It’s a weekly show devoted to the Beatles, on a Classic Rock station.
You know the kind: “Breakfast With The Beatles,” “Brunch With The Beatles,” “Beatles Brunch,” “Sunday Morning With The Beatles,” etc.
The host often creates a “theme” for each week’s program.
That’s a good idea. There’s not much new Beatles music these days, so it’s smart to look for fresh contexts in which to present the familiar music.
But this was a less-than-good idea:
One program was devoted solely to instrumental versions of Beatles songs.
Five hours of instrumentals.
There isn’t a pop music station in the world that would deliberately play two instrumentals in a row.
Five hours of instrumentals??
I don’t blame the host. He doesn’t know better.
Moral: If you’re a program director, do you listen to your weekend hosts? Do you do everything in your power to make your weekend programming sound at least as good as your weekday programming?
Or do you just hand the keys to the station to your part-timers/satellite shows/brokered programs and hope you still have an audience on Monday?
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Who the hell would air 5 hours of the beatles anyway? I sure wouldn’t.
As no doubt there are many people who like the Beatles, There are those listeners who don’t like the Beatles, and devoting 5 hours to one group outside a one time documentary profile type thing is crazy.
Anything I’ve seen from WW ONE or other syndicators runs only an hour. That’s a compromise and doable, maybe even if it’s instrumentals, but i’m betting any decent show wouldn’t run all instrumentals. All the classic rock devotees would be gone.
Funny thing is, in the early days of the recording industry, say pre 1940, instrumentals were king. vocals were slowly incorporated within the music and well…..they took over.
It wouldn’t kill PD’s to watch the cue sheets for some of the syndicated stuff.
I love the classic AT 40 stuff from the 70s and 80s a local station is now
running. Especially the early 70s, before radio consultants formatted everything to death. You could have perry como and led zeppelin in one countdown….kinda cool.
There aren’t many REAL Program Directors left. Most PDs are expected to do an on-air shift, often the morning-show or PM Drive which, when done properly, are full-time jobs. In addition to pulling a full-time on-air shift, there’s music, promotions, production and staffing to take care of and trying to work with the sales department. The weekend stuff is just too far down the list. But that’s the price that corporate radio pays for asking too few programming people to do far too much work. Program Directors should be full-time program directors… and on-air hosts should be full-time on-air hosts. You can’t combine the two and expect great results.