When I first started really listening to the radio was late in '79. I was born in May 1971, so I would have been about 8 and a half then. The songs I mostly remember from that time are Video Killed the Radio Star, it played a lot at the time.. Video killed the radio star.. video killed the radio star.. Another one was Cruel to be Kind. I remember at the time trying to figure out that meant.. And that Pina Colada song you heard a lot at the time. Also Don't Stop till You Get Enough by Michael Jackson, YMCA by the Village People, I Will Survive.. etc. 

Anyway that year, and those songs are significant to me now because it was literally when I first started paying attention really to music.

What year did you start actively listening to the radio and what are major songs that you remember from that time?  

Very interesting questions because there are songs I remember as early as the early 70s, but I believe many of them I actually heard with more regularity later.  I'm focusing on 1977-78 as the era when I first started to pay more attention to the radio myself as opposed to just listening to my older brother's music. And it was pop music on AM, not FM rock, at first. This led to the switch from transistor radios to having one's own receiver turntable 8-track and speakers.  K-TEL albums! Then shortly after, FM rock....

I recall:

James Taylor - Your Smilin Face

Neil Diamond - Desiree

Andy Gibb - I just wanna be your everything

Bee Gees - How deep is your love

Stevie Wonder - Sir Duke

Debbie Boone - You Light Up My Life

Rod Stewart - Do ya think I'm sexy

Emotion - Samantha Sang

Chuck Mangione - Feels so good

Exile - Kiss you all over

Player - This time I'm in it for love

Just to name a few...

Me too!  I find myself YouTubing those old songs all the time.  I love album rock and prog rock but I'll never give up pop songs.  Even dig The Carpenters!

I started listening to pop music in 1971 at age 11. One of my favourites was a single edit version of  Supersister's A Girl Named You. When I really plunged into it, in May of that year, Gilbert O'Sullivan's Underneath the Blanket Go topped the Dutch charts. Focus entered the charts with Hocus Pocus in those weeks. Though I liked most Top 40 music, my favourites were, even in '71, prog-oriented bands. Earth & Fire could be heard quite often on the radio. 

Glamrock-bands like The Sweet, Slade and Middle of the Road were gaining momentum back then.

I don't remember ever listening to AM radio, and going directly to FM band and most likely it was CHUM-FM and CILQ (or Q-107  as it was known)  in Toronto and whenever in Montreal, it was CHOM-FM. From that moment, I guess it was the end of album-oriented radio (I do remember hearing a few full albums or at least full-sides of album), so I wasn't exposed at home to "pop" music...

 

However, during High School days, school bus rides (relatively long in my case: +/- 2 to 2.5h/day) meant that the choice of radio (the cool bus drivers asked us) was not always up to the boys: generally we'd choose the FM stations (roughly 3 days/week) and the girls would go for the AM stations twice a week, where we were subjected to crappy disco, MOR, bubble-gum pop, etc...  

Sooo, in a weird way, I'm better acquainted with MOR and AOR from 76 onwards (my high school years) than that of 74-75 (when finishing elementary school) and almost not at all prior to 72, unless it was via AM radio in my HS years)

By '70 I finally got this tiny radio, cassette recorder thing and began taping the songs I loved...one day I heard Lucky Man and my world changed 

 I didn't have access to FM radio until I was older.Even then as a teen I listened to a lot of mellow pop rock stuff (Fleetwood Mac, Chicago, Doobie Bros., Billy Joel, ...) It was later when I found the cooler FM stations that played prog and heavier stuff. 

Same in the SF bay area.  San Jose had KLIV AM 1600 and I recall when the Beatles white album came out, that's ALL they played for the entire weekend.  Hard to believe, but AM was super cool back in the 60's 

Oh yeah! A bunch of stuff from them actually and that was definitely one of them! A bunch of Bee Gees and disco stuff, and I don't care what anyone says it was a special time for music imo. 

The Love Boat, Fantasy Island, Battlestar Galactica.. special time, I don't care. 

Funnily I what I recall best from radio is sitting in my room listening to the «European Top 100» while drawing. So there I heard songs that I didn’t get ane airplay elsewhere such as Flash and the Pan «Midnight Man», Orchestral Manouvers in the Dark «Secret» and well Falco "Amadeus" before everyone else lol. Random and not particularly amazing songs but I felt like I was the only one who had heard them. Before this I remember Bonnie Tyler «Total Eclipse of the Heart», F.R David «Words», Men at Work "Down Under", several Bowie songs from Let's Dance (maybe mostly because my big sister bought the album) and completely idiotic tunes such as «E.T, I Love You» and «Woodpecker From Space». I still enjoyed them all though. I also have a recollection of getting into the car with my family and Steve Miller Band "Abracadabra" filled the space when mom started the engine and thinking it was mysterious and magic compared to what we were usually force fed. I'm guessing that song must already had been a year old or so by then.

