WKRP saw the future.
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jefgg — 13 years ago(March 12, 2013 06:47 PM)
You made a good point. It was a good episode. It is nice that Venus saw that he made a mistake and WKRP took him back. Does that happen often in real life? My buddy says "never take a counter offer". I heard the radio business can be very cutthroat. I would not be surprised if there was bad blood when a disc jockey left a station. But the WKRP crew seemed to have love for one another.
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KobiyashiMauru — 12 years ago(September 22, 2013 09:02 PM)
I can't stand the "same eight oldies format" on classic rock stations today. Also when I hit the scan button on my radio and finally find a REAL GOOD oldies station that plays the more obscure classic rock songs, in a week or two everyone starts to sing, talk and laugh in Spanish!
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hariseldon59 — 11 years ago(April 07, 2014 06:02 AM)
Not just that, but Mama Carlson was right about AM radio not being able to compete with FM for music, now AM IS mostly news and talk radio.
It's uncanny how accurate that was. Even stations like WLS AM, Chicago, one of the hottest rock and roll stations in the country in the '60s and '70s, had gone to an all talk format by the '90s. -
baran_erik — 10 years ago(August 23, 2015 03:24 AM)
It didn't take a genius to see, or hear, rather, that the future of popular music stations was going to be on FM. The tinny, static-y sound of AM is no match for stereo FM. The only thing that AM has over FM is coverage area. DXing must be awfully boring nowadays.
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country_tanner — 9 years ago(June 07, 2016 07:42 PM)
Close WLS gave up music in 1989 and I believe they were one of the last if not THE last major AM players in the past to had done so. On the other hand I believe WLS wasn't much of a rocker in it's last days since sometime ago I heard an aircheck of WLS from 1988 and they were playing Nat King Cole and Dean Martin.
For a time I had belong to a website about radio and once the topic of "what was the last major rock & roll big market top 40 station" was brought up..apparently the winner of that was Denver's KIMN-AM 950 which still played the hits all the way until 1988 even though the Mile High City had a few stations on FM sporting that format at the time such as Y108 and KS-104.
The late 80s seem to be a period when so many big AM stations threw in the towel as far as playing rock & roll went. NYC's 66 WNNNNNNBC came to an end as well in 1988 though in its last years they were more of an oldies station and Buffalo's 1520 WKBW came to an end I believe in 1987 when the station was split away from its sister TV station to become WWKB while WKBW remains with Buffalo's channel 7 to this day. -
Doug-Oh — 9 years ago(July 31, 2016 05:55 PM)
They weren't totally automated.
They were usually "easy listening" (Muzak-like) stations that played music off big reels.
It still required an employee to change the reels (which ran maybe 30-50 mins.) and provide local weather updates. -
jimmorg — 9 years ago(August 03, 2016 11:46 AM)
The first automated stations needed someone to change the reel to reel tapes, usually every three hours, and most needed a board op to insure the proper commercials played. At that time, I'm not even sure it was legal to leave an radio station overnightI worked at an automated station in the 80s that used reel to reel tapes, and although we were live between 6a and 6p, we still had board ops overnight.
That's not the case anymore. Computers now allow stations to operated unattended for weeks at a time.
Sad.
WKRP illustrates that the dj's were just as important as the music to attract listeners.