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Tim Conway Fudge...
- Thread starter sdwulfdawg
- Start date
Yet Rogan is 3 to 4 hours and has more listeners
I worked at PRN , Coast to Coast was 4 hours then they reran hours 1 and 2 fromm 3 am till 5 am
Steve & Eydie are my shorthand for "middle-of-the-road". No need for explanation. Everyone knows what you're talking about.
True story: In 1980, my Curb Records rep sent me a 45 all by itself, and then called me:
"Mike, I'm putting one 45 in an envelope by itself. Here's the bet I want to make with you: They use a stage name. If you can't tell who it is on the first try, you have to add it to your playlist for at least two weeks."
"DeDe, that's not how it works."
"C'mon, Mike."
"No. I'm not going to add a record because I don't know who it was. It could suck, it could be totally wrong for the station."
"All right, but call me after you hear it. You'll never guess."
"I'll do better than that. I'll call you before I play it. We'll listen to it together over the phone."
The record arrives. The act is "Parker and Penny."
I call DeDe, and drop the needle on the 45.
The moment the second vocal comes in, I say:
"Look, DeDe, I can understand that even as big a square as Mike Curb is, he doesn't want to put "Steve and Eydie" on the label, but....
She hung up.
Yeah, but could he sustain the audience over 3 to 4 hours if he had lengthy commercial breaks? Talk radio and podcasts are different animals with some similarities.
At NPR, both Morning Edition and All Things Considered are two-hour shows with hours repeated and updated if stories evolve between plays.
"You promised me we were not going to do any more self-deprecating humor, and WHY did you say we will do no more self-deprecating humor?"
"Because we're no good at it."
Hilarious!
That is among my favorite jokes on earth and I have used it myself more than once.
I LOVED Lohman and Barkley. Here's another of my favorites---a live spot for Giant Longo Toyota in Giant El Monte:
19780313 KFI Lohman and Barkley.mp3
drive.google.com
K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
I would like to go on record as being grateful for that concluding statement, since it prevented another argument with you that (based on our history) I have no doubt I could not win.
That said, if I may take one quote out of @powers' reply to you ...
He's right, and we're doing quite well in Albuquerque with a core library of about 430 titles.
oh no- he's not entertaining- hos stand up was average, he was the least funny cast member on Newradio. I still dont get his success. But whatever
The pros will never tire of letting you know how right they are and you, welll...not so much.
K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
Thank you ... I think.
I have, as you well know, explained the Classic Hits programming philosophy of "consensus favorites" several times, in direct response to people asking. But the real test is whether or not it works in practice. I don't find that philosophy to be at odds with a somewhat larger library ... in my opinion, if one can find 125 songs that are strong enough to be powers, then there's nothing wrong with scheduling a longer turnaround period and go through those twice a day instead of three or four times in a 24 hour period. One advantage of doing it that way is being able to schedule by offset and better serve people who listen at the same approximate times every day for the same length of time. Hearing a song repeat on Thursday during your lunch hour that you last heard on your drive home on Monday is, I believe, much more tolerable to the average listener.
And I also keep a lot of secondaries in active rotation ... enough to let them repeat only every other day (or a few hours less than a full 48 ... gotta keep that offset). But what I am proudest of as a programmer was creating the hourly "Forgotten 45" feature, which has a library of 500 titles all by itself, scheduled to only be active for three weeks at a time, and rested for six months between active periods. I won't say they are obscure; they're more like "oh wow, I haven't heard that song in years".
I think I've managed a decent balance and Don (KRKE's owner) is happy with the station sound and sales.
And I'm not a big fan of smaller libraries and tighter turnovers myself. I think that has a lot to do with my own programming philosophies.
I've never really understood the philosophy of resting titles. During the time you're resting some titles how many of those 500 are in rotation?
I get that some programmers do use the rest technique. But I've always thought that if a category is done correctly, using packets and maybe even packets within packets, resting is unnecessary. If you put all 500 in the active playlist scheduled it rarely enough wouldn't it basically accomplish the resting by itself? Or is there something I'm missing. I've had people tell me (listening to a station that i believe rests) that they hear a song that they haven't heard in a while, and they hear it again a few times in the next few days or couple of weeks. And of course they aren't listening 24/7, the song is obviously playing in rotation. Then, it's gone, not to be heard again for months. Why do that? What does it do that a well thought-out rotation can't?
