AOR and why I don't like it.

Reading reviews during my early days on this site lead me to believe that AOR was another term for MOR or Adult Contemporary. My conclusion nowadays is many that throw the acronym around in reviews to bash post-artistic-peak albums by prog bands don't even know what AOR is. They can be forgiven though because before we even get to tagging a genre, there are two variants by name of what AOR is anyway. SteveG has gone the "Album Oriented Rock" variant, which in my mind should be a separate thing from "Adult Oriented Rock", which is what AOR is as well. What is most annoying to me though is the term Adult Oriented Rock, which is a terrible and misguiding name for a genre that could hit closer to the mark by being called Arena Rock. 

Never as in never listen to radio, unless I drive a very short car-ride, so i dont care what they are playing.

Album Oriented Rock (AOR) is one of the most commercialized forms of pop music, imo. Built on the premise that "independent" minded DJ's played whatever they wanted to on early 70s radio stations, until the record industry saw big money being thrown away and wanted to influence the FM playlists. Payola now went to studio executives who hired "program directors" to pick songs for the DJs to play. Songs that were now only part of record albums, as singles were now redundant. So, many of these so called "deep cuts" were played in daily rotation just like singles. The list of which is endless: Blinded By The Light, Come Sail Away, Born To Run, all of Fleetwood Mac's side one songs from the Rumors album, etc., etc. To be honest, some of these songs are quite good rock music, but their over saturated broadcasts and commercial origins tarnish them for me. What say you about AOR?

Edited by SteveG - March 19 2020 at 09:21