MOR - What is this? I think it vaguely means pop ballads, but what does it actually stand for? A quick googling was not too informative.
Standards - I’ve heard references to musicians doing standards… what are they?
.45s, 7s, and other random numbers - I know these refer to albums, but what exactly do they mean?
45’s, 78’s and 33 1/3’s refer to rotations per minutes on a turntable. 33 1/3’s are the large LP’s, 45’s and 78’s were for single recordings.
I still have a fairly large collection of vinyl, but no turntable. 
MOR= Middle of the Road. Bland. Boring. Manilow.
Standards are tunes that have been recorded and performed so often that they are, well, standard fare. A lot of Gershwin tunes are considered standards. As is “My Way”, recorded by everyone from Frank Sinatra to Sid Vicious. If a song played late in the evening by a wedding band, there’s a good chance it’s a standard.
45 stands for 45 RPMs. 7 stands for inches, I think. Like a 7" single is a 45, but the 12" single is a dance mix ( and the same size as an album.)
I thought it stood for mainstream-oriented rock, but I could be wrong.
Could very well be. Makes sense, since AOR= Album Oriented Rock. However, during my stint working in the record industry (very brief), I always heard MOR= Middle of Road. Could just be a quirk of the people I worked with, though.
MOR is “middle of the road,” but it doesn’t really mean boring like Manilow as much as safe, nonthreatening, obvious, and not too edgy. Granted, that means anything on modern clearchannel radio.
Thanks a bunch, folks!
I’m curious, does MOR also work in-genre as well? Besides MOR-pop (which is the default, I assume), is there MOR-jazz? MOR-rap? MOR-metal?
About standards, would a lot of Beatles songs be considered standards, due to everyone and their brother covering them? Or do they have to actually be recorded many times by different artists in order to earn that distinction?
I’m not sure what makes a song a “standard”, just as I’m not sure what makes anything a “classic”. If there’s any semblance of congruity on what constitutes such a thing, I’m unaware of it.
However, if you look at many examples of “standards” or “classics”, you may begin to see some patterns. I think it may also depend on the genre of the artist doing the cover and/or the genre of the original - for example, lots of rock and roll bands started by doing old blues standards, and lots of rock bands since then have started by doing rock and roll standards…if any of that makes sense… :smack:
Nah, no such thing.
MOR originally stood for Middle of the Road, but there’s no reason its use couldn’t have changed to Mainstream-Oriented Rock. There never was any good definition of what constituted Middle of the Road anyway; it was just an industry term for softer rock that people other than teenage rock purists wanted to hear.
Again, “standards” originally meant the kind of music that adults listened to when rock and roll became popular. They were the works of the great songwriters (Harold Arlen, Cole Porter, Broadway show tunes, etc.) and the type of music sung by Frank Sinatra and the million other individual singers. I can imagine that the use has also broadened, but the singers and standards channel on digital cable still features exactly these songs. For me, a “standard” has to be pre-Beatles, at least in form if not necessarily timing. Beatles and their ilk are “oldies” or “classic rock.”
There’s no MOR anything in the old sense that I know of, as it’s been replaced by “soft sounds” and other terms, and especially no exact equivalent in other genres. Some middleaged jazz purists would argue that Smooth Jazz is the equivalent for jazz, but that’s just the same sort of prejudice flipped on its head.