AM/FM/WTF

I generally only peruse any "10 Things About The Beatles You Never Knew!" lists to snobbishly roll my eyes about already knowing everything on them, which I was fully prepared to do with this 10 Beatles Innovations That Changed Music one. And it pretty much is the same as always - one thing I can snidely remark on is the line about their studio techniques deserving an entire list to themselves when in fact entire BOOKS have been written about said techniques - but in all honesty I don't think I've ever heard this one:

By 1968, the American radio dial preferred to have music on AM and talk radio on FM, and most AM stations played music in a three-minute single format. This meant that any singles significantly longer or shorter than three minutes were ignored by AM stations, because it would wreck their repetitive hourly format to play it. When the Beatles released “Hey Jude” as a single in August, 1968, it was nearly 7 1/2 minutes long, and AM stations simply chopped off the song at the 3:00 mark, which denied listeners the chance to hear their favorite part – “Na na na nanananaaa.” At KSAN-FM in San Francisco, radio pioneer Tom Donahue used the promise of a whole “Hey Jude” single as a means to lure listeners away from local AM stations to his uniquely programmed FM station, and the idea eventually snowballed across the country. Within ten years, American radio stations had almost completely switched places, and put music on FM and talk radio on AM.

Oh, moi: always learning, always optimizing!