Oh No!!
You're new around here, yes?
In any case, you shouldn't have.
I'll be here for moral support.
K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
Thanks for asking that. I wasn't clear, although you probably could have figured out the math from knowing the library size and rest periods.
Yeah. You're missing the part that I failed to elaborate on.
There are always 45 songs in the active F45 library. The scheduling software creates rest periods between each play of each title, and also moves songs around so that they move to different dayparts each spin, and when they come around to a daypart again, they have to play in a different hour than previously. And if a song hits 12 plays in three weeks, it is blocked from further scheduling.
Each week, I take out the songs that hit 12 spins and put in the same number. Usually the math works and it's 15 songs, but it can just as easily be 11 songs one week and 17 the next. I am less concerned with that number than I am burning out those titles.
I keep track of the library in an Excel spreadsheet and do the moves manually; the drawback of packeting is that the same group of songs would come in and out of rotation simultaneously. I have a policy of never having two songs by an artist live in the same period, which means I frequently have to hold off on putting a song back in even when it's that title's "turn". So it does mix up the order somewhat.
I guess you can see that I gave this a whole lot of thought when I set it up.
In the case of Forgotten 45's -- which would be the type of song you describe -- there is a great danger in just keeping them all live and letting the scheduler rest them by setting rules. Such a policy would also create a problem in spacing out multiple songs by any given artist (for example, I have four Bob Seger songs in there and I would hate for them all to get scheduled over a short period of time and then have him disappear for months).
The other advantage is that doing it the way I do, I can be 100% certain that I am not burning these titles out, as I said earlier. That would be disastrous.
Now it will be @ChannelFlipper's turn to tell me that I overexplained the process just so I would look better than everyone. Of course, he's one of those "you're burning all the titles to a crisp" type of commenters, so nothing I do would please him.
You just keep on keepin' on.
my whole point is that packeting should be able to accomplish this even better. no, i get that you have thought it out, and you like the way you do it. and it's successful, as well. it just seems like if you put everything in to selector, packeted to your heart's content, and established the rules exactly as you wanted, it could do it efficiently. if "katmandu" (guessing that's probably not a power) is ok to be in the playlist from January 8 to 14, why is it not ok from January 15 to 21? because it'll get burned out? Not if selector is told not to play it so much. So my actual question is DURING the period a F45 is in the playlist, is there a reason to play it in a heavier than I would suggest rotation? Is there something good about a song playing kind of often for a while, and then disappearing for another while? because to me that's what resting seems to imply. here's a song that we don't want to play all the time, it's kinda good but not strong enough for regular airplay. as you said, an oh-wow song. in my rotation i would decide how often the song should play to get the wow factor (yeah, i know KOAI) and schedule it like that. whereas you would put it in for a certain period of time, play it more often than i would during that time, and then rest it. why is yours better? what am i missing?
i do see that you've put a lot of work and thought into your way, and obviously it works very well. the computer programmer in me wants the scheduling software to have all the rules and do the heavy lifting. in a nutshell i don't want any songs to come out of the playlist if they're good enough to be played EVER. if they belong on the air, they belong in the library where if rules are met, they may play. in your case there are a certain number of songs that CAN NOT play during a period because you've pulled them out.
Is this thread about Tim Conway or scheduling 80's music? Maybe starting a new thread over in the Classic Hits forum would. be best.
Well, y'see, after we found out that Tim's show is four hours after all, Flip said he'd go back to criticizing KRTH's playlist, and then Weiserguy suggested it should be KFI's playlist, and then I made the Steve and Eydie joke....
So it's all my fault.
I should never post here again.
Dammit.
I promised I was not going to be self-deprecating.
And WHY did I promise not to be self-deprecating?
Because I'm no good at it.
(quick plug for the guys I stole the joke from---oh wait, they've been gone from KFI for 40 years):
At least this gets us back to a four-hour show on KFI.