OT: Radio sources

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.

CountryPD wrote: 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.

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.

Spencer Morasch (ex-WABCRadio77 on YouTube) had a video of the 45 of Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up" with "CARTED" written on the sleeve, and he said it was from WPLJ in New York City. So even in 1987-1988, major-market radio stations were still receiving new music on 45s (and copying them to tape "carts" to play on-air), rather than on CD.

Regarding country promo singles in the late 80's/very early 90's it was similar to the scenario with pop radio as outlined in the previous post by Hykker. Initially some single releases were sent on CD while others were still on 45's. Most of the major labels periodically released multi-artist CD compilations that aggregated recent single releases. Many stations (like mine) used those CD's as the source for transferring songs to broadcast tape cartridges for airplay.

I recall that initially there was a lack of CD manufacturing facilities so record labels had some limitations in that regard. As more CD plants came online it allowed promo CD singles to proliferate.

One of the early limitations for CD's airing on radio stations was not having CD players available! My station's first CD player was a higher-end SONY deck obtained with an advertising trade-out with a local appliance dealer. Initially we only had ONE so it was installed in our production room where we would use it to dub music to tape cartridges. Some months later we acquired two more that were installed in our main studio so we could finally play music from CD direct to on-air. About a year later our capital budget allowed us to replace the SONY decks with Denon professional broadcast CD players. For quite a while we continued to use a mix of CD's & tape cartridges on air. It was a few years before many country oldies had CD availability. Also many of the single edits/remixes were unavailable on compact disc (to this day there are still hit radio versions with no digital availability)
That's why many stations used a service like TM to obtain oldies on CD.

Edited by CountryPD - 3 hours 53 minutes ago at 7:53am