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Overnight only songs...purpose?
- Thread starter tall_guy1
- Start date
There may be two kinds of songs that you're noticing. One group of songs that haven't officially been added to the playlist, but are being tried out in a daypart that won't hurt. The other is a group of songs that might have suggestive lyrics not appropriate for the general audience. Most CHRs and contemporary country stations have younger audiences after 7PM. They like to hear a higher percentage of new music, and react well to songs with suggestive subjects. The higher percentage of currents will help a station maintain its reporting status with the charts.
This, today, is almost always done to fill in the near total absence of commercials and other content in overnights. Stations may have a fill or tertiary gold category that gets used only in overnights and, perhaps, occasionally in hours that have very few commercials elsewhere in the schedule. They may also be set as fill songs in case the digital system misses a song or gets outt'a whack.
Having this sort of category allows the regular 24/7 categories to rotate regularly, so that the daytime horizontal and vertical rotations don't get messed up.
Nope. Most of us look at the default reports that are 6 A to Midnight. We know stations often use fill categories in overnights.
I remember 103.3 WKFR when they had All Night Cafe guessing it was syndie to radio stations across the country would play Cause I Got High back in 2001 I think that was a song that one of the morning DJ said never did say what the song was but I'm guessing it was Cause I Got High. After pop crush radio show it is just like a Ipod from 12AM to 5:30AM when there morning show comes on which WKFR is live from 5:30AM to 7PM at night.
I've noticed that too with some smaller stations. Like a popular urban station (mostly r&b) that I listen to sometimes plays a huge variety of songs from the 80s-current. They have a pretty large playlist. But in the evening, say from 6pm-10pm they sprinkle a lot of the same songs throughout those times that aren't played at any other time... not hugely popular songs, but good songs that probably aren't played at all by any of the similar stations around the country and make them unique to that station and their listeners and represent the station in their own unique way. And during middays it's more boring/blend/safe music, like what would suitable for office background music. I'm assuming that they probably got certain feedback from their listeners about what their favorite songs are and they feel like the evenings are where they can squeeze those in best... or at that time, the songs seem to fit the mood better and people look forward to and have come accustomed to hearing them at that times. There are definitely different moods and vibes throughout the day and some songs fit a certain time better. Like how stations liked to put an energetic dj in the morning and then a more relaxing dj in the evening to wind down. And usually overnights is when stations be more free with their selections and open up their playlist more and not be as cautious.
Seems like there are some stations that use the longer extended mixes (of songs that get played only in their "single" mix during the day) to play during overnight hours, to stay with the format clock, and not get off track, for the same reason: lack of commercials. Seems like some stations that I used to work for did this. I did it as well.
I seem to remember one of the top-40 stations in Nashville used to sell its new music previews, and those songs got tons of spins in the overnight hours. I'm guessing, though, that it did that to fill time when it lacked commercials. I can’t imagine the labels paid extra for multiple spins an hour in that time slot.
I briefly did overnights on an AC about 15 years ago, and it scheduled 60+ minutes of music an hour in that slot. A good portion of those extra songs were, for all practical purposes, dead songs on the log to make sure the clock stayed on track. The PD didn’t care if they aired or not because “nobody cares about overnights.”
I briefly did overnights on an AC about 15 years ago, and it scheduled 60+ minutes of music an hour in that slot. A good portion of those extra songs were, for all practical purposes, dead songs on the log to make sure the clock stayed on track. The PD didn’t care if they aired or not because “nobody cares about overnights.”
Sometimes... back a handful of decades, playing a song only in overnights let the station report to "the trades" (Gavin, FMQB, Hamilton, R&R, etc.) that the song was an "add" even if it never played in a rated daypart.
I think this practice used to be more common in the 80s/early 90s, when top 40 was still gunshy about playing rap or alternative music in the daytime. A lot of stations would only air these records in overnights.
Actually, it has been common for perhaps 60 years or so for Top 40 stations that wanted to appeal to adults during the prime 6 AM to 7 PM hours to have a "Nights" category that had music that was too edgy for daytime play. In the late 60's and 70's, they might have been harder rock songs. More recently, they would have been harder core rap and hip hop songs.
The idea is / was that the evening audience will actually like those songs, but the slightly more mature daytime Top 40 listener would not.
I remember hearing a lot of new country singles on KKWF and KMPS that aired at midnight-5AM for a few weeks before they were put on regular rotation. But this was 9-10 years ago. Maybe they don't do that anymore. For all I know I never hear anything out of the ordinary, in any format, during the overnight hours nowadays.
It also seems like more and more stations are airing almost non-stop blocks of music in overnight. Several years ago they would air a 3-4 minute commercial break once or twice an hour, some mixed with PSAs. I remember with the old 98.9 KWJZ (now KNUC) in Seattle and 106.9 KRWM, they ONLY aired Ad Council PSAs between midnight-5AM (mixed with regular ads and promos of course), no other times even on weekends or holidays. Remember the Childhelp PSAs? I remember the waitress who abused her children and one with an answering machine; I still hear them once in a while on Fox Sports Radio during their late night show.
It also seems like more and more stations are airing almost non-stop blocks of music in overnight. Several years ago they would air a 3-4 minute commercial break once or twice an hour, some mixed with PSAs. I remember with the old 98.9 KWJZ (now KNUC) in Seattle and 106.9 KRWM, they ONLY aired Ad Council PSAs between midnight-5AM (mixed with regular ads and promos of course), no other times even on weekends or holidays. Remember the Childhelp PSAs? I remember the waitress who abused her children and one with an answering machine; I still hear them once in a while on Fox Sports Radio during their late night show.
Nights or overnights only airplay is quite common in the country format where the pressure to add records is more concentrated than in other formats. Because the Mediabase chart includes Midnight-midnight airplay, the labels can get their "adds" and say "WAAA is playing our new song from our new artist", while "WAAA" is only playing it in non-rated or non-prime hours.
I once did a weekend overnight shift (in December) in a very small town whose AM station pumped out a whopping 54 watts at night. (This was not my regular shift.) To get me to take the shift, the then-PD said that I could just track CDs all the way through if I wanted to. Since we had already been wall-to-wall Christmas on what we now know as "black Friday," I decided to track a reel-to-reel tape of Christmas music. This tape had the wrong type of tones, so we could not use it on our automated FM station, anyway. (I rewound it each hour while the network news was on.) Easiest shift ever for me. I went the whole night without ever cracking the mic on the AM! (Of course, now the station has an FM translator, and they carry syndicated satellite overnight programming, so what I did on my shift there back in the early '90s would not even be necessary anymore.)
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