Myhre was a tad earlier, from the sixties. But yeah, many young people who weren’t even born at the time listen and party to such songs (it started in the early nineties, parallel to the ABBA revival).
(I have a special place in my heart for “Er steht im Tor” because I used to be a football goalie in my youth)
ETA: I just googled “Wenn der Mondschein” and I see that it was by Thomas Fritsch. I have never heard the song, and I know Fritsch only as an actor, but he sure had the looks to be successful also as a Schlager singer.
We had a tape of the 1969 hit parade in my high school German class. I listened to it a lot, but the only other ones I remember are “Yokohama Baby, Yokohama Boy” and “Denver, Colorado.”
What about these guys:
A lobster dinner at Scott’s the next time I’m in London if you can sing this one! 
Oldies and Easy Listening stations were birthed around the same time and artists ended up in one bucket or the other; rarely both. (Someone like Neil Diamond would be treated like two distinct artists: pre-1970 Neil and post-1970 Neil.)
These two were concurrently huge hits in the Spring of 1975. Has anybody heard them lately?
Oh my god, you managed to link to fucking Modern Talking, a-ha and OMD in one breath? Modern fucking Talking was the absolute nadir of Western popular music, nay, the nadir of any music ever, while a-ha and OMD are absolutely OK bands. And they both aren’t one-hit wonders like in the US, but both had a string of hits in Europe and are still going strong.
Modern Talking was played a lot at the adult contemporary station where I worked in the '90s. So were Tears for Fears, The Pet Shop Boys, and numerous other artists I can’t recall at the moment.
Modern Talking and the other bands you mentioned had three things in common: they played pop songs on mostly electronic instruments in the 80s. What they didn’t have in common was a sense for a song, or a sense of music in general.
Sorry for my rants. but Modern Talking is a trauma from my teenage years. It doesn’t help that fuckface Dieter Bohlen still is constantly on German TV.
I merely meant they were popular, not necessarily good.
I’ll back you up on this one. Didn’t hear “She Sheila” anywhere from the mid-80s until about 2016 when a local 1980s-format independent station started playing it. Today, Sirius XM’s First Wave station will play The Producers very occasionally, and it’s usually “What’s He Got” over “She Sheila”.
a-ha should be a two-hit wonder in the U.S… “The Sun Always Shines On T.V.” made it to #20 on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart. That’s generally (but not always) high enough on the chart for a song to be generally remembered in the future.
Notably, however, MTV in the U.S. rarely played the video for “The Sun Always Shines On T.V.” Probably would have gone Top 10 with a little more push from MTV, which was still very relevant to chart success in the mid-80s.
Sure. It’s a positive (or negative depending on POV) feedback loop.
I’ve been sitting in when we made these tests. I’m going to do a long rundown and hide it for those not interested in the TL;DR
Summary
Mind you, this is about a decade old, but listening to radio and still being in touch with former colleagues I don’t think much have changed.
- What’s your intended audience?
- For many it it’s the coveted 25-44 (-ish) demographics. This might differ some between countries and markets, but the truism is that these are out of college/uni, starting families, buying homes or IOW making a lot of investments which is interesting to advertisers.
- The most popular format is CHR - Contemporary Hit Radio. What they play on what would typically be called Top 40. I guess the playlist today would skew heavily towards Ed Sheeran, Adele, Ariana Grande, Rhianna.
- AC - Adult Contemporary aims a little older and is generally not as quick to add the latest. There’s an overlap with CHR, They’ll play Harry Styles and Taylor Swift, but not the week the latest single has dropped. They’ll wait a while to be sure it’s really a chart topper.
- Then there’s the type of station I used to work at: Mix- the greatest Mix of Hits and Oldies. This used to be a very successful format: safe, familiar songs. If we’re talking older stuff, you’d hear Eagles/New Kid in Town, but never LZ/Immigrant song.
- Very few stations will cater to 60+ (except for classic rock). The truism here is that they’re not consuming as much, are set in their ways and not so easily swayed by ads, have a bit less money (being retired). There is no money to be made from older people.
- Then there are the obvious genre stations: country, hip-hop/rap ASF. I’m leaving them out of this, since the thread is about popular music in general.
