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Beautiful Music

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Beautiful Music was a mostly-instrumental music format that was prominent in American radio from the 1960s through the 1980s. "Mood music", "easy listening", and (inaccurately and often in a derogatory fashion) "Muzak" and "elevator music" are other common terms for the format and the style of music that it featured. Beautiful Music can also be regarded as a subset of MOR music.

Beautiful Music first offered soft and unobtrusive instrumental selections on a very structured schedule with a minimum of commercial interruptions and often functioned as a free background music service for stores, with commercial breaks consisting only of announcements aimed at shoppers already in the stores. This practice was known as "storecasting" and was very common on the FM dial in the 1940s and 1950s, particularly on independently owned FMs that did not have an AM sister station to simulcast. Later, in the early 1960s the Federal Communications Commission adopted a standard for transmitting and receiving stereo signals on a single channel of the FM band. In addition to delivering stereo sound, FM broadcasting provided a clearer sound quality and better resistance to interference than AM, thus being the ideal vehicle for broadcasting the Beautiful Music format. At Philadelphia's WDVR, Marlin Taylor, in 1963, created a custom-designed "Beautiful Music" format and within four months, WDVR-FM 101.1 FM became the #1 rated FM station in Philadelphia and went on to become not only the first big success in FM but instrumental in establishing the viability of the FM band.

Although WDVR perfected the "beautiful music" formula and confirmed its appeal, it did not invent the format. According to a 2003 article in Popular Communications magazine by broadcast historian Shannon Huniwell, perhaps the first true "beautiful music" station in the United States was KIXL in Dallas, Texas, which operated at "104 on both dials" (1040 AM and 104.5 FM) during the 1950s and 1960s. Pronounced "kicksill" on the air, KIXL was well-known for seamlessly blending one song into another with the help of specially designed instrumental bridges, and for a popular feature called "Think It Over," in which the smooth-voiced announcer softly intoned a proverb or a word of wisdom, followed by a short pause and the admonition, "Think it over." Inspired by the success of KIXL, Gordon McLendon - best known for programming Top 40-formatted KLIF, which was the top-rated station in Dallas throughout the 1950s and '60s - decided to start up a Beautiful Music station of his own in the San Francisco market. He took over KROW-AM, licensed to nearby Oakland, and revamped it with a Beautiful Music format as KABL (pronouned "cable," as in "cable car"). Other pioneers of the format included WPAT-AM/FM in Paterson, New Jersey, which served the New York market, WJBR-FM in Wilmington, Delaware, whose signal reached Philadelphia (home of WDVR), and WQMR-AM/WGAY-FM, which served the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area.

Others, such as Jim Schulke, devised a method of buying air time on FM stations in bulk and reselling the blocks to interested advertisers. Schulke formed Stereo Radio Productions (SRP) to help his stations get better ratings and pull in more agency advertising dollars. His stations used 600 ten-and-a-half-inch reels of stereo audio tape, using a method called "matched flow", where a couple of tape machines had 15 minute segments which by controlling where you cued the reel, you could vary the sound where no half-hour was repeated within a two week period. One of Schulke's stations using the "matched flow" concept was WDVR's chief competitor in the Beautiful Music format in Philadelphia, WWSH-FM (now Smooth Jazz WJJZ).

Some group station owners created their own "in-house" format distribution system. Bonneville Broadcasting Systems serviced mostly Bonneville-owned stations with easy listening music distributed first on reel-to-reel tape and compact disc, and later adopted satellite distribution, often under the slogan "Satellite Stereo" (as was used by Malrite Communications' WEZO-FM Rochester, NY, one of the independent radio stations signed with Bonneville.)

Several other tape syndicators offered easy listening music formats on reel-to-reel tape and other formats, until the 1980's when industry consolidation and listener appeal reduced the audience for the format.

Generally, the music heard on Beautiful Music stations were newly orchestrated arrangements of the songs of the day. These were available from the major record labels and performed by artist such as Andre Kostelanetz, Percy Faith, Mantovani, The 101 Strings, Billy Vaughn, The Living Strings, Frank Chacksfield, and many, many others. When the record companies cut back on releasing this material, syndicators of the format had custom recordings produced for them, performed by many different orchestras from around the world. These new custom recordings were usually instrumental versions of current or recent rock or pop hit songs, a move that was thought would make the stations sound more "mass appeal" without "selling out" to rock but also disgusted some longtime listeners of the format.

Many Beautiful Music programmers constructed their own style of sets, eventually incorporating vocal songs, generally one to each 15 minute set. Many stations adopted a 80% instrumental - 20% vocal mix, others offered 90% instrumentals, and a few were entirely instrumental.

