The following is excerpted from Fundamentals of Radio Programming by Randy Michaels….
If you have a music station, then I would say music probably is the most important part of your product. But I am disappointed by how poorly most stations rotate music. By the dissonance between what the PD thinks is going on and what a hard analysis of the music system shows.
I’d like to offer some suggestions on thinking through music rotations. It’s common to look at a station’s research, to analyze the spins, and it’s typical that we’re not spinning the biggest hit records. If you looked at what we’re spinning vs. the call-out data, they don’t seem to line up.
There are a lot of reasons for that, peer pressure probably being the largest. If you do research, you spend a lot of money on it. And then you get influenced by the trade publications or by what certain big-name PDs are doing.
Every record has a life cycle: Introduction, Adoption, Maturity, and then Decline. And those curves all can look different.
But record companies have an agenda. You may have a record you’ve been playing for 12 weeks, and it’s still a Power. But it’s dropped off of the trade publications, so I’d better move it down.
What?? Who cares about the trades? Who cares that the record label wants?
The record company says, “Oh, no, we’re pushing the next cut now!”
And the PD says, “Oh, well, I guess I’d better put that on. Screw the audience. The record company is much more important to me.”
You don’t even help the labels that way, because they do best when we play the music people want to hear. They’re in business to sell records. And although they have an agenda and they’d like to sell the ones they’ve picked, they really don’t care; they’d just like to sell music. And we’ll do better for them if we play hits.
And Country is the worst!
“Oh, he’s got a new song out! Got to take that one off.”
“But it’s still testing #3!”
“No, can’t play it any more. It’s not a Current; people will make fun of me. They’ll think I don’t know what I’m doing; I’ve still got that record in Power, and it’s old!”
Well, I’d rather have a good rating and big bonus than a gold record.
Comments on this entry are closed.
A former consultant of mine once said pretty much the same thing you said….Dont look at the charts…The charts do not matter! Since then I dont look at the charts when Im deciding what to add or move or drop. Yes, I do get some pressure from some reps, but they dont live in this market so they dont know whats working or not…Great article Dan, I hope other programmers read this and agree with this…
I work for a company which is notoriously slow on adding new songs.
The record companies hate us. We don’t even allow for “weekly calls”, and will not discuss our playlist with reps.
And, when the artists come to town, we still get meet & greets and tickets to give away. The record label…and the promoter knows they need us, regardless of our music policy.
Our competition thinks they can beat us by playing “the new music – first”, and kissing butt to the labels.
And yet…we’ve been #1 for over 20 years now…by factors of at least a 5 share 12 plus.
Questions?
It’s about what the listener wants…not what the record company wants.
I am not a PD or MD, but I hope to be one day. I do work at a country station and I do know a little bit on how my PD/MD picks his music. Some songs high on the charts don’t get requested as much as the others. So when my listeners call me or a request or dedication, I record every phone call I get. I then name and date that phone call with the song title they requested. So that way, my PD/MD can see which songs are getting requested during my show. It helps him and me. It’s not scientific, but it’s helpful. It’s something I’ve done at other stations I’ve been at and still do it.
Thank you for your help and for sharing the knowledge,
“Big John” Horton