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In any given market, you’re going to try to find a group of people who’re not finding what they want from the line-up. When you find that group, start figuring out what to do. Since it’s a music station, defining the boundaries is key. And since we’re talking about older music, let’s say that we’re starting an oldies station.
In a way this is safe and easy. There aren’t any new oldies being made. If you market your station as “The best of the 80’s and 90’s” the catalogue is kinda closed. So start defining what kind of 80’s+90’s station you are: A top 40, classic rock? You’ll not find a radio audience that will put up with Macarena segued to Black Hole Sun. -
So, classic rock it is. Billboard is a great tool. Start scouring the charts for songs that’ll fit your format. Try to be as middle of the road within that format as possible. Bon Jovi, Nirvana, Guns’n’Roses. Sure. Pixies? Maybe. Rob Zombie? Probably not.
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Get a list of about 400 songs. Remember, your rotation will be a total of 250-300 in total, so you don’t need more. Find the hook in each song. It might be a riff, part of the chorus or something else (Think Wooo-Hoo from Blur Song 2). Edit it down to 10 second snippets.
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Find people in your intended demographic who are willing to sit in a town hall school auditorium or some such for an hour, getting some coffee, donuts and maybe ten bucks. You’ll need about 50 people. When they get there, you give them a score card. You want to find out as much about them as possible: exact age, what stations they listen to most of the time, how they rate that station ASF. When you’re processing the result, you’ll discard anyone who spends a lot of time listening to soft rock. You’re not going to win them over with heavier stuff, and their opinion will skew the result.
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Start playing the song snippets and have the people score them. Nobody’s going to be able to listen to 400 hooks and remain sane, so the whole process will need to be repeated a number of times. As with any survey, you’ll have to do a lot of mixing. Welcome to the Jungle will probably score well if it’s the first of 50 hooks being played, but not so great if it’s #48 of fifty. So throw it in again the next day in the middle.
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Keep doing this until you’ve tested the four hundred songs and you feel confident that the rating holds up. Dump the bottom 125.
Why? There are only so many songs that’ll get a 5 of 5 star rating. If you find 290 (you won’t), keep those. Any time you play a song with a 4 star rating, you take the risk of someone zoning out and flipping to another station, because (and this is statistics again) this one listener might’ve given that song 2 stars, and then they’re gone, maybe forever. As long as you only play the 5 star stuff, you’re somewhat safe. -
Plug it all in some software and let it feed the playlist to a computer.
This is the simplified version. There are so many more parameters being checked, double checked and cross checked.
I’ve sat at the very back at such testings to see how people react. You see 50 people swaying along, tapping feet and mouthing lyrics when they hear Welcome to the Jungle. When we played Pixies Where is my Mind, we might as well have played Bobby Goldsboro’s Honey. No movement and the score cards uniformly showed 1 star.
And for those who didn't want to read all that, remember the one defining trait for ALL commercial radio: They play music for people who like music, not for people who love and are interested in music. There are so very, many more in the former category.
Yeah, that’s one I feel I still hear all the time, although where, I don’t know. I wasn’t alive when it came out, but when I saw that I was like “is that the ‘you’re a fine girl?’ song.” Somebody out here plays it all the time. Could be Me-TV FM Chicago, which I listen to a bit. I would consider a mainstream standard by how well I know it.
I think I may have posted it in one of the Cafe Society pages on current earworms or a similar thread within the last year. I was born in 1975, and have absolutely no memory of this song. A drummer friend of mine sent me an email about a year ago sharing this song and how I might appreciate it as well as a number of other songs by The Producers. Had no knowledge of this band; never heard any of their songs and wondered to myself why nobody has ever brought them to my attention. And, since having become acquainted with them, I still haven’t heard their songs in the wild.
Was coming to comment on Dick’s hair. That was quite the bouffant!
I kind of think of a-ha as the band that just won’t go away. It’s a bit of a mystery to me. Not really sure what they ever had; don’t know why they’re still here.
j
I used to see Dick Dale in his driveway washing his RV/tour bus as I walked to a favorite bodysurfing spot in the 1980s. He was cultivating a weirdo Phil Spector type image at the time living with a pet tiger and a teenaged girlfriend. A classmate of mine had the balls to knock on his door and ask him to play a concert at our community college and he turned out to be very generous and accommodating.