It's an interesting analogy in that a band aid needs to be pulled off immediately to avoid pain!
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Seattle-Tacoma PPM ratings November 2024
- Thread starter KilowattKat
- Start date
Here you go for $7.99 a month 24/7 for you.
Tom Petty Radio | SiriusXM
Music from Tom Petty's entire Rock & Roll Hall of Fame career, plus Tom's critically acclaimed Buried Treasure radio show.
Yes I'm well aware of it. As I said, there are places to go for artist depth. They've existed for a long time. Classic rock stations on broadcast radio are not among those places. As I often say, broadcast radio is the free sample.
Fordranger, you're forgetting the one key mantra of music radio (tongue only partly in cheek here): LESS IS MORE.
Instead of having 5 Tom Petty songs in rotation, you've got to reduce that down to just 1 and pound away at it -- but make sure that one has been researched to a fine crisp.
It's the same with the other 90's stuff. Even in Seattle, arguably the home of the biggest and best 90's rock, no one apparently cares about Soundgarden's extensive array of radio hits, you've got to hammer away at the biggest one, which probably researched well.
This is how you get ratings. Unfortunately, this is also how you drive listeners to Spotify and Pandora. 35 years ago, Radio could operate with the 'less is more' mantra and not worry about losing listeners to other platforms. Today it's different. The methodology for ratings success is the same, but unfortunately for Radio the listeners have other options.
OK, but haven't you pointed out several times in other threads on RD that younger demos are more open to music from earlier eras than the older demos?
Depends on the music. My question was in response to the comment that "iHeart doesn't appear to see a future in classic rock." What does that mean?
Suppose all radio programmers of stations that play gold in all mainstream genres -- rock, AC, country and R&B -- had a sudden epiphany and started playing deep cuts of their core artists, thinking that would be a good way to get their former listeners back from the clutches of Pandora and Spotify. Now suppose that a good number of them actually came back. Would that result in a net gain for the stations, or would the introduction of so many forgotten and/or ignored songs to the playlist drive off the listeners who loved every song on the tight playlists and either didn't know or didn't like the others? After all, classic rock, AC and country radio seem to be doing just fine with shallow, ultra-focused gold.
To be fair, I may have articulated that poorly. What I wanted to communicate is that classic hits seems to be a safe format that will last and stand the test of time for the years to come. People love 80’s hits, and there is a decent variety of other music that you can mix in with it. Obviously, there will be a point where this format will struggle, but it seems to be safer than classic rock.
Iheart does a great job with classic hits. 95.7 The Jet. The variety is good, there’s great personalities (and a morning and afternoon show based in Seattle). It’s very very well done.
As for there being a “future” in classic rock: obviously it can’t go on forever. I wonder if KZOK only exists in 2024 to provide some outlet for classic rock on the Seattle radio dial to balance out the portfolio). It’s there, but I’m sure there are plenty of people like me who migrated over to 95.7 and never really had a major reason to go back.
I don’t think anybody here was ever advocating for deep cuts. Most of us have been involved with radio in some capacity, and know for a fact that deep cuts will never work. I think people also latched on to the example I gave about Tom Petty. I would never advocate that anybody play any of his deep cuts, but it’s a bit amusing that Free Fallin gets played as much as it does (multiple times a day from what I can tell).
You're making a format generalization based on your personal taste.
My personal taste has absolutely nothing to do with this conversation. It’s a fact that there’s a lot more you can do with classic hits as opposed to classic rock from a programming perspective. How that plays into the dynamic of two iheart stations in Seattle remains to be seen.
Come on! Your entire post is about how you prefer the music at 95.7. There are no objective facts or statistics at all.
Both formats have evolved and replaced songs to attract current demos.
That part is opinion, but is it not a fact that iheart is able to do a lot more with the classic hits format as opposed to the classic rock format? In every example I’ve looked at, they seem to have far more flexibility and latitude with their classic hits assets.
Some people prefer rock only to pop with some rock mixed in. Classic rock is for them. Obviously it's not for you.
Which is totally understandable. Nobody would argue that point. People like what they like. But back to the point I’m trying to make, there’s a very strange contrast between KJEB and KZOK. One station seems to fire on all cylinders, and the other one seems almost like an afterthought at this point.
Go back and read post #72.
Okay fair enough. I’m not here to argue with you over it. If it works for them, that’s all that matters.
Why is the iHeart 3rd wheel never mentioned, Adult Hits KJAQ? The format is heavy on 80's/90's, but includes more variety with more decades of music. All three have an overlap with songs, but all do very well in the right demographics. This strategy must be successful for them.
Exactly, which gets back to what I've said about songs not being exclusive to formats. The thing that distinguishes a format is its presentation. You take the station as a whole, looking at the mix of ALL of the songs, not just certain specific songs. When people stream, they don't choose songs based on a format or genre. They like them regardless of format or genre. So radio formats have become broader to reflect that. Even the country format, which appears to be based on genre, includes songs that are played on other formats, such as Shaboozey's A Bar Song.
'Doing fine' is a relative term, really. Radio is losing listeners. Is that an example of 'doing fine'? It's debatable.
I'm not suggesting that Classic Rock stations start cluttering up their playlists with deep cuts. But when I hear the exact same Beck song playing every time I tune into KISW, I find it questionable that it really is gaining the station new listeners. Maybe short term it keeps the ratings bolstered. But long term? Those who tire of hearing the same tracks repeatedly will switch to Spotify or Pandora.
I realize there is no easy and perfect solution. It's a problem that I'm sure radio programmers have to struggle with. They rely on research, which helps, but even they know that the internet is a very big place with a lot of audio entertainment -- all available on one's smart phone.
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