Free Form Play Lists

[michelej1]

This article on radio mentions how stations stopped playing only singles and started to play album cuts, while still ensuring their audience would stay interested. This excerpted section

http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/articl...silent-party-3 used FM as an example.

Pitchfork Media:

These listeners are drawn in by the "classic hits" format, which promises something for everyone, with nothing wild or provocative. The history of the "classic" format more generally mirrors the history of FM radio since the mid-to-late 1960s, a case study in how corporate logic can keep the veneer of chaos while disguising behind the scenes a phalanx of demographic research. When the "counterculture" itself was big business, freeform jocks took control of the new FM airwaves for a brief moment, rebelling against the sponsor-ridden, repetitive formats by digging into album cuts with extended run times and questionable subject matter. If not necessarily always more enjoyable than its predecessors, and often leaden with its own annoying tics, freeform was nonetheless something new, which took advantage of the superior fidelity of FM to play music that aimed for audiophiles.

Of course, it wasn't long before an enterprising executive-- Lee Abrams, who worked for a consulting firm in Atlanta-- figured out a way to effectively monetize freeform while retaining its superficial "spirit." Abrams was fine with playing non-singles on the radio, but with a catch, which he proudly explained in an interview: "Let's say a Fleetwood Mac album comes out on January 1; by January 7, we have called back thousands of people who bought the album to find out the demographic spectrum of the record, the favorite song, what they don't like about it...We find exactly which cuts sold the album, exactly the right two songs to play." More or less, Abrams used AOR to rationalize the DJ's curatorial function, effectively reducing the role to something of a PA announcer. More broadly, Abrams introduced the era of the consultant to mainstream radio, an era for which many probably can't imagine an alternative.