Radio Drops #20: Where Dayparting Came From

Dayparting means playing some songs only at night and other songs only during the daytime. Where did it come from? The video runs 5:31.

Watch the video on YouTube: Radio Drops #20: Where Did Dayparting Come From?

It Was a Defensive Move

Where did dayparting come from? Dayparting is where certain songs in your playlist are played only in a certain part of the day. Thus, dayparting.

It was a defensive move. Top 40 program directors up against another top 40 station in town learned early that the main reason people tuned away was a song they didn’t like.

When Top 40 Played Everything

A little background here. Top 40 was the first format, all music all the time, and the idea was to play nothing but the top 40 hits in America at that given time. In the 1950s, cruising into the 1960s, that was it: 40 records. There were no rock and roll oldies, remember? When rock and roll was only three or four years old, that was a recurrent, although we didn’t call it that yet.

Playing only the 40 biggest sellers meant a lot of what we called adult records in the mix. At the same time the Beatles and the Stones and Dusty Springfield and all those great Motown artists were on the charts, so were Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, and a lot of instrumental hits.

The Beatles first hit number one in January of ’64 and held it with various songs until April, I believe. The song that knocked them out of number one, for one week only, was “Hello Dolly” by Louis Armstrong. A song from a Broadway play, for gosh sakes.

We music directors and program directors knew some of our audience didn’t care much for “Hello Dolly”: the younger kids, the principal audience you were going for, because the kids controlled the radio in the car. Their mothers and fathers found they liked a lot of what was on top 40 too.

But there was a lot of polarization. The other side was what the adults in the audience didn’t like, and they were pretty vocal about it. Top 40 could also play some Johnny Cash, and country singer-songwriter Roger Miller was having a lot of hits in the early and middle ’60s. They were popular with part of the audience, particularly in the American South. Smart program directors recognized that a good percentage of the listenership didn’t like country at all.

Then there was the R&B side. A significant percentage of adults still thought of it as race music, which is what rhythm and blues was called in the ’30s, ’40s and into the early ’50s. And there were a lot of white people who thought rock and roll was the devil’s music. A few black adults kind of thought that too, from what I’ve heard from some of my friends.

The Furniture Dealer

With another top 40 station going against you, you had to deal with those attitudes. Particularly since advertisers, and read that as principally white businessmen, were among those objecting to some of the songs.

Say the furniture dealer who always ran a big schedule asks the ad salesman, and I did hear this from the ad salesmen, “Why is your station playing so much of that music?” That comment gets back to the station manager and the program director immediately. That guy spends a lot of money with the station. He buys enough advertising to pay two of our full-time announcers every month.

The white furniture store owner thought “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” by James Brown would lead white children to hell. Problem was, his daughter and her boyfriend were crazy about the song. White kids were buying James Brown records in huge numbers.

So what to do? In 1964, a top 40 station needed to play “Everybody Loves Somebody” by Dean Martin. It was a monstrously big hit. Adults loved it, and so did a lot of kids, particularly young females. But boys who were into the Animals and the Stones thought it was a piece of, well, you know.

Daytime and Nighttime

Dayparting was the solution. When adults got home, they turned on the television, not the radio. At night, the radio audience was the younger listeners. During the daytime, a lot of them were at school.

So during the daytime you played Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Louis Armstrong, and at night you played James Brown and Wilson Pickett. And you played the Four Seasons, Dusty Springfield, the Beatles and Gerry and the Pacemakers both daytime and nighttime, because everybody loved those songs.

I don’t know that dayparting has much application anymore. The landscape, and how people use the radio, have changed dramatically. A station has to be very consistent with its music mix. It can’t sound like one kind of station at one time of day and another kind at another.

Those are my thoughts on the subject at this moment, for your consideration. Talk to you later.