M
Music Lover
Guest
Went to see Paul McCartney's concert Thursday night! It was awesome!!!!!!! Best concert I've seen thus far in my life!!!!!!!
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M
Music Lover
Guest
My baby boomer parents were surprised that teens and college kids knew the words to the songs.
A
Avid Listener
Guest
They shouldn't be. Despite almost constant denials by the suits who claim to be the experts on radio, the truth is that everyone has the means of tuning in any radio station on the dial. Not everyone restricts themselves to only the stations the suits think they should tune in. They'd be surprised at how many younger listeners prefer vintage music, and how many old farts listen to the new crap.
You are generalizing without analyzing. Again.
Radio programmers know what you say is very true. But it affects a less-than-majority position at both ends of the age spectrum. Relatively few younger listeners like music older than they are and the senior audience (which is, coincidentally, of little interest to advertisers) has only a minority who are actively interested in current pop music.
Radio is a push medium, with its strength lying in often skillfully curated music selection and play. When only a portion of your young listeners know and like older music, you don't play McCartney on a CHR. And if your core is in older demos, you don't put Nicki Minaj and Pitbull on your classic hits or traditional AC station. That is, quite simply, because in both cases very few of your existing listeners will know and like the music... radio looks for consensus "I want to hear it on the radio today" songs, not songs that a small group likes while the larger group does not care for.
I know the words to all kinds of songs like "How Much is that Doggie in the Window" and "The Wayward Wind" and "Dancing in the Rain" but I'd likely throw up a little in my mouth if I had to hear them on the radio.
M
Music Lover
Guest
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That's exactly correct. If they want to hear McCartney, his music is available somewhere on the dial. They simply have to tune around and find it. Maybe not on the station where you hear current music, but it's around somewhere. It may even be in the educational part of the dial. But there's no need for all stations trying to be all things to all people.
M
Music Lover
Guest
There is a retro subculture out there: http://www.today.com/id/32322322/ns.../kids-are-all-right-they-love-s/#.VFatoGe4KSo
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M
Music Lover
Guest
As far as "the music of our parents" goes, I think it depends on our stage in life when we are introduced to that music.
Plus, not everyone goes through the rebellion phase of rejecting their parents music, as the Today.com article points out.
Plus, not everyone goes through the rebellion phase of rejecting their parents music, as the Today.com article points out.
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A good example of retro on the radio is the Art Laboe show, on 13 stations in CA, AZ and NM where it does quite well in 18-49 Hispanics despite the music being older than most of the listeners.
http://artlaboe.com/Radio.html
A
Avid Listener
Guest
When discussing people who know the lyrics to a song as evidenced by the fact that they are singing along with the song at a concert that they paid good money to buy a ticket to, the fact that one might also know the lyrics to songs one doesn't particularly enjoy hearing is irrelevant.
And, no one is asking that all radio stations be all things to all people. But some of us are asking that some radio stations don't bore us to death by playing the same few songs over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over. After a while, the repetition gets to be too damn boring.
And, no one is asking that all radio stations be all things to all people. But some of us are asking that some radio stations don't bore us to death by playing the same few songs over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over. After a while, the repetition gets to be too damn boring.
M
Music Lover
Guest
My teen era was the 90's. I enjoyed some current things at that time, such as Backstreet Boys, but I was also starting to love 60's and 70's classic hits more and more. I certainly wouldn't term that as being weird though, as Michael Hagerty did once. For me, it's like "American Idol” alum Brooke White said in that article, “The music of that time has a warmth that doesn’t exist in music today".
The problem is that when stations slow down rotations, they have to add songs that people like much less than the others and songs some people don't even like at all, so the tune out when one of those poor scoring plays, every time every time every time every time every time every time every time every time every time every time every time every time every time every time every time every time every time every time every time every time every time every time every time every time every time every time every time every time every time every time every time every time every time every time every time every time every time every time every time every time every time every time every time every time every time every time every time every time every time every time every time every time until most of the audience is gone.
