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Old 04-16-2011, 10:49 PM
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bgadow bgadow is offline
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Join Date: Oct 2003
Location: Federalsburg, MD
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Radio Broadcasts on Record

I thought I would share one of my interests, which doesn't appear to be extremely common. I'll start with some background:
Growing up in the 80s, I loved radio & listened regularly to a variety of syndicated programs. My assumption at the time was that these were all sent out via satellite to the local stations, perhaps recorded for replay as convenient. I never thought it any different, until....

In the 90s I started building a collection of records, almost all of them comedy albums. Whenever I went to the flea market or a thrift store I would dig through the piles and grab anything in the category, along with some spoken word albums and other oddities that caught my eye. One day I came across a box set that floored me: it was the weekly broadcast of American Country Countdown from a week in 1981, a complete show (less commercials) on 3 LP records. Well.

Eventually I discovered that many of these shows are readily available via ebay, among other places. In recent years I have built up a collection of shows. Some of these (like ACC) are pretty well known and documented; others are rather obscure. So, I thought I would use this forum to tell you what I know about them, and solicit any information that others can offer. I should state, I have never worked in radio (not that I haven't thought about it a time or two) and some of what I say is only speculation.

Before I get into talking about the programs-from what I've seen, records were heavily used in the 70s and 80s. 1992 seems to be the year that the switch was made to CD, and many shows are still distributed that way from what I can tell. (I don't have any shows that new) In some cases shows were available via satellite if the station had the capability. All of these records were supposed to be either returned to the syndicator or otherwise destroyed after airplay, but in practice many of them got saved by DJs or given away. (some stations would use them as prizes. One stack of shows I picked up are labled with the winners names-the ones I got were for people who never showed up to claim them)
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