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. Based in Tenafly, New Jersey, and led by Marlin Ta
ylor, the company developed and distributed successful automated music formats—especially the “beautiful music” or easy listening style that made WRFM in New York a market leader.
Bonneville Broadcast Consultants was established to answer a simple but compelling question: Could the remarkable ratings success of New York’s WRFM—a station known for its lush, “beautiful music” format—be replicated elsewhere?BBC’s primary focus was providing automated, prerecorded music programming for radio stations.
But their services didn’t end there; they also offered comprehensive consulting in programming, promotion, and technical engineering. This holistic approach 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. At its peak, Bonneville Broadcast Consultants served more than eighty radio stations, reflecting both the demand for its programming expertise and the rising popularity of automation in broadcast media.
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.