Some of the most notable and highest-rated Beautiful Music stations, in addition to those already mentioned, included WLIF and Art Wander-programmed WBAL-AM in Baltimore, WPCH in Atlanta, WJOI (formerly WWJ-FM, now WKRK) in Detroit, WDUV in Tampa/St. Petersburg, WLOO and WLAK in Chicago, WAYL in Minneapolis, KBIG in Los Angeles, KUMU in Honolulu, WKTZ in Jacksonville, KEWT andKCTC in Sacramento, WWSH (competitor to WDVR/WEAZ) in Philadelphia, K-JOY and XTRA in San Diego, and WEZO in Rochester, New York.

Most of the aforementioned stations were programmed by Schulke Productions or competing syndicators such as Bonneville and Century. Ed Winton, a protege of Gordon McLendon, brought the format to Connie B. Gay's WGAY 1050 am in Silver Spring, MD changing AM to WQMR. Simulcasting on WGAY and WQMR (Washington, D.C., and Silver Spring, Maryland) Ed Winton, Bill Doty and Alan Campbell programmed an independent Beautiful Music format beginning in the early 1960s and ending in the early 1990s. Later Bob Chandler, tutored by Winton, a leading exponent of the genre, was Operations Director. He organized repeated trips to Europe to make instrumental cover recordings of popular vocal music, which were then made available to Beautiful Music stations in other markets.

In the latter years of the format, more vocals were incorporated into each set, and the vocals played on beautiful music stations were more likely to be from softer-styled "top 40" artists such as Barbra Streisand, Carpenters, and Helen Reddy than from "adult standards" artists like Dean Martin, Andy Williams and Doris Day. Eventually the instrumentals were eliminated completely, making way for the Adult Contemporary format. By the end of the 1980s the popularity of other formats, such as Top 40, Album Oriented Rock, and Classic Rock began to dominate the FM dial. Advertisers were going after a younger audience, and stations soon dropped the Beautiful Music format and switched to whatever seemed more appropriate for the audiences the advertisers were going after.

Some Beautiful Music stations did make a successful transition into Adult Contemporary formats, although often not without call letter changes to drop the identity of being an "elevator music" station. The aforementioned WDVR in Philadelphia, which later changed its calls to WEAZ, became AC-formatted WBEB-FM in the early 1990s and continues to this day as a highly rated station. Other examples include Chicago's WLAK-FM, which became WLIT, Charlotte's WEZC, which is today's WLYT, and Atlanta's WPCH which is now WLTM. Other stations continue with AC formats bearing the same calls as their Beautiful Music predecessors, including: KOST and KBIG in Los Angeles, WTVR in Richmond, VA, WSHH in Pittsburgh, WLIF in Baltimore, KOSI Denver, CO, WNIC in Detroit, and WJBR in Wilmington, DE, as well as, in Canada, CHFI in Toronto and CHQM in Vancouver, B.C.. In Tampa, WDUV also lives on with a mixture of soft AC hits and oldies and with one or two instrumentals per hour (though the instrumentals are now more likely to be of the "smooth jazz" variety). WDUV ("The Dove") is also consistently the top-rated station overall in the Tampa Arbitron ratings, despite its move in 1999 from 103.5 (licensed to Bradenton) to the weaker 105.5 frequency (licensed to New Port Richey).

But the Beautiful Music format did not die completely. Today's Smooth jazz radio stations maintain the structure and style of the Beautiful Music format. And although there are today only a handful of true Beautiful Music stations still on the air, the format still lives on a few non-commercial radio stations, including WKTZ-FM in Jacksonville, Florida, which is owned by Jones College and also streams its programming online. Some commercial Beautiful Music stations are still found in other markets with large retiree populations. KWXY in Cathedral City, California has retained its Beautiful Music format since taking to the air in 1964 and remains one of Palm Springs' most highly-rated stations, largely thanks to an annual influx of older vacationers from cold climates. WJIB (AM 740) in Cambridge, Massachusetts is notable as one of the few remaining Beautiful Music serving a major metropolitan area; in fact, it features the same calls and format as a former Beautiful Music FM in Boston (now WTKK-FM, 96.9), and its listening audience has grown since the market's commercial Adult Standards station (WXKS-AM, 1430) flipped to a left-wing talk format. In Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, Beautiful Music WEZV-FM is the top-rated station. And in Gibson City, Illinois, WGCY-FM, 106.3, continues as a full-service mixture of instrumentals and easy listening oldies, as does CKOT-FM, 101.3 (Easy 101), in Tillsonburg, Ontario (serving the London, Ontario, market).

In addition, Beautiful Music is available on satellite radio. Using WDVR-FM and SRP veterans, XM Satellite Radio programs a dedicated Beautiful Music channel ("Escape") for its subscribers, and the Music Choice digital satellite service now has a permanent music channel devoted to the once-mighty FM radio format that relaxed and soothed radio audiences for decades.

Artists and music

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