I actually love music, but I do wish I wouldn't be assaulted by music everywhere I go. Kinko's, grocery store, even the GAS station. The next president should put limits on both that and Xmas music played before Thanksgiving. Was in a store this weekend and they had the Xmas music blaring already. Um, it's Halloween.
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The new krth
- Thread starter krth101
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I actually love music, but I do wish I wouldn't be assaulted by music everywhere I go. Kinko's, grocery store, even the GAS station. The next president should put limits on both that and Xmas music played before Thanksgiving. Was in a store this weekend and they had the Xmas music blaring already. Um, it's Halloween.
No. The simple fact is that a Top 500 or Top Anything is an inverted pyramid. The songs at the widest part are those liked by nearly everyone and negative to nobody.
The deeper you go in the list, the appeal thins... that is why they scored lower in listener voting (or in a music test). If you go any deeper, you end up, eventually, with songs with more negatives than positives. More important than that, in a countdown, you end up playing hour after hour of songs with limited mass appeal.
This idea is put to the test every day when stations in PPM markets look at the MSores if they buy that MediaMonitors service. The MScore, in simplified terms, looks at the reaction of listeners over averaged, repeated, plays of each song. The MScore will show how likely a song is to drive away listeners or to hold them.
Songs that people score high on music tests have low negative MScores... they like to hear them.
Every station that tests tries out as many as double the number of songs that they will eventually play. And they keep testing lots of "what if" titles each time.
Listeners know what they want to hear. The programmer's job is to take that knowledge and combine the songs so that there is nice flow and a nice blend. That alone is a hard enough job.
Yeah, that's what the next president should spend his or her time on...
Too much caffeine....I'll take Coca Cola, instead.
Or better yet.....Inca Kola!!
Better yet, I'll just play the top 500 or 1000 songs of all-time based on Joel Whitburn's rankings, there you go!
And this soda fountain analogy comes from the guy who didn't like my pizzeria analogy!
Do you think that if KRTH had played songs #501 to #600, a lot of listeners would react with "Hey, I love those songs---I hope KRTH plays them more often"?
Actually, since KRTH's playlist is around 800 songs according to Mr. Hagerty, we've most likely would have heard more of the same ole, from #501 to 600. For us to hear "Oh Wow" music on KRTH, on a countdown like this, we may have to have a special that features the top 1500 of all-time! Positions 1500 to 801 (give or take) would be the "Oh Wows" and 800 to number one, would be the well-tested songs. The only way to hear a true, ranked countdown based on past performance, is to play them according to Billboard rankings.
At quite a few market leading stations I was with during the 70's, 80's and 90's we never subscribed to Billboard. The chart did not tell us who was buying the songs, how many got returned and how may pieces were pay-offs for reporting to the trades. Uselless
That is why, from '58 on we used Gavin, and then Hamilton, Rudman, R&R and other reports specific to individual formats.
Once single 45s ceased to be a trackable item, using music sales was useless. And that is when callout and music test came on the scene to replace them.
I can't think of anything less useful to a music radio station today than charts from decades ago.
Oh, I don't know. Wasn't it George HW Bush who outlawed the old Muzak we used to hear in elevators and stores? I recall that it disappeared sometime during his administration and was replaced by Lite Rock.
When Michael Bloomberg becomes President, he'll probably outlaw soft drinks. I'm hoarding Classic Coke and Mountain Dew in my garage.
I'm sure Dick Bartley and the countless classic hits / AC stations out there, running Casey Kasem top 40 reruns would highly disagree.
You'll be playing a boatload of songs that haven't been popular since the week they fell off the chart.
And now you've suggested a structure that ignores listener votes.
This one is sooooo simple, guys...the 1 to 5 percent of KRTH's audience that voted, did what people do...named the first three songs they really like and expect to hear when they think of KRTH and nominated them. You're looking at small numbers of votes the closer you get to 500. Beyond that, you're playing songs that not only don't test well, but nobody asked for even on that special.
Right....but think of the playlist, the sound, the "oh wows". You would have oh wows, lost hits, mixed in there with all the popular, better tested songs. Frankly, it'd be a great mix, Michael. Think of the possiblities here, not only are you satisifying the ones that enjoy KRTH, but are instilling the great sounds of what classic hits are all about to those listeners and new listeners that tune in. And besides, it's during a holiday weekend, when (as you have said) listenership is down anyways....If there is any loss, it should be minimal. That's what's great about weekend programming....it should be a chance to show off what classics are all about, instead of weekday programming, which tends to be more uniform and generic.
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Hopefully you realize I am kidding.
Sometimes, in this group, Met...it's hard to tell. Glad you are!
All of which sounds great on paper, and which I would have agreed with many years ago, but since then I've learned that it runs counter to the behavior of a mass audience and how they use the medium.
An "oh wow" is only an "oh wow" because it's not being played. And it's not being played because a significant percentage of your audience will not say "oh wow" when you play it.
People who are not walking encyclopedias of music (most people) have three categories of songs:
Songs I like.
Songs I don't like.
"Weird songs".
"Weird songs" is the catch-all for the songs they don't know.
And even on a weekend, if your regular listeners tune in over the course of Saturday and Sunday and hear too many "weird songs", they don't intellectualize that you're doing a special weekend, they just know they're hearing "weird songs" on KRTH.
And do that enough and they listen less or not at all. They have 6 to 9 other pushbuttons.
"I used to listen to KRTH, but they started playing all these weird songs..."
I really think we need to develop a radio programming simulator, like a flight simulator, so you and Steve can program all these ideas and crash a station or three without hurting employees, their families and stockholders.
LOL!!! ROFLMAO!!!! THanks for a good one, Michael!! Only a few of us are walking musical encyclopedias! Only a few of us know within 1 or 2 seconds what "oldie" is starting to play EVEN if we last heard it 20+ years ago! However, as you mentioned, most listeners do not use the medium as we radio nuts do.
You don't know that for a fact. You're talking nearly a thousand classics from just the 70's alone that are being ignored. Add a few hundred more from the 1980-84 era also. Believe me, people will remember. Research is not a "personal" medium. It's just generalization.
Who says our ideas are specifically only for KRTH? It can be done in smaller market areas, easier. Give it a chance.
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I do know it for a fact. That's the only reason songs aren't played. They simply have too high negatives.
As you've been told again and again and again, stations would love to play more songs. It reduces stress over what happens when titles inevitably burn.
Classics from the 70s....we're less than two months away from our target listener having been born in mid-1975. A song that fell off the radio when it fell off the charts is not a record (s)he will remember.
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The topic is KRTH. It is being done in smaller markets, with varying degrees of success. But a tighter competitor can eat their lunch if one comes along. Case in point, Joplin, Mo, where KJMK went tight and rode the rocket from a 4.8 to an 11.0 in two books while the existing broader station fell from third to fifth, making them the lowest-rated FM in the market. Or Long Island, where WLNG is a local treasure but a no-show in the numbers while 'CBS-FM is top 10.
As Michael already said, those are specialty shows.
... and they run in dayparts that have next to no radio listenership and nearly zero revenue impact.
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