Seventies stations cover a decade that contains several incompatible traditions: progressive rock, glam, singer-songwriter, funk, disco, reggae's first international breakthrough, punk at the end, and the Motown and soul catalogue running through all of it. A station calling itself a seventies station is choosing among those, usually without saying which.
The broad split is between rock-led seventies stations and dancefloor-led ones. The first plays album-oriented rock and the singer-songwriter canon; the second plays disco, funk and soul singles. They share a decade and essentially no records.
Audio quality is a genuine consideration for this decade. Seventies recordings were engineered with care for vinyl playback and many have been remastered several times since, with results ranging from excellent to badly over-compressed. A seventies stream at 192 kbps or better rewards good source material in a way that a modern pop stream does not, because the dynamic range is still there to hear.
