Classic & Current Contemporary Non-Schlock-Rock Metropolitan Music

1980s AOR Radio - "Core Burnout"

AOR Radio Overplays Mainstream Artists

College radio certainly helped bring about changes, but there were rumblings within the commercial radio community as well. By the end of the '70s most commercial AOR stations were relying on mostly older material for the bulk of their programming. There was a revival of regressive music. The Beatles and the Rolling Stones dominated formats. '60s rock was as popular as ever. Lynard Skynard's "Freebird," Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven," The Who's "Won't Get Fooled Again," and Eric Clapton's "Cocaine" were the backbone of radio playlists. The public bought into this because they were offered little else on the high-wattage commercial airwaves. AOR radio was so locked into the corporate image it had created for itself that fear of change kept most of the exciting new music off the air. A good deal of the new product rock radio was exposing was stale and unstimulating. This translated into boring stations that lost rating points over time.

This older music was played in extremely high rotations. Any song — no matter how good it is — is bound it lose its appeal after many repeated listenings, especially over a period of years. Radio programmers finally figured this out last year.

"Most stations have come to the conclusion that the records they were playing the heaviest, which is a lot of old stuff, was suffering from what someone called ‘core burnout’" says Paul Lemieux, Music Director for WCOZ Boston. "All the old Who and Zeppelin and Rolling Stones cuts were just burnt beyond recognition. So when 80% of the music that you are playing is ten, fifteen, sometimes twenty years old, it's just bound to burn out after a certain amount of time. That's the realization that people came to in 1982."

Not only were these older offerings burning out, sociological factors were playing a part. People who had grown up with AOR were now getting older, and a younger crop of people were moving into AOR demographic target areas. These people did not grow up with the music of the '60s and had difficulty relating to a lot of the older music.

Don Davis, Program Director for WWDC-FM Washington says, "AOR became aware that because of a change in the audience growing older and a new portion of the core coming in from the younger end that the old tried and true methods didn't work anymore. Particularly in the case of the younger audience, newer and non-AOR sounding types of music were becoming acceptable to them. And for AOR to stay viable into the '80s it was necessary for it to start changing and embracing music that may not have been necessarily AOR-style music."

What AOR radio needed to do was bring in the young audiences because they were losing listeners in the upper demographics without building any on the bottom.

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