You could be right, I didn’t delve into the possible reasons why, just the numbers that show tracks are remaining in high rotation for longer, in a world where access to new/more music is everywhere.
This is so fascinating, Thanks for posting it! It’s so varied, with many music programs and a lot more news magazines, probably because NewsRadio was still a while away.
However, the more things change the more they stay the same by the looks of it:
- Afternoons from 2-4 p.m. seem to have always been a quiet shift.
- Repeats of programming on weekends and weeknights
- Stephen Watkins hosting a sacred music show on Sundays (now at 10PM on ABC Classic)
- Offspring, Life Matters’ parent show on at 9 AM.
- and of course, Late Night live repeated the following day at 4 PM!
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There is less new music coming through. That’s why songs are staying in the charts SO much longer these days. In the 80s and even 90s there were always new hits coming through every week to knock the current hits both off the charts and also the radio playlists. Take a look at the monthly charts from the 80s and you’ll see what I mean, month after month of massive hits being churned through. It just doesn’t happen these days.
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Less new music, or less new music commercial radio is willing to spin? Because I’m not convinced there’s less new music.
Before the internet influenced (top 50 singles) charts, I’d keep an eye on the US, UK, & Australian top 50 singles charts. The UK chart moved extremely fast, tracks came and went in the blink of an eye. The US chart was the opposite, moving extremely slow, tracks would hang around the top 50 for several months. And Australia was somewhere in between.
There was still the same amount of new music, but in the UK they played/bought anything and everything, where the US was much more selective with their music selection.
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Or at least, less new music of sufficient quality perhaps to generate interest/airplay?
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When 3XY, 5AD, 4IP and etc. were in their heyday, everyone listened to the same songs, watched the same TV shows, read the same one or two major newspapers, went to the footy on Saturday arvos. Today in the world of the net and streaming and on-demand, it’s no longer a mass shared experience.
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You mentioned YouTube, so using that as an example… there are countless songs on YouTube with millions if not hundreds of millions of views and a huge like to dislike ratio then never get airtime on Australian radio.
So, in terms of sufficient quality, that leads me to believe that’s not it.
The question could be asked, if Australian radio was willing to expand their library to include these tracks, would they gain or lose listeners? Maybe they have research that suggests people are happy for radio to be even more repetitive these days? I don’t know.
I’m talking the 80s. There was definitely more new music being released, both commercial and alternative. It’s true there’s always been more churn in the UK than US, but in the 80s the new chart hits just kept on coming and pushing other songs out of the charts. Take a look at weekly and monthly charts from the 80s. You’ll see how choc a block most Top 40 lists are with massive hits, it’s quite astonishing.
Commercial ‘Hit’ radio in Australia, I think, is still pretty risk averse, they let Triple J play the new stuff, and only play songs that start becoming popular there, or somewhere else.
I find it really interesting with how Rosé is charting now, yet would be almost framed here as some new debuting artist, not a solo offshoot of an immensely successful career.
I heard one of the album tracks on Coles Radio of all things, so hopefully there’s a some airplay beyond the somewhat safe Bruno Mars crossover, but it shows how backwards it is, if the exact same tracks were from a generic “new Aussie artist” (or Kiwi, but that doesn’t count) they’d have never been played on radio here.
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If it didn’t feature Bruno Mars, it’s the type of track I’d imagine to rack up over 1 billion YouTube views (it’s not far off it now), and still not get a second of airtime on commercial radio here.
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They must have been getting radio airplay too because that was mostly how people found out about new music then. It’s a struggle for new music to get airplay now. It has to hit the top of the charts before radio discovers it.
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New music does get played. Just not on stations or online platforms that people “our” (general “our”) posters frequent.
Just a little perspective here. 3XY stopped playing Top 40 music circa 37 years ago.
Of course it does. But how is it selected? There is no coordination or curation of what is played, so 99% of it has little to no chance of becoming widely known or mainstream (or monetized), that’s the problem. At least when the record companies and radio stations were in control they knew how to push new talent and songs that were of some quality.
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There’s a big difference between niche stations/platforms and mainstream radio which has the biggest chunk of listeners.
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Younger people don’t listen to broadcast radio in the same numbers as we did as it’s not 1975 anymore. Radio will never be as big as it was.
A lot of that has to do with radio stations skewing themselves to certain demographics which has chased away younger listeners.
Programming cannot fix technology changes. 2SM, 4IP and others (as Top 40/CHR) on AM for example. Or WABC, WLS and KHJ as USA examples.
From Transdiffusion - a look at ATV’s first two years of involvement in Australian broadcasting, being the majority shareholders of the Macquarie Network.
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I had a listen to some of Casey Kasem’s American Top 40 today on 2NUR FM, this year was 1985.
He welcomed a couple of Australian stations to the countdown, “The Fox FM” (Melbourne) and “6SE” (Esperance WA) as he introduced them …
I found these interesting as I don’t remember the Melbourne station ever using ‘The’ in the station ID along with ‘FM’… To me, it was always only ever know as either ‘Fox FM’ or in more recent years ‘The Fox’.
And with 6SE, I recall they were known as “Radio 747” in the late 1980s, but not sure about before that… according to Wikipedia, they only started in 1982.
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