That's OK. No judgement here. We only get paid when we deliver the biggest audience. The advertisers don't ask if the audience is correct. Once again, this is not a hobby. This is our job.
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That's OK. No judgement here. We only get paid when we deliver the biggest audience. The advertisers don't ask if the audience is correct. Once again, this is not a hobby. This is our job.
Great discussion! Stating the obvious, stations are in business to broadcast, not narrowcast I have subscribed to SirrusXM for 9 years. At about $5 per month, I can get any narrowcast format I like, including Blues. It is so easy now to stream. I listen to the 60s, 70s, 80s, soul town, Beatles, and Stones channels to name a few. None of these are viable terrestrial formats. You can have both!
That I completely agree with.
Again, my whole point today wasn't that you all should change everything for an individual preference.
I am going to advise Wikipedia to add your name to those of Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky and Sartre!
(I'm not sure even they understood it as they were continuously redefining it, sort of like what radio is doing to the Alternative rock format.)
I think, therefore, I am.
In research, we have what are called "outliers". These are persons who give answers in any kind of project that are outside even the fringes of normal.
In presenting music tests and perceptual research, I used the example of a shipping box. We want to put a bunch of stuff in a box. There is one item that protrudes and keeps the box from closing. We have a decision to make: use a much bigger box, with lots of empty space and extra packing material, or ship the oversize item alone in its own box of a different shape.
The radio parallel is expanding the playlist to be much broader, taking the focus away from the core and moving into areas that are isolated. The alternative is to give the odd-man-out songs to some other station but not ours to retain our focus and specialization.
When a station does a music test, recruiting has to both cover all the core types of partisans, but exclude the very deviant outliers who will send out outside our... and our listener's... comfort zone. But occasionally we get an outlier anyway. When we look at the test results we can see, particularly if we do cluster/factor analysis graphically, if we end up with a "cluster of one" who is a person totally unlike the rest of the sample. We then remove that respondent from the results and reprocess.
There is very definitely a mathematical way of determining this beyond "I don't wanna' play this song on my station".
Your point is deeply valid. Radio stations find in music tests songs that are liked but which are outside the "feel" of our station. We understand that our listeners have more choices than ever and they don't come to us for those songs. They either stream them, download them or find them on a different station; generally they don't want to hear those songs when they are listening to us, either.
Part art, part science.
Some colleges teach communications as an art, some teach it as a science. Graduates can receive degrees either way.
The arts side is more about language. The science is more about statistics.
The problem is that we end up with grads who have half-empty glasses.
The comparison that comes to mind are musicians or vocalists who are technically perfect, but who never have a hit.
I myself have a doctorate in education and know well the process of quantiative research. I myself work more with qualitative research (I know, gasp at the shock of that). What your industry does is nowhere outside the realm of normal quantitative research practice.
The qualitative side is supposed to be handled by record labels.
When people complain about the music, it's not my job.
And we also do qualitative research over things like morning shows, comparisons between our competitors, and the like. And some projects, like a format search, can have a taste of both qualitative and quantitative elements.
Mixed methods. My dissertation is qualitative with a mixed methods approach (I used a survey to guide the questions that I asked in my focus group and individual interviews).
That would make sense with identifying personalities. Reminds me of Private Parts when the WNBC executives were going over the interviews. "I want to see what he will say next." 😆
For songs, definitely. We use qualitative for talent, morning shows, talk hosts, station imaging, format searches and the like.
But often we get complaints that we don't play enough xxxxx (fill in artist or genre) as if we could demand the production of more hit songs by the record labels.
With music; but as David pointed out, talking about an entire station I see where qualitative info is more valuable.
Anecdotally, I would tune to the radio more for the talk. It was my biggest gripe in WAAF's final months with Mike Hsu and LB's show. I wanted more discussion than about a minute between songs and commercials.
These days.... IMHO, the only person doing good radio in Boston is Mr. Bob Bitner. AM 740 is the best station I have heard in Boston in the past 10 years. There used to be many good stations in the early 90's, but as others have stated, consolidation took over and ruined it. WERS is second best. Just one man's humble opinion.
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