In my radio listening, I hear something that makes me say “oh wow” about once a week. It’s a pretty eclectic bunch of fairly deep songs. Yesterday on CKOI Montreal, it was “I Just Wanna Live,” the 2004 CHR mid-charter by Good Charlotte. Last week on Portugal’s AC RFM network, it was “Oh My God,” which snapped Adele’s hit streak in 2021. The week before, I was listening to Robby Bridges’ new retro top 20 countdown, covering 1990. That year is rich in lost hits, but “Girls Night Out” by Tyler Collins is the one I singled out.
The point of listening to a retro countdown is, in part, the forgotten hits. In the other cases, “oh wow” wasn’t necessarily the objective for the intended audience. The recently profiled RFM is a successful station, and “Oh My God” was likely bigger there. Montreal remains a very distinctive musical universe, and I often seek out CKOI because its hits are my surprises. (There is only one American market, however, where I would play “I Just Wanna Live,” and I’ll be curious to see if anybody reading this column guesses which one.)
If surprise and delight are ever your programming objective, you’re likely choosing from a few different piles of songs beyond the safe list. There are songs that disappeared from radio station libraries almost immediately, but there are also those that were airplay staples for years and have faded with time. For the stations playing a ’60s/’70s version of Classic Hits, it’s possible to play only onetime “safe list” songs. They don’t surprise us, but they’re also not being played anywhere else.
For instance, Foreigner’s “Cold as Ice” is a song you still expect to hear at both Classic Rock and Classic Hits. “Feels Like the First Time” or “Double Vision” are songs played somewhat less these days, especially on the Classic Hits side, but not such that an average listener might notice. The true “oh wows” in the catalog are “Long, Long Way from Home” or “Blue Morning Blue Day,” but those aren’t songs that everybody knows, especially if those listeners weren’t Class of 1979.
WXRC (The Ride) Charlotte, N.C., was up 6.5-6.7 in June, fourth in a market that also has Adult Hits, Classic Hits, and Classic Rock. In the Mediabase hour I studied, there was “I Love Rock & Roll,” but there was also that next tier of once-standard/now-rarer titles (“Running on Empty,” “We’re an American Band”), as well as deeper cuts (“Suffragette City”) and true “oh wows” (“Cars” by Gary Numan, “Every Time I Think of You” by the Babys). “Do Ya” would’ve gotten my attention by ELO; WXRC played the earlier version by the Move.
Classic Rock KOFX (The Fox) El Paso, Texas, is typically the market leader and currently has a 12.6. Its hour had a mix of standard (“Small Town”), once-standard (“Witchy Woman”), and deeper (“For Those About to Rock, We Salute You”). Then it went into the noon hour, and the spikes got spikier: “Ebony Eyes” by Bob Welch, “Godzilla” by Blue Oyster Cult, “Screamin’ in the Night” by Krokus.
At KOAI (The Wow Factor) Phoenix, where the intended effect is built into the name, some of the “wow” comes from the juxtaposition of genres and eras. Yesterday’s 2 PM hour draws from all levels of familiarity: still big now (“Billie Jean”), once safe but slipping (“Sister Golden Hair,” “Cecilia,” “The Long Run”), always secondary (Blue Oyster Cult again, with “Burning for You”), and a few that are both older and never made the safe list (Lobo’s “Me & You & a Dog Named Boo,” “Temptation Eyes” by the Grass Roots).
When “That Thing With Rich Appel” listeners vote for the syndicated show’s annual “WOW” countdown, they go for both lost hits (“Driver’s Seat” by Sniff N’ the Tears) and songs that never really were (“Pretty Lady” by Lighthouse). But they also include “It’s a Shame” by the Spinners and “God Only Knows” by the Beach Boys.
In the early ’00s, Howard Kroeger’s Bob FM, and the Adult Hits format that it unleashed, changed programmers’ notion of whether it was ever OK to augment the hits with songs that provided some relief or just sounded good on the radio. Bob and Jack FM and similar outlets began with some true “oh wows” — “Tired of Toein’ the Line” by Rocky Burnette or “Sausalito Summer Night” by Diesel — that became, for a while, secret weapons for a significant number of affiliates. Eventually, the passage of time, the advent of PPM, and the initial novelty wearing off dispatched that first wave of records back to trivia night.
Kroeger’s new Temple of Rock format, announced last Friday, like WXRC or KOFX, has songs at various levels: “Photograph” and “You Shook Me All Night Long” from the top tier; “Back on the Chain Gang” from the “less heard now” pile; “Pretty Vacant” by the Sex Pistols and “My Head’s in Mississippi” by ZZ Top as the depth. I came back this morning and heard “Calling Dr. Love” by Kiss, which definitely meets my “oh wow” criteria.
I also heard a song that has moved from “oh wow” to “safelist” to “deeper” again. When Classic Rock was new, I heard “You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet” by Bachman-Turner Overdrive for the first time in years on a small-market AM and was so excited to hear it that I caught myself speeding (fortunately before anybody else did). It’s not “oh wow” now, but now that it’s no longer a song heard everywhere, I found myself enjoying it again.
Context has a lot to do with “oh wow” too. “California Love” was once more surprising on Classic Hits KRTH (K-Earth 101) Los Angeles than it would have been on Hip-Hop/R&B KRRL (Real 92.3). Bill Withers’ “Use Me” isn’t easy to hear even at Adult R&B outlets anymore, but it’s surprising (and gratifying) that WXRC plays it in a Classic Rock context. I once heard a Classic Rock programmer refer to hearing “Let’s Hear It for the Boy” by Deniece Williams on Jack FM as left field. But it’s not that if you work in AC or Classic Hits.
Stations that are willing to play “hits plus variety” might want to have a few separate piles of songs to work with — former safelist songs and true “oh wows.” Songs that have faded gradually provide variety and relief but not necessarily surprise and delight. A listener old enough to remember “Easy Lover” by Philip Bailey & Phil Collins may not realize it ever went away. (The adjoining issue is that a 29-year-old may not know it.)
A lot of this column over the years has been about the songs that surprise me on the radio. I know that most thresholds are lower — I once had a colleague excited about hearing “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number” on the radio — so I like pulling from both stacks. The best possible situation is playing enough hits to be able to pull off just enough variety to keep the hits fresh. It’s always risky to campaign in public for the strategic use of variety and “oh wow.” I’m happy to have WXRC and KOFX (and the whole 20-plus year history of Bob and Jack FM) to prove that it’s possible to augment the hits, not merely play the hits.
This story first appeared on radioinsight.com