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When Did Great Top 40 Radio Die?
Bemiamigo
Posts: 35 Forum Member
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Remember the days when you could turn on the radio and hear great hit after great hit?
Radio Soapbox http://wp.me/p33t2I-m0 looks at the demise of Top 40 Radio when there were so many great records in the Chart in the same week!
The article puts forward several reasons for the demise and when it happened.
What do you think? When did great Top 40 Charts phase out? Or is it an age thing?
Click on the link first and read the feature before you fire back!
Radio Soapbox http://wp.me/p33t2I-m0 looks at the demise of Top 40 Radio when there were so many great records in the Chart in the same week!
The article puts forward several reasons for the demise and when it happened.
What do you think? When did great Top 40 Charts phase out? Or is it an age thing?
Click on the link first and read the feature before you fire back!
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Comments
Then follow on further narrowcasting, stations for fans of only one genre... Kiss, Planet Rock etc. and you now have kids who only hear one type of music, and hate anything old! Myself, I like Capital for it's upbeat presentation and the imaging is great, but I can only listen for 90 mins, then it repeats itself. So a great Top 40 station would mix their playlist with the A, B and C List from Radio 2. That way kids get to hear a greater variety of music rather than just one type.
I didn't like every song on the radio when i was young, but hearing some songs now in retro playlists on Magic North (for example), i'm getting in to stuff i wasn't into back then.
Funnily enough that was when I finally stopped caring about the Top 40 too. The charts have always been a mix of wonderful, mediocre and absolute rubbish tracks but the arrival of SAW really did see a shift towards formulaic derivative rubbish becoming the norm.
Maybe it's an age thing but when you look at the charts from the late 50's to the mid 80's
and compare them to the charts from 80's to today the vast majority of the innovative, groundbreaking, melodic, musically brilliant stuff falls in the first half and the vast majority of the formulaic rubbish falls in the 2nd half.
Others may disagree...;-)
Was it ever the case? Every era has had its naff. No one, when talking about the 60s mentions Ken Dodd, Cilla or The Bachelors - all of whom were very popular recording artists at that time.
In my 40s, I have no desire to listen to Top 40 radio, I like some new, some old
Exactly ;-)
I look back to the 1980s with great fondness of the radio because it was still fun and even tuning into 88 - 91 FM on a Sunday evening to hear the Radio 1 Top 40 in stereo was a novelty.
Sort of agree, I can remember well into the 90's Simon Bates featuring a year from the 50's on the Golden Hour on Radio 1.
The trouble is that somewhere post mid eighties music became formulaic production line stuff and more about the producer than artist, I cite Steve 'Silk' Hurley's Jack Your Body as probably the first No.1 of that ilk and a taster for what was to come.
In essence its the lack of decent 'pop' music available has caused the death of Top 40 radio, not the other way around. Back in the day the music was about the personality behind it. Looking at the this weeks Top 40 its about faceless producers 'feat' some obscure vocalist. It's apparent to anyone who managed to sit through this years Brits!
X Factor and the Voice just concentrate on vocalists, but most of the innovative and melodic music of the last 50/60 years has come from bands, a collection of musicians and vocalists, but nowhere now are bands promoted. A quick look at the Radio 2 playlists will confirm that new bands are few and far between. Never will tosh like the X factor create anything long lasting, innovative or creative, just a revenue stream for Cowell.
Something melodic catchy and different will always chart, Goyte's No.1 from a couple of years ago, was the best selling single of 2012 because it was melodic and catchy and wouldn't have been out of place in a 1985 chart, but back then so was all the other stuff. In 2012 it was an oasis in a desert of mediocrity and instantly forgettable solo vocalist tosh.
You are just assuming that it should be younger people who like pop and then you grow out of it.
They get older and their tastes change.
You just happened to be the opposite to that, you didn't like pop then you did later in life.
You still got older and your tastes changed, just the other way around.
Absolutely 100 percent correct ( as usual... )
There were 13 ( aprox ) offshore stations in the 1960s. Some were not what we'd call "top 40". I wouldn't describe Caroline North as "top 40", as it played a variety of music, including soul and C&W shows. Caroline South was more top 40 orientated. Britain Radio ( ISTR ) was more light music, but most of the rest of the offshore stations were top 40, such as Radio England ( sister station to Britain Radio ), and ( of course ) Big L. I'd say that Big L Radio London was the ultimate top 40 station, which would have been a hugely popular success had it been allowed to continue as a UK national station.
Radio 1 was good, but it increasingly became all about personalities, an unfortunate "tail wagging the dog" situation that has hindered some BBC radio channels ever since "I'm a big mega-personality and can do what I want"... Er - can you ?
David Simonds in the early years of Capital Radio used to present a very "together" show that was top 40 and fun to listen to... there have been bright spots since 1967 - but there has never been a whole station that was mostly top 40 since Big L et al switched off and set sail...
Well said Inkblot...
To answer your question with another question, do we follow radio trends in the USA if we do (as I imagine historically we did) then it would be 1980/1982 when the great top 40 station WABC couldn't keep up with the trend of FM radio and transformed into all talk format. leaving WPLJ on FM to continue with the format of the day.
The UK has come a long way since 1973 when we only had BBC to listen to in fact probabally leading the world in broadcasting, lets move with it after all that's what the 1960s pirates really wanted "free radio"
Now of course I don't deny that certain tastes will change over the years but certainly in my opinion the charts are not currently in good health and I would have thought the same if they had been like this 5 years ago.
When Matthew Bannister killed it.
Absolutely correct as Keicar says....1987 was the beginning of the end.
I gave up religiously listening to the entire Top 40 chart show each week in April 1996 at the age of almost 27 which I thought was old enough to be spending 3 hours every Sunday evening on it. Plus the change in chart behaviour at that time was a serious turn off for a chart show which wasn't just about the music but the anticipations of positions.
Plenty of familiar names have gravitated to this subject I see. :cool:
Peter you have written some "Great" posts here in my opinion, probably because they so very closely mirror my own view.
Yes, I believe there was a brief golden period in the UK charts for about 2 years from early 2007 to sometime in 2009. My attention was drawn back towards the charts and I began paying as much interest in them again as at any time in over a decade. I also hated the late 80's charts of 1987-89, when I was in my late teens, a time when they should have been right up my street. Yet, by 2007-09 I think they were better than that late 80's period, and enjoyed them more at the end of my 30's than at the end of my teens which I distinctly recall feeling I ought to be embarrassed about!
What is really troubling me lately is the inability of undeniably great singles that should certainly be hit records, by new and old artists alike, not to even be making any chart impact, and I do not understand why this is happening. I'll cite a record from about 4 years ago that failed when I thought it would top the charts, as the song was brilliant and the artist was young, talented and relevant. Gabriella Cilmi, Hearts Don't Lie. Another by an long established act, Elton John only late last year, Voyeur, a classic single that had primetime airings on Norton's chat show and elsewhere yet never charted. WHY? There are so many examples like this. It is almost as if the current UK singles chart has been hijacked at the moment, yet when the download era began I imagined it would loosen the stranglehold that the under 25/30 dynamic had on record singles buying and broaden into a far more democratic and representative Top 40 of the nations general tastes. What happened?