I was at a concert tonight. I'm not going to say what artist, but he has a lot of hits that get a lot of airplay. You know which one got the biggest applause? The one that gets played over and over and over. That's the one people never tire of. I talked to the artist about it at the post-show meet & greet, and he told me he got tired of that song himself a long time ago. But he never gets tired of hearing them scream when he starts to play it. Same with radio. You think it's boring. Most people don't. I see it every day.
A
Avid Listener
Guest
Playing a slightly unfamiliar song might cause someone to change to a different station temporarily. Boring listeners to death with the same damn songs over and over causes them to find alternative sources for music. It chases listeners away from all OTA radio, over to other alternatives.
Statistically, the number is around 7%. While 93% stay. Who do you program to?
I know you don't believe my statistics, and I don't care.
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Once you have programmed a few stations... and watched many more... you learn that the most lethal thing is a bad song.
Whether the song is bad to a smaller segment of the audience, or just weak to a majority, the song taints the image of your station. After a few experiences with bad songs, the listener says, "every time I listen, they play something I don't like". Once you get that image, the listener is going to leave and never come back.
When you play only the best songs, you get the image of variety... which, to the average listener, means "lots of songs I like". So each time the listener wants your kind of music, they know that you are going to deliver it every single time.
Since the average PPM panelist is seen to use 5 to 6 stations every week and as many as 8 or 9 in the period of a fortnight, it's more important not to let a listener down than to have a deep library, which will definitely let them down. As long as the listener knows that you consistently play the best songs in your genre, you will be part of the set of stations a listener regularly uses.
A
Avid Listener
Guest
If every year you lose 7% of your listeners, how long until you have no listeners?
And if you actually knew anything about music, you'd know that songs are just binary commodities, either "good" or "bad". You'd know that some are very, very popular until they get burned out, others are slightly less popular, some are in the middle, and some truly are bad. No one is suggesting that stations play bad songs. We're suggesting that instead of playing only the best 10 out of 100, you play the best 15 out of 100, with numbers 11 through 15 played a little less. That has been explained to you many, many times. But you persist in setting up the straw man argument that we listeners want to hear "bad" songs, which is total bullshit.
Is that how you conduct business? With total bullshit? Or is that something you only trot out in here?
Incidentally, the rest of your post describes the sort of exploitation of the biases in the ratings I referred to earlier.
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That's not how it works. The 7% was not an annual number. It's total.
The most interesting thing is when they stream music on their personal devices, the majority are streaming the exact same songs we're playing on the radio. So obviously we're not playing those songs enough. But for you, it's too much.
But my job is not that of musicologist. My job is to find out what songs my listeners want to hear and how much they want to hear them. I don't really need to know why they like the songs, as that is a very personal matter that differs with each individual.
If I play the songs that every listener wants to hear the most less, and play the ones they like a little bit less more, where on the planet does that logic work?
Stations go through all kinds of analytics to determine rotations and the performance of individual songs at particular play levels. We get burn scores from music tests and "callout" and MScores if we have MediaMonitors service and we analyze TSL per incident, per day and per week and track changes historically.
And we adjust both individual songs based on specific performance of each song and the categories. An example is when, from time to time, we find in a current based format that there are plenty of hits, but no outstanding ones that qualify for "power" status. So we may change the number of the other current categories in each hour while eliminating temporarily the power. Or we may substitute additional recurrent plays for the power clock positions. Or we may pick one of several other possible solutions to a listener-based music situation.
What you have explained does not work in practice, and causes stations, time and time again, to lose audience. There is no straw man argument here as real situations have been proving the soundness of the practices such as what I just described in very brief detail for decades.
I am telling you how not just I program, but every good programmer that I know does. If you consider it a practice worthy of only a vulgarity, that's sad. Generally, the use of cuss words indicates that the person saying them has admitted to a failed argument.
Since you have not sourced or proven any failing in the ratings other than in the infertile ground of your own mind, that's a poor argument. We've had ratings in the US for about 85 years, and stations and advertisers have good faith in them while, at the same time, they are always looking for even better performance. You, in turn, say they are fixed, with is an accusation of criminal fraud, but for which you have presented nothing in the way of proof; that's shameful and disgraceful.
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