To Good Times And Great Oldies and anyone else with foolish notions:
I have been a successful oldies programmer and I consult and program one such station today. BTW: it's doing really well...
When I read "playlist should be 5,000 songs" and "you should not repeat a song within 12 weeks", I bust out in hysterical laughter.
Why? Because those who suggest such things are showing they know nothing about the format or how you program it. It's obvious you are passionate listeners of such formats, and I do respect that. But you know not of what you speak or suggest.
First of all, such things have been tried before. In fact, right here in my backyard in Ohio...at least one station failed because it tried to play 5,000 songs.
I tried to program a station once rotating 2,200 songs...it failed, too.
Such a large and wide playlist will only attract a small handful of record collectors and hard-core oldies addicts. Not a substantial number of listeners. The "average" person doesn't know anywhere close to that number of songs, nor do they care. They want to hear "their favorite song" pretty soon after they tune into the station or, poof! The button is pushed and that station is g-o-n-e.
Why? Let's start at the beginning: You understand stations need ratings, right? Sure you do. There's 2 components to that: cume and share. You rotate the hits and that helps you build your cume audience. (You develop a reputation for playing the songs people care about the most and they keep coming back. Incidents of "repeat listening" builds your cume. That's why successful stations test their music...they're finding the songs people want to hear most often.) A large number of titles will not get you cume. Then, you get share with the things you do with your programming that keeps people listening.
To be successful in this format, a station must focus on the perception the listeners have about the songs today...not focus on what chart position in Billboard it got in 1965. Those chart positions are fun to talk about on the air...but are otherwise irrelevant to the average listener.
A word on playlist size. I will grant you that playlist size is somewhat debatable based upon the local market conditions and the situation a station is in. The typical oldies playlist can be as short as 350 songs...or as big as about 600 (with 450 usually the "average".) However, that doesn't mean the station only plays that number of songs. (The ones who do stick with a super short list are, most likely, stations that are having cume issues...and you attempt to bring that cume back by focusing on the hits...It's a tactic, not always standard operating procedure.)
Many successful oldies station, no matter what their actual day to day playlist size will also operate with a "universe" of between 1,000 to 1,500 songs. Those "library" songs are sprinkled into the programming as "feature" songs (think: a top 10 at 10 nightly countdown) or maybe used on weekends when people may be listening to radio longer for "Class of (year)" weekends, or a "Beatles A to Z", a "Wayback" feature on a morning show, or whatever. Some of those don't "test well", but they are recognizable enough that if you play them between two legitimate hits and, especially, if you can explain (through jock talk, a pre-recorded sweeper or promo) why you're playing the song, it will, generally, do no harm.
But when you talk about rotating thousands and thousands of songs, you're playing more "stiffs" than "hits". (Remember: you have to play "the hits" enough to get cume audience to your station.)
I remember a guy in one market I worked in who competed against our oldies station by bringing in his 45 collection in and playing "B" sides and "stiffs" for 4 straight hours nightly. (He'd say things like: "This song really wasn't a hit, but it was good song, so I'm going to play it, anyway.")
I gotta tell you...every record collector and oldies fanatic in town told me how great his show was and how he was going to "put us under".
When the ratings books came out: his show was always, consistently, the worst performing show on their station, ratings-wise. He was later moved to Sunday night (the worst daypart on the station) only because he had a couple of sponsors the station (which was losing a big battle to us), wanted to keep on the air. Though, he was eventually fired.
Bottom line: A super big library rotated for a 12 week rotation...won't get you listeners. The majority of radio listeners have lives. They don't "hang" on radio stations for 12-15 hours a day.
(Of course, if your station is lucky enough to have a fan that listens that long that gets a ratings diary or a PPM monitor, sure it's a plus..) But, the average listener doesn't listen that long
and wants "instant gratification" when they tune in. That's why the big library scheme doesn't work. There's far more "average" listeners than "fanatics" and "record collectors".
My current oldies project station is in a very small town, with a very limited signal. But, it's a resort area, and thus an oldies format (with which I air music from 1955 to around 1985) is perfect. It reaches 35-64 year old adults. We're a non-comm, so we play a minimal amount of underwriting announcements and PSA's (All :30 spots and never more than 5 to 6 minutes an hour). That means we average around 54 minutes of music per hour. (18 to 19 songs). We're playing right now from about a 1,200 song database with a little less than half being the "playlist". Our underwriting has increased dramatically over last year since we went to this programming strategy...and the station is the talk of the town.
But, there's not too many more songs that we're missing that I really feel compelled to play. A few more, maybe...but beyond about 1,500 is the absolute cutoff.
And that's "Oldies 101" for tonight.
