Beautiful music initially offered soft and unobtrusive instrumental selections on a very structured schedule with limited commercial interruptions.
In the early 1960s, the Federal Communications Commission adopted a standard for transmitting and receiving stereo signals on a single channel of the FM band.
The station format launched in the fall of 1960 featured music sweeps of lush instrumentals with subtle comments from their staff announcers.
WDVR was a resource for mature listeners who were driven from AM radio at the time when WFIL and WIBG (and others) switched to rock 'n' roll programming.
Others, such as Jim Schulke, devised a method of buying air time on FM stations in bulk and reselling the blocks to interested advertisers.
Schulke formed Stereo Radio Productions (SRP) to help his stations get better ratings and pull in more agency advertising dollars.
His stations used six hundred 10+1⁄2-inch-diameter (270 mm) reels of stereo reel-to-reel tape set on multiple machines so that 15 minute segments would play at a time, alternating from one player to another, allowing a varied programming format in which no half-hour was repeated within a two-week period.
One of Schulke's stations using this "matched flow" concept was WDVR's chief competitor in the beautiful music format in Philadelphia, WWSH-FM.
Initially, the vocalists consisted of artists such as Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, Peggy Lee, Tony Bennett, Patti Page, Johnny Mathis, Perry Como, Doris Day, and others.
On the other hand, even uptempo jazzier songs by standards artists, such as "Detour" by Patti Page, would not be heard on beautiful music stations except during specialty shows.
Also, during weekday morning drive times, most beautiful music stations increased the vocals to as much as 50 percent to accommodate a broader audience.
These new custom recordings were usually instrumental versions of current or recent rock and roll or pop hit songs, a move intended to give the stations more mass appeal without selling out.
Many beautiful music stations would air a few Christmas songs per hour beginning around Thanksgiving each year, increasing their frequency as the month of December progressed.
Bonneville, which had acquired the SRP and Century catalogs in the 1980s, sold its beautiful music assets to Broadcast Programming in November 1993.
EMF ended the beautiful music format and switched WKTZ-FM to WJKV, broadcasting its in-house satellite K-Love network.
An annual influx of vacationers from colder climates has helped such stations as KAHM (102.1 MHz) in Prescott, Arizona, and, until 2021 KWXY (1340 kHz) in Cathedral City, California.
In Canada, Evanov Communications' "Jewel"-branded stations in Ontario and Quebec (including CKDX-FM in metro Toronto, CJWL-FM in Ottawa, and CHSV-FM in metropolitan Montreal, among others), which play soft adult contemporary music during the day and standards in the evening, feature an hour of traditional beautiful music from 11:00 p.m. to midnight, dubbing the program "The Instrumental Concert Series".