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Paul McCartney concert

TheBigA said:
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.
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And you know this how?
 
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TheBigA said:
Charts that count streaming plays.
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Could you expand upon that? I have often wondered how airplay from Internet stations are counted for Mediabase, Billboard etc., especially if they play mostly mainstream artists.
 
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Avid Listener said:
And you know this how?
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Like much of the rest of the things your question out of ignorance or misunderstanding: we ask the listeners.

Either we use streaming data and play counts for on demand music, or we find out what a stratified sample of users of portable music devices has on thier iPod or MP3 capable phone or tablet.

("We" being either stations, station groups or industry groups and independent research companies. An example would be the music usage studies done for public release by Edison Research.)
 
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Music Lover said:
In contrast to amazinglitemusic.com, the repetition is not as bad though. I think the key to why they aren't as repetitive is because of better daily mixing of the songs.
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You hit on an important factor for "repetitiveness".

In radio, we generally call "mixing" by the term "music scheduling". Software us used to control many different factors of songs, but one of them is how the song schedules. The optimum is to have each song play evenly spaced throughout the day and the week and even the month so that it (and this is oversimplified) plays in every shift before returning to the same shift and plays in every hour before returning in the same hour.

There are lots of other things music scheduling does, but that is one example.

It takes days and days of tweaking to get rotations and songs to run as perfectly as possible, and every time a change in music categories is made, readjustment is needed. When a station does not do this, it is evident by imperfect rotation. And when a streamer tries to use the equivalent of an iPod on shuffle to schedule rather than real (and costly) scheduling software (or tries to do it by hand and finds it takes hours and hours each day to do), we hear bad rotation and apparent repetition.
 
Music Lover said:
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".
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An alternative I would personally use is that much of today's music lacks soul.
 
Music Lover said:
My baby boomer parents were surprised that teens and college kids knew the words to the songs.
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I think there are certain artists who are multi-generational. A couple of my friends, in their mid-to-late 40s, are major Elvis fans. They have posters and all kinds memorabilia galore around their homes. One of them even puts up an Elvis tree at Christmas!

The thing I find quite worrying is how quickly music and artists of today appear and, just as fast, fade away.
 
DavidEduardo said:


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
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Nevada, too, on KOAS Las Vegas. I went to one of Art's oldies shows a year or two ago, and the place was packed. (I may have been the only white guy there.) Laboe has drawing power, it seems.
 
One place you can find Paul's new music is America's Best Music. Some of the songs actually are standards but others would be more at home on AC, though not necessarily today's version of the format.
 
TheBigA said:
Charts that count streaming plays. Everything everyone does, especially on the internet, gets counted.

Of course I'm sure you won't believe this, and you'll say the numbers are fixed.
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No, it's not that I don't believe it. It's that I referred to "alternative sources for music. It chases listeners away from all OTA radio, over to other alternatives." You, in your narrow little vision that assumes that the only alternative for music played over the air that was selected by a bunch of suits is music streamed over the internet from sources programmed by other suits. I'm talking about "alternative sources for music". I'm talking about downloaded or ripped MP3s. I'm talking about picking your own personal playlist, dubbing it to a CD or other media, and playing your own personal selection of music.
 
Avid Listener said:
I'm talking about "alternative sources for music". I'm talking about downloaded or ripped MP3s. I'm talking about picking your own personal playlist, dubbing it to a CD or other media, and playing your own personal selection of music.
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That's great! Radio was never intended to replace personal music selection. The reason radio started losing TSL in the 80s is because people recorded their favorites on cassettes and listened to them INSTEAD OF radio. This was 30 years ago! As a music lover, I encourage people to buy lots of music and build a huge personal collection, so they can listen to their favorite bands and deep cuts all day long. I have no interest in diverting people from their personal collections.

But as I said, we can also track downloads of songs from iTunes and other sources, and the most-downloaded songs tend to be the songs we're playing the most on the radio.
 
TheBigA said:
The reason radio started losing TSL in the 80s is because people recorded their favorites on cassettes and listened to them INSTEAD OF radio.
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That definitely brings to mind my youth. I remember my dad recorded some mix tapes during the 1980s of music he liked from radio. One of the songs that he recorded that easy listening/soft AC stations in our neck of the woods at that time were playing was the theme from E.T.
 
Avid Listener said:
I'm talking about "alternative sources for music". I'm talking about downloaded or ripped MP3s. I'm talking about picking your own personal playlist, dubbing it to a CD or other media, and playing your own personal selection of music.
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Or like Pandora, where you get to program your own station.

From what I've learned from using Pandora, they go by characteristics that songs have in common.
For example: if a song has a leisurely tempo, it will give you other songs that share that trait.
That's why, if you want specific sounds on your Pandora station, it's best to create one by song instead of artist.
Giving songs thumbs up or thumbs down helps fine tune your station.
 
Music Lover said:
That definitely brings to mind my youth. I remember my dad recorded some mix tapes during the 1980s of music he liked from radio. One of the songs that he recorded that easy listening/soft AC stations in our neck of the woods at that time were playing was the theme from E.T.
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One of the popular devices of the day was a combination cassette recorder with AM/FM radio, so you could record songs off the radio. That infuriated the RIAA, who wanted royalties for their music. Ultimately, they got a royalty imposed on blank tape.
 
Music Lover said:
Or like Pandora, where you get to program your own station.

From what I've learned from using Pandora, they go by characteristics that songs have in common.
For example: if a song has a leisurely tempo, it will give you other songs that share that trait.
That's why, if you want specific sounds on your Pandora station, it's best to create one by song instead of artist.
Giving songs thumbs up or thumbs down helps fine tune your station.
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I suppose there will always be know-it-all wearing suits who'll insist on dictating to people what they should and shouldn't listen to. And, they'll claim that they're trying to make your life better by providing a valuable service. It's all bullshit.
 
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