Radio Drops #23: PsychoSeasoned Oldies

When the competing stations are playing much the same Oldies that you are, it’s the little things that make a difference.

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Good Vibrations Is a Fall Record

In pop music radio, when we had disc jockeys in the control room 24/7, we got a lot of phone calls, a lot of requests. Requests were important because they were a barometer of hit records. Sometimes not, but that’s another topic.

A lot of stations did a countdown every day, Top Five at Five or Top 10 at 10: the most requested records of the past 24 hours or whatever. They’d put a list of the currents on a clipboard in the control room, the jocks would check off each request, and the music director could take it from there.

The Yellow Pad

I was interested in oldies, though, and I wasn’t going to print out every oldie we were playing. So I put a yellow pad in the control room and had the disc jockeys write down the oldies they got requests for, plus whether the caller was male or female, adult or kid. You didn’t have to ask everybody their exact age.

Every morning I’d go through those yellow pads and see what people were requesting. Do that often enough and long enough and you start noticing things. You get little gems of information that might give your station’s music mix a bit of an edge.

This was one of those things. I do believe it started with “Good Vibrations” by the Beach Boys, that magnificent, earth-shaking 1966 hit.

Why the Fall?

I noticed I was getting more requests for “Good Vibrations” in the fall than in, say, the spring. It’s requested constantly, because it’s a monstrously big record. And you think of the Beach Boys as beach, summer, fun, girls, sand, all of that. So why more calls in the fall?

Because “Good Vibrations” was a hit in the fall. It was released in October and hit the top of the charts a few weeks later, in November, so it carried through the fall and the holidays of 1966.

If you lived through that time, you got chills from that record. It was so great the first time you heard it, so unique.

And what was happening when you heard it? If you lived in the northern hemisphere, the leaves were turning and it was getting cooler. School was in again, the sports teams were on the fields again, the holidays were coming up, and “Good Vibrations” was on the radio. The record gets an emotional lock, an emotional memory, with what was going on at that time.

A List for Every Month

I started watching that closely, and here’s something you could know. “Rolling in the Deep” by Adele was a hit in the fall. “Viva la Vida” by Coldplay is a spring record. “Smooth” by Santana is a winter record.

So as a consultant, I started giving my clients a monthly PsychoSeasoned oldie list: songs that were in the top five, maybe the top 10, in the two months coming up. They’d get a January and February list, the next month a February and March list, then March and April.

I did it that way because a hit song’s life at the top of the charts was about six to eight weeks. Each month some songs would drop off and new ones would come on.

I’d say, “Here’s about 60, 65 oldies. Increase airplay on these during that time.” We were already playing those records. Just put them into a power oldie rotation in those months. That’s what I call PsychoSeasoned oldies.

Did that little strategy help? I think it did, because a lot of what people get from the radio, maybe most of it, is on a subliminal level. “Smooth” by Santana sounds good any time of the year. But it feels better in the wintertime.