DAN O’DAY TALKS ABOUT RADIO

QUICK RADIO MUSIC PROGRAMMING LESSON

by Dan O'Day on August 10, 2010

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.

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MONDAY RADIO COMMERCIAL SMACKDOWN: An Opening Line That Does Its Job

by Dan O'Day on August 9, 2010

The opening line of a radio commercial has two goals:

• To get the attention of the targeted consumer

• To get that targeted consumer to listen to the next line of the commercial.

Most radio commercials fail. But not this one:

If you don’t experience “hot flashes,” odds are you won’t stick around for the second line of that radio commercial.

Which doesn’t bother this advertiser at all, because no matter how good the commercial is…

You ain’t gonna be buying.

But women who are bothered by those menopausal symptoms? They’ll continue to listen.

See, it’s really not that difficult, is it?

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PAUL McCARTNEY’S “JON STEWART” MOMENT, 40 YEARS EARLIER

by Dan O'Day on August 8, 2010

In 1967, when Paul McCartney was 24 years old, a newspaper reporter asked him if he’d ever taken LSD.

McCartney had three choices:

1) Tell the truth: He had taken LSD.

2) Lie and say he never had.

3) Refuse to answer — thereby effectively saying “yes.”

He answered the reporter’s question honestly.

This TV interviewer thinks McCartney’s answer was irresponsible. But McCartney puts the blame for “spreading the news” squarely where it belongs….

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THE RADIO PROMOTION THAT WENT AWRY

by Dan O'Day on August 7, 2010

Legendary radio program director Chuck Blore with the first-hand account of a promotion at KFWB/Los Angeles that….

Well, let Chuck tell it….

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O’DAY’S TRAVEL WOES #83: WHAT’S THAT SMELL? NOT THE FOOD.

by Dan O'Day on August 6, 2010

As I Recall, Every Friday Is Something-Or-Other Night Here At The Sheraton Skyline Hotel

July, 1996 (continued): As I mentioned in our last installment, July saw me back in London for the European version of PD Grad School, which was held at the Sheraton Skyline Hotel across the street from Heathrow Airport.

This, by the way, is a very convenient location for anyone who needs to spend the night prior to catching a flight from Heathrow. A few notes on my stay there….

Although the hotel is quite nice, their food is perhaps the blandest I’ve ever experienced.

Yes, “British cuisine” is considered by many to be an oxymoron. But even in England, if you ate a meal described as “chicken curry,” you would expect to be able to taste at least a slight hint of curry. This food, however, was 100% flavor-free.

The Sheraton was very modern…so modern that during my entire stay I was unable to figure out how to operate the panel that controlled my suite’s light fixtures. Whenever I wanted to turn something on or off, I would hit buttons at random until I achieved the desired result.

(One of our guest speakers, Rasa Kaye, confided to me that she, too, was unable to decipher her room’s lighting code.)

During my Sunday morning session, a very foul odor permeated our meeting room. We never did learn what caused it. (At least we can assume it wasn’t the hotel’s food, given its complete lack of sensory impact.)

But the highlight of my stay was witnessing a screaming match — in the hotel lobby — between the hotel’s concierge and the driver of one of the airport shuttle buses. They found themselves in violent disagreement regarding which airport terminal a departing guest should be taken to.

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