With today's post, I'm going to fill you in on how we worked the music at KZZO-FM during the time I was there. In order to provide a well-rounded mix of current and contemporary hits, the songs came in the following categories:
A - This designated the hottest hits and had the heavier rotation.
B - This was applied to songs that were trending upward to becoming hot or going downward after being hot. These received medium rotation.
C - This was used for our newest music. We would play one C per hour at about the :50 minute mark.
D - This was applied to songs between one and five years old.
E - For songs more than five years old.
A/O - This was short for Album Oriented Rock. Hard rock and heavy metal songs in the Top 40 would only be played at night. If they became really big hits in the A and B categories, we would only play them after 3pm.
A/C - Short for Adult Contemporary and they would be really soft songs that we only played between 9am and 3pm.
R - These were Recurrent songs that we would put back into rotation after we had stopped playing them for a few months.
L - This stood for "Lady" and was the label for love songs, although there were exceptions. Owner Jid also put songs referred to as "Freaks" in this category. "Freaks" were songs that EVERYBODY liked.
Any given week, we had about 12 A songs, 12 B songs and 4 C songs. We played about four A's and three B's an hour. This meant that during a six hour shift, we would typically play every A song twice. All the DJs screamed about this. However, Jid pointed out that in the larger markets, the hottest songs got fully rotated every two hours, so he was already being lenient on the rotations.
(A side note: A radio DJ has to be able to withstand hearing the same song hundreds of times. I had a pretty decent tolerance level for that. However, in all the time I was a DJ, there was only one song I ever got sick of. That was Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the USA." Don't get me wrong. It's a great song about something that matters, but I couldn't stand the same melody line being played over and over. I vowed to never play that song again. And if I hear it on the radio today, I immediately change the station.)
I need to point out that most radio stations have their own systems for getting new music on the air. You've probably seen movies and TV shows in which a radio DJ will get a new record in the mail and put it on the air right away. That almost never happens in real life. Most radio stations will play the new songs in rotation on Monday and change the playlists on a weekly basis.
Our competitor, KTQM, had all its Top 40 music recorded on reel-to-reel tape and was provided by a music service. The station would have several tape players that would play songs in an alternating order through an automated system to simulate some illusion of a mix of new and old songs (similar to what I dealt with at KENM/KNIT, but that station used cassettes instead of reel-to-reels). This meant that it could take up to two weeks before newly released songs were played on that station because the service provided reels with the latest hits on a weekly basis.
I had posted earlier about how KZZO couldn't meet everyone's expectations about what a "really good" station should be like. It also didn't meet mine. When we launched, I thought we were going to be Top 40 radio that led instead of followed. I thought we would be quick to play new songs that would obviously be hits. The weekend we made the switch, we started playing Prince's "Purple Rain" before it was released as a single AND we played the album version. It helped us appear to be pro-active in terms of new music.
Despite that beginning, Jid kept a tight control on the new music in the weeks that followed. The routine was that he would meet with Program Director Crad and get out the newest copy of "Radio and Records." He would look at the Top 40 chart and see which songs were new, which ones were moving up and which ones were moving down. He would designate the songs that would be A and B each week. He would then ask Crad to play the new songs for him so he could figure out which ones he wanted to add to the playlist as C's. If Jid didn't like a certain song, he would just have Crad sit on it until the next week.
In all reality, it wasn't a big deal if we didn't play certain songs that were only going to hit the lower depths of the Top 40. However, there would be some songs that would slowly climb up the charts and Jid wouldn't add them until he was practically forced to. One prime example was Simple Minds' "Don't You (Forget about Me)" in 1985. We didn't start playing that song until AFTER it hit #1, and Jid still HATED it. Everyone else at the station, including Crad, knew the song was a hit and that we should be playing it. Waiting to play songs meant that KTQM was getting them all on the air at least two weeks before we did. If they were beating us at this, that means we weren't really in the new music game.
When I finally got to be the Music Director, I saw firsthand what everyone else had to put up with. When we did our music meetings in person, Jid would make these sour faces anytime I played a song that he didn't like. Most of the time, these songs would go on to be big hits. It appeared that Jid didn't have much of a grasp on what was becoming popular and equated the experience to his 60s and 70s heyday. However, more than the previous Program Directors, I was successful in convincing him to add the top new artists out of the box, like Michael Jackson, Whitney Houson, Madonna and Bruce Springsteen. But anybody else, ESPECIALLY new artists, I just could not get him to budge. Every once in awhile, he wouldn't call because of some prior commitment and that permitted me to add what songs I wanted. However, that happened maybe once every two months.
The final month I was at the station saw me with COMPLETE control of the music. This was because he decided to no longer be involved in the programming, but he never told me that. He just stopped calling. Even though he was still part owner, he had apparently given up on radio. On the surface, it was great, because I could finally do the playlist the way I wanted and could transform the station into one that led as opposed to followed. Unfortunately, without Jid, the rest of the air staff decided to go rogue and play whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted without any regard to the clocks. It wasn't really worth being Music Director on those terms.
So I couldn't enjoy being Music Director with restrictions and the position was worthless when I was free to do what I wanted. That's just one of countless ways I feel like I've been forced to live life as a loser.
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