Bonneville Broadcast Consultants (BBC) was a division of Bonneville International Corporation, established around 1971 to provide specialized broadcast programming consulting and services, particularly to radio stations.
Bonneville Broadcast Consultants — This Bonneville division is based in Tenafly, New Jersey. Its president, Marlin Taylor, was drafted for the job as a result of his success in programming Bonneville's WRFM in New York. Taylor's "beautiful music" format, which blends music, news, community affairs and personable announcers, moved WRFM to the top of the New York FM market. Bonneville Broadcast Consultants grew out of an effort to transfer WRFM's success to Bonneville's other stations. Bonneville Broadcast Consultants now provides services to over eighty radio stations. Its services are essentially to provide prerecorded music for automated broadcast systems together with consultation on program format, promotion and engineering. Its clientele is growing rapidly, evidence of both its expertise and a mushrooming demand for such services within the radio business. (1)
The holistic app
roach helped many client stations streamline their operations, reduce costs, and present a highly polished sound to listeners. The hallmark of BBC’s innovation was its delivery of curated “easy listening” formats—a sophisticated, instrumental style that quickly found a broad audience. Stations using BBC’s services benefited from professional playlists, consistent branding, and the ease of fully or partially automated broadcasting.
Bonneville International
The parent corporation, Bonneville International, is owned by Deseret Management Corporation which also owns several other LDS commercial enterprises. The Bonneville Board of Directors includes Church authorities, broadcast professionals and assorted business and community leaders. Bonneville's holdings include broadcast stations and broadcast support divisions. (2)
The Mormon Church is a formidable broadcast institution. Through subsidiary corporations and institutions it owns sixteen radio and television stations, a sophisticated international broadcast distribution system, a Washington news bureau, a cable TV system and production and consulting divisions. These broadcast holdings are controlled in three ways: 1) through Bonneville International Corporation with its 13 commercial radio and television stations; 2) through Brigham Young University and Ricks College with two noncommercial/educational radio stations and one television station, and 3) through the Public Communications Department and Bonneville's production division with a worldwide program production, duplication and distribution system whose primary purpose is distributing General Conference and other LDS programs and building the Church's public image.
According to Bonneville Vice President Robert W. Barker, the Church owns broadcast stations "to serve the public interest of the communities to which the stations are licensed and to exert a positive influence in the broadcasting community." (3)
1, 2, 3. "The Church as Broadcaster," Fred C. Esplin, Dialogue Volume 10, No. 3
Behind the Scenes
The origin of Bonneville's CD Numbers
Walter Powers, one of the greatest guys in the broadcast syndication business, provided insight into the numbering schemes of the Bonneville library.
You can view Walter's notes here.
Materials:
Bonneville Demonstration Tape: Verdery Environment (1992)
"Sent to prospective clients of Bonneville Broadcasting Services while they were in Chicago just before being taken over by Broadcast Programming Inc of Seattle. This was archived from a compact cassette sent to me by a BBS rep in 1991 from Chicago.
Dave Verdery is and was a programming expert based in California at KBIG and was instrumental in the transfer of the vast custom archives of Bonneville at the time to digital. An expensive and huge endeavor by these folks we can be grateful for their efforts today to move what material they did to the digital universe in effect securing its survival. BBS called the process “True Source” as they used the most original mother tapes from the acquisitions of libraries of S.R.P., their own Bonneville, and smaller syndicators such as FM100, Peters, and others all bought up by Bonneville in the late 1980’s. This ultimately led to a library of CDs which was referred to as the Ultra series grouped in 6 discs per Pioneer CD changer carts designed to work with Selector a BSI product for selection of titles per hour automated through the CD changers. In the end the library was the final attempt to offer custom driven beautiful music formats for radio broadcast by its progenitors."
Source: Cookies's Channel, Youtube
Listen here:
Our good friend Don Hobson has compiled a wealth of information about Bonneville Broadcast Consultants. At Don's request, we've archived and reproduced his work here.
Click on any of the following links to access the voluminous data that Don has collected:
Don was also able to obtain actual written programming worksheets from about 1985 by programmer Marlin Taylor. You can view them here.
