AC's play more than Far Away by Nickelback? That's the only one I've ever heard one play. A few AC's play Creed's Arms Wide Open and Hoobastank's The Reason. Still amazes me those have a place on 'lite rock'
Star 92.1 played "Never Gonna Be Alone" when I was in Myrtle Beach, which has a real AC problem right now.
Of course, they quit calling themselves soft rock on the air a few years back. Someone should tell them to change their billboards, which still say soft rock and have hideous photos of Faith Hill and Celine Dion, along with nice photos of Elton John and Phil Collins.
Something I didn't say elsewhere is that WLGI 90.9 has some smooth jazz. I don't know how much. Of course, it's really just instrumental-based urban AC and not really the good stuff.
Here's what I said about WEZV on another board:
I had a long talk with the general manager of this station last week while I was in Myrtle Beach. The news isn't that good.
While there are times this station sounds very good and it even plays several songs in a row that are real standards, the instrumentals have pretty much disappeared. You get fooled by a lot of songs which start with such gorgeous instrumentals and they end up with a fine vocal performance--but still, not instrumental. They call the station "Easy". They promote it on-air and in the newspaper as "the relaxation station".
A lot of the songs fit into that gray area between real standards and AC. Most ACs aren't playing the songs any more. Then there are the real AC songs, many of which I could do without. Some aren't even on standards stations that I've heard. One was "Have You Ever Really Loved a Woman?" by Bryan Adams. One of the last people I would want to listen to, although it's one of his least objectionable songs.
The first thing I said to the man was that The Sun News had messed up twice, calling WEZV soft AC. He said it was soft AC. He didn't give me any of that garbage about how the station didn't really fit any category, which is what I was expecting. I said no, Yes 94.5 was soft AC. Easy 105.9 was easy listening.
Regarding WEZV, he said that it was not easy listening because it didn't have instrumentals. I didn't tell him I heard "Nadia's Theme", but he's pretty much correct and that's a shame. I said the defintion of easy listening had evolved. He said no one calls their station easy listening any more. Soft AC is what this is. I said no, a lot of stations are easy listening. Most are in Florida. Okay, that wasn't true, but my Yahoo groups know there are easy listening stations, even some with the classic definition. He mentioned how WDUV in the Tampa area (which he said has 80 percent of their playlist) is considered soft AC. Well, I would have to agree, because the last few times I've looked at their playlist, pretty much everything was AC at one time, even if a few songs have been rejected by AC.
And of course we discussed what soft AC really is. No, he said, Yes 94.5 was mainstream AC. Now the Wikipedia article says the station changed. I don't know if that's true, although Yes 94.5 in October 2007 certainly wasn't the station I had seen described earlier in The Sun News. Actually, according to the Wikipedia article the station went mainstream in March 2008 but switched to oldies in September, before I heard it again. . I wonder if that could be what he meant. Amazingly, as the man described how AC had a wide range, he said a lot of people don't think Star 92.1 is AC, but it is. Excuse me? That's not helping your case. That's not what I said to him but I should have.
I never used the word standards but based on the way that format has changed he would never have found it acceptable as a description of his station. Luckily, the man who keeps formats up-to-date for the Arbitron section of this site agreed with me that it was. I certainly didn't tell the man from WEZV this! I explained what that man said about soft AC being the description of some of the Delilah stations (I didn't call them that) and he said once again, those were mainstream. And whether WEZV is standards or not, Westwood One was calling their format "adult standards" even when it was more AC than WEZV is.
As he was talking about how formats had evolved, he tried to claim Sunny is now classic hits. I disagree. Its format is called "true oldies". Therefore the defintion of oldies has evolved. No, it hasn't, he said. I suppose he could be right, because stations such as WNMB need to distinguish themselves.
He had to leave to go on the air. I read somewhere he calls himself Scott Richards on the air. I found out Kelli Dixon was on vacation, which was a nice relief.
This man is crazy. You need to label your station correctly or people will get the wrong idea.
