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What happens to songs not in a station's active playlist?

CTListener said:
So all the stiffs that got a week or two of light/overnight airplay before being dropped still exist, but they're not going to be played again, even by request?
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Now, perhaps. Back when dinosaurs like me ruled the airwaves, we had hard drives that were in the 300-500mb range, so we deleted them because space was at a premium.

The reason I took away access to the library was because my morning drive talent deleted 300 songs at 2am the morning he quit and moved back to Ohio. Rebuilding a library on the fly by ripping songs from a CD and manually entering every title, artist and tempo/intro/label was fun. I seriously considered buying a Soldier of Fortune magazine then to see if any mercenaries wanted to travel to Ohio for a few dollars...
 
amos1001 said:
I've been involved with a station that believed that if a song ever made the top 40, even for one week at #40, that it was a hit and therefore belongs in the playlist. Listening, the format sounds like "flipsides and stiffs." Or maybe "big songs by the wrong artist."
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"The greatest hits of all time ... NONE of the time!"
 
tall_guy1 said:
Basically, the sound quality/volume of the individual track if it does not go through modernization needed to sound on par with current tracks (for example, older songs' sound quality is different and radio stations process songs to be up to par.)
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Mirriam-Webster says it isn't a word.
 
tall_guy1 said:
How many songs are stored? I remember my CHR has a throwback song a day in the afternoon. Once the song played with the original "sweeper" from like 2007.
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With today's storage costs, you can keep thousands of songs for very little expense.

If I were storing old audio... music, comedy cuts and other morning show content, and the like.... I'd probably go with a NAS system that has several steps of redundancy.

A Synology 5-drive with 5 x 20 tb drives can be put together for about $2500 using top of the line server drives. Keep the 5th drive as a "hot standby" and do RAID on the other 4, using their system that will give you about 50tb of redundant storage plus a drive that will automatically kick in if one of the 4 "main" ones gets ornery.

And the business office can store old bookkeeping "stuff" there, too. Scans of contracts, insurance policies, whatever.

I have two identical such systems, with each also backing up the other. Easy to operate, and drives today have very long life spans. And most of us set the systems up to "rest" if not being accessed when they are used only for storage.

But there are no rules. Every station and group makes its own decisions on what, if anything, to store. There are no rules.
 
tall_guy1 said:
Do the thousand or so songs that don't get regular play live anywhere particular on the computer that is different than something likely to get played? What about sound-do some songs started auditorally sound "softer" when not updated?
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The songs can be moved onto / into a separate system or folder for "conservation". Think of a place that is like the attic, garage or basement. You know where it is, but it is not in your "on air" system... but can be moved easily.

Think of a library: some books are stored and not in regular circulation "on the shelves". That may be because they are rare, fragile or whatever. You might have to make a special request to see them, perhaps in a "monitored" room or hall.

Same applies to archived audio of any kind. It can't be called up by MusicMaster or Selector or whatever else you use to program your daily music "playlist" or log. It is not accessible to the business software that schedules commercials and non-entertainment content. It is "safe" from accidental airplay because it is not accessible to the "on air" software or even to a live operator or jock.
 
CTListener said:
So all the stiffs that got a week or two of light/overnight airplay before being dropped still exist, but they're not going to be played again, even by request?
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A station might want to save even low-charting songs by significant artists just in case there is a special or something arises that calls for a spoof on a music star to show that not all their tunes made it.

Some years back on a morning show I supervised, we had a feature when one of the artists or bands was in with the morning show... we play about the first 60" of one of their stiffs and then asked things like, "did you really think this would be a hit?" or "why did you even record it?"

At that station, we did not "interview" artists. Boring, particularly if all your top ones were local and might come by the station frequently. So what we did was have them be part of the show, tell a joke (dangerous thing for a rock station to do, of course), talk about what their hobbies are, what soccer players they rooted for, what they did when not doing shows or touring...

We also loved having them do a verse of one of their hits a capella, or having a listener call in to sing with them. But we did that with real, true hits.
 
fybush said:
As with *any* data that's critical to a station's operations, it's up to the IT team to establish and enforce policies for backup and retention. In addition to offering storage on-site in a station's own servers, at Myriad we also have a cloud option that will constantly sync the on-premise audio library (and all the data that goes with it) into the cloud for emergency backup and playout.
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You bring up a good point: many station groups have a cloud system where a server somewhere stores just about anything a station might need... songs, famous quotations, audio of historic news events, comedy bits, listener endorsements, artist interviews, old artist liners... and the like.

Any station in a group with such a facility can pull up a buncha' stuff on demand. There just has to be some supervision or a set of rules on usage of "strange" stuff.
fybush said:
But as others have suggested, it's really not like the days when there was a physical library of records or carts or CDs that had to be maintained and purged. It's all just data storage and data storage these days is pretty cheap. At least with Myriad (and it's the same for other major systems), removing a cut from active rotation is as simple as editing the categories for that file so that our scheduler won't schedule that cut.
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And, for safety, moving the cut to a protected directory or server.
fybush said:
If you need it again later and your IT people don't have a policy of purging inactive cuts, you search for it, change the category and there it is again.
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Using my library analogy again, only a small number of books are checked out at any time. Those are the library's "playlist" with some titles having a waiting list ("rest" in Selector). The rest of the books sit on shelves, waiting to be called on... or not.

Reinforcing your point about how easy and cheap digital storage is... I have around 14,000,000 pages of radio and related stuff on less than 5tb of server storage.
 
tall_guy1 said:
Does it get stored in an "archived" folder for any potential future spins or are they deleted? I know some old songs need to be reprocessed for current sound quality.
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First off, this thread is a pretty funny read.

Second, as others have said, it depends.

But really, where a lot of songs go is "into the grubby hands of people with access to the media." Way back when I was a young lad during the time when stations actually played vinyl records, I met a Music Director who'd amassed a collection of 20,000 albums from his time in album rock radio. Fast forward 30 years later and I'm doing kind of the same thing..."acquiring" a copy of the music library of a defunct alternative station before it was wiped from the servers. Oddly enough my collection of songs I've surreptitiously...collected is about the same number as that man I met so long ago...20,000.

It's a fringe benefit of a radio career.
 
Deus Ex Machiato said:
It's a fringe benefit of a radio career.
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You bet! I have every song that the Recuerdo (KRCD/V) network ever played or even ever tested... over 3000... on a hard drive in a closet.
 
I always wondered how small stations could fit such vast record collections in their building. I remember in the mid-'80s, WCLU Cincinnati was top 40, and it had a big playlist. They added new records early, and sometimes they'd dig up an oldie (often from a scratchy 45) you hadn't heard in years. One evening, we drove back by the WCLU studio in Covington, and saw that it was practically just a shed.

How did they fit so many records in such a small building?
 
Deus Ex Machiato said:
And I have Paris Hilton's debut album that was played as a format flip stunt (IIRC). My gods her cover of "Do Ya Think I'm Sexy" is...not nearly as bad as I thought it would be.
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She's supposedly into amateur radio and antique radios, according to this:
saigondrugs.com

Evidence that Paris Hilton restores antique radios

All my friends know that if I had the chance to meet God and get the answer to only one question, ANY question I could ever want to ask, I would only want to know one thing: does Paris Hilton restore vintage radio equipment and operate a HAM radio as hobbies? I have been thinking about this for...
saigondrugs.com saigondrugs.com
 
amos1001 said:
I've been involved with a station that believed that if a song ever made the top 40, even for one week at #40, that it was a hit and therefore belongs in the playlist. Listening, the format sounds like "flipsides and stiffs." Or maybe "big songs by the wrong artist."
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I know of two of those in tiny little markets. It's like listening to Hour 1 of an old AT40 all the time without the benefit of Casey's personality
 


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