Yeah those great days of underground/pirate radio that I keep hearing about was long gone - and probably never existed where I grew up anyway. Fortunately my parents had a decent record collection for me discover some much better 60’s/70’s stuff that shaped & exited me way more than early-to mid-eighties radio.

presdoug wrote: I started actively listening to the radio around 1976, when FM radio was changing from it's alternative, "underground" music haven, to a kind of merging with the more mainstream pop diet existing on the AM Band. There was still underground music on FM radio, but it was just becoming harder to find, and rock radio was gravitating to a more mainstream approach. But even then, I feel that mainstream pop was of a better quality. I remember hearing Ambrosia's Holding On To Yesterday, Boston's More Than A Feeling, Alice Cooper's Only Women Bleed, and Dire Strait's Sultans Of Swing, and thinking they were pretty cool songs. But gone were the previous years where you might hear a side long prog epic or full album from a band like Yes or Triumvirat, and I got schooled in real progressive rock more from listening to friend's albums than on the so-called "alternative" FM radio. Still, radio had a role to play in the development of my music appreciation.

 

That's pretty well it, isn't it???   By 76/77, most FM radio stations had taken over the AM radio playlists... Only a few radios were left playing less commercial stuff - and even then it was late evening or nightime only.

 

Of course during daytime, they also played the stuff you mention (Aerosmith and Zeppelin were there too), but it was mixed with Bob Seger, Bruce Sprinsgsteen, Eagles, Fleetwood Mac, Al Stewart, etc.... and with a strong dose of the AM stuff (including disco).

 

 

actually I never heard this one (until this morning), but the French-speaking sex-obsessed youth I was preferred this one:

 

 

 

Edit: I still listen in the car sometimes but nothing current, all classic rock and like '80's flashback.'

YESESIS wrote: I've heard that song September on the radio more times than I can possibly count, but they had another hit(they've had many actually) in the early 80's called Let's Groove, which was really big at the time but now you rarely hear it. Very good band.

They were magnificent, one of the great Soul/Pop bands in history.

Interesting - 1979 is the year my love for music and prog in particular started and I started to distance myself from the stuff that was played day in day out on mainstream radio (I had loved Abba and Boney M. before, and the Beatles actually, but was giving up on these at the time - the Beatles came back later though).

One band that I really loved at the time and had picked up from the radio in 1979 were Dire Straits (although the amazing Sultans of Swing, the first I discovered, is from 1978 actually; in 1979 they had Once Upon a Time in the West and News). And then of course Another Brick in the Wall II, and I also liked Logical Song from the beginning, and, somewhat embarrassingly, Barclay James Harvest's Love on the Line. Looking around a bit, in 1979 I was starting consciously to look for earlier music and I didn't pick up a lot from the radio in that year, this started massively in 1980.   

Yeah, hard to argue with that. 

Me too. My radio listening definitely exploded in the spring of '80. So many great songs then! 

I used to record songs on cassette off AM radio with a microphone. It was around 1970-1973. I had a bunch of tapes in our pickup camper and my dad sold it before I realized I left them in there. It was a bad day. I can still see the hand drawn labels and every time I hear one of those songs my memory flashes back to the tape and my brain fills in whatever the DJ blurted at the end and what the next song was. Here's what I remember of the playlists:

Come and Get Your Love - Redbone

Liar - 3 Dog Night

Fire - The Crazy World of Arthur Brown

Jungle Fever - Chakachas

Roundabout - Yes (single version)

2001 A Space Odyssey - Deodato

Jump Into the Fire - Harry Nilsson

In the Right Place - Dr. John

Come and Get it - Badfinger

Mother and Child Reunion - Paul Simon (I stopped the tape only about 30 seconds in. Now that song is only 30 seconds long to me)

Baby Blue - Badfinger

Back in the Black Bayou - Jim Staffford

Bang a Gong - T Rex

I'm guessing Boston would be on most people's list for that year. Foghat also makes sense. Cool, and I used to love Triumph as well, right on. 

That's right, they really are great.