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OT: Radio sources |
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LunarLaugh 
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Joined: 13 February 2020 Location: United States Status: Offline Points: 137 |
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 Topic: OT: Radio sourcesPosted: 24 March 2026 at 4:37pm |
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Just curious to know if anyone here knows what CD promo services (HitDisc, Chartbusters, etc.) KRBE and KHMX in Houston might have been using in the 1997-2001 time frame? I know they probably played regular promo CDs, too.
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aaronk
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Joined: 16 January 2005 Location: United States Status: Offline Points: 372 |
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Posted: 24 March 2026 at 11:52pm |
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Were major market stations using services like HitDisc? I always assumed stations in those markets had such great service they didn't need to pay for HitDisc or similar promo services. Medium and small market stations that didn't have top-tier label service might have benefited from TM and Hitmakers, though. We certainly used them at our small-market rural top 40 in northern Michigan.
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CountryPD
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Joined: 29 July 2023 Location: United States Status: Offline Points: 32 |
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Posted: Yesterday at 8:00am |
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Agree with Aaron that most major market radio stations always received excellent service from record labels and had no need for other sources. Companies that compiled multiple new releases on a single CD were mostly for smaller market stations or club DJ's.
CDX was a company specifically created for country releases. They provided free discs to the smaller country stations to save the major labels from doing so. CDX discs mostly included the radio versions/remixes/single edits. At the dawn of the CD era TM began to offer "oldie" music libraries on CD. A significant number of radio stations subscribed to them as many oldies were not yet commercially on compact disc. However many of the tracks were sourced from vinyl with noise reduction applied. Some also had inaudible "tones" embedded at the end of songs for automation systems. |
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Hykker
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Joined: 30 October 2007 Location: United States Status: Offline Points: 48 |
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Posted: 16 hours 13 minutes ago at 6:16pm |
I've worked at several small market country stations, and agree those CDX discs were a lifesaver. Another source smaller stations used at least in the 00s & 10s was newmusicserver.com. I don't know if they're still around. One of the PDs I worked with gave me his login, but that was 15+ years ago, and last time I tried it, it didn't work. I know Top Hits USA used tones to trigger automation systems, but, at least in the 90s TM used the index function on CDs to perform that function. |
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NightAire
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Joined: 20 February 2010 Location: United States Status: Offline Points: 49 |
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Posted: 8 hours 6 minutes ago at 2:23am |
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I know the big top 40 in Tulsa I worked at in 1989 and 1990 was getting MULTIPLE copies of CD singles from the labels... so much so that he was begging part time staff (like me) to take crates of CD singles home. (Most of them were songs we DIDN'T play, to be fair.)
The big country station I worked at in 1998, though, had a huge library... I think it was TM Century? Not sure; some library, could have been CDX. I later worked at the other Top 40 in town, and they had a mix of CD singles from the labels, and compilation CDs... so I'm not sure there was a pattern. |
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CountryPD wrote: