• Get involved.
    We want your input!
    Apply for Membership and join the conversations about everything related to broadcasting.

    After we receive your registration, a moderator will review it. After your registration is approved, you will be permitted to post.
    If you use a disposable or false email address, your registration will be rejected.

    After your membership is approved, please take a minute to tell us a little bit about yourself.
    https://www.radiodiscussions.com/forums/introduce-yourself.1088/

    Thanks in advance and have fun!
    RadioDiscussions Administrators

Atlanta Playlists?

I

itburnswhenipee

Guest
Does anybody know who has the widest playlist in Atlanta vs. the tightest playlist? If I had to make an educated guess, it would be:

Total Songs on Playlist
-------------------------

97.1 The River 100

Q-100 300

V-103 800

Eagle 106.7 200

B-98.5 6,000

Smooth Jazz 200

95.5 The Beat 400

Project 96.1 800

Dave FM 100

Rock 100.5 200

Am I missing anybody? ???
 
Eagle used to have more... probably closer to 600 ... about 50 % classic country. I seem to remember the number was on the board here a year or so back.

Recently, I said the River was 200... if you are right and it's only 100, my bad. :(
 
really they have 20? I thought it was more like 12-15... ::)
Cox are the king of washouts, any Cox FM toilet bowl has the same brown swirling 50 or so songs. Clear Channel commodes are loaded with around 40 lincoln logs...
 
I request occasional access to Mediabase 24/7 but the last time I looked carefully was last June, 2007. Mediabase provides unique song titles per week, which might make some stations with speciality shows appear to have deceptively deeper looking playlists. Dave in the past has played about 500 unique songs in a week; Star, around 200; Q100, about the same; 95.5/The Beat at about 130 (very tight); Eagle -- 700 songs; Kicks, 450 songs; Hot, 250 songs; V-103-350 songs (they have quite a few specialty programs), The River, 325 to 350; B98.5--325 (not counting Delilah); Kiss -- more than 700. I heard Rock 100.5 had about 450 unique songs its first week. This is purely from memory and may not be remotely reflective of what they are doing at this very second. (I'll post those next time I check in on Mediabase.)
 
Does SIZE matter?

Any PD will tell you that playlist SIZE does matter when it comes to extending TSL, and minimizing "burn" on hit records.

Anecdotally, I can't see how Rodney could possibly be right with his Mediabase cited statistics. I've listened to Kiss 104 between 9 am--6pm weekdays and hear many songs TWICE in the same day, even though this is an Urban Oldies station that doesn't need to pound the hits.

Conversely, I listened to B-98.5 last week for five straight days (at least 40 hours), and never heard the same song twice! B98's playlist has got to be upwards of 5,000 songs, as a conservative estimate.
 
Re: Does SIZE matter?

itburns said:
Conversely, I listened to B-98.5 last week for five straight days (at least 40 hours), and never heard the same song twice! B98's playlist has got to be upwards of 5,000 songs, as a conservative estimate.
Click to expand...


HAHAHA Get Real!
 
I'm sure a lot of the perception has to do with how individual songs are rotated. If you have, say, a 1000 song playlist in a given week, but you play 100 of them much more frequently than the rest, you'll obviously have repetition of certain songs while simultaneously giving the appearance of some depth.

Also, I don't know how "randomly" song sets are generated--but (warning: statistical geekery ahead) if you pick the songs at random "with replacement" (meaning that the song gets thrown back in the bucket to be picked after it's played), the chance of repetition increases quite quickly with each song played.

Let's say you have a 300 song playlist--heck, let's make it 500. After the first song is played, the chance of repetition on the second song is 1/500. After the first two songs are played, the chance of repetition of either of those two songs is 1/250. After 4 songs, 1/125. After 8 songs, 1/62. After 16 songs, 1/31. After 32 songs, 1/15. And so on. Put your iPod on shuffle and you'd be surprised how much repetition you get from a "random" selection of songs.

Now, playsets aren't that random. PDs make sure that the same song (or even the same artist) doesn't come up again too soon. But after that point, especially with heavily rotated songs, the chance of repetition is surprisingly high.

The chance of hearing "Free Bird" two days in a row is not that great. But the chance of hearing a song (any song, could be Free Bird, could be Stairway to Heaven, could be Hotel California, could be The Joker, etc.) you heard yesterday is quite a bit higher.
 
Lets talk a little "Selector" reality here too: All stations "recycle" a certain amount of todays songs into the next days playlist. When I was programming it was usually the 9A-5P music recycled beginning at 10PM-5AM. So there is a lot of "repetition" from day to day, but you are unlikely to hear it. Mediabase, however, with electronic monitoring, records ALL plays, no matter what time of day.

And to say a station has a 700 title playlist doesn't mean that they don't have heavy rotation categories turning more than once a day. They could have 150 song in faster rotations, and 550 in lighter rotations that only play once a week. On Mediabase, that would show as 700 unique titles, but average listener would hear mainly the fast-turning 150 with lots of repetition.

Most gold-based formats like a B98-5 or Rock station will turn their heaviest songs at about 14-16 hours.
 
OutOfTheBiz said:
Most gold-based formats like a B98-5 or Rock station will turn their heaviest songs at about 14-16 hours.
Click to expand...

Which tends to be related to one of the most common complaints about gold-based formats, essentially that they have songs in considerably heavier rotation rather than being more balanced in their categories while broadening their library.
 
40 x 10 x 30 = 12,000

jabba17 said:
I'm sure a lot of the perception has to do with how individual songs are rotated. If you have, say, a 1000 song playlist in a given week, but you play 100 of them much more frequently than the rest, you'll obviously have repetition of certain songs while simultaneously giving the appearance of some depth.

Also, I don't know how "randomly" song sets are generated--but (warning: statistical geekery ahead) if you pick the songs at random "with replacement" (meaning that the song gets thrown back in the bucket to be picked after it's played), the chance of repetition increases quite quickly with each song played.

Let's say you have a 300 song playlist--heck, let's make it 500. After the first song is played, the chance of repetition on the second song is 1/500. After the first two songs are played, the chance of repetition of either of those two songs is 1/250. After 4 songs, 1/125. After 8 songs, 1/62. After 16 songs, 1/31. After 32 songs, 1/15. And so on. Put your iPod on shuffle and you'd be surprised how much repetition you get from a "random" selection of songs.

Now, playsets aren't that random. PDs make sure that the same song (or even the same artist) doesn't come up again too soon. But after that point, especially with heavily rotated songs, the chance of repetition is surprisingly high.

The chance of hearing "Free Bird" two days in a row is not that great. But the chance of hearing a song (any song, could be Free Bird, could be Stairway to Heaven, could be Hotel California, could be The Joker, etc.) you heard yesterday is quite a bit higher.
Click to expand...
I had an old program director who said a listener can love a song and simultaneously be sick of hearing it. In research, a song can have a high popularity AND a high "burn" simultaneously.

I'll admit that Gold-Based stations have an advantage over current-based stations. Q-100, by definition, is a Top-40 station so it MUST play the Top-40 songs over and over. By contrast, a Gold-based station can play the hits from the past 30 years. Therefore, you can play 40 songs x 10 (number of times the Top-40 turns over each year) x 30 = 12,000.

So, that explains why B98.5 can play 6,000 songs. However, that doesn't explain why other Gold-based stations, such as Kiss 104 and 97.1 The River only play about 200 songs.
 
You sir, know absolutely ZERO about radio programming. First, if you think Top40 means you actually play 40 unique songs and that list competely evolves 10 times per year, you are not living in reality. If you think there is anywhere NEAR 400 new songs per year that are big enough hits to warrant further airplay, you are suffering some form of mental illness. And if you think any gold-based station builds a library on 30 YEARS of music... well then you're just farking nuts!

You know even less about Cox Radio and Bob Neil and how he programs stations. And make no mistake, B985 is THE flagship for he entire Cox radio company. All PDs, ALL formats and ALL markets are following the lead of Bob's personal station. I guarantee you B98.5 at no time has more than 350-400 songs on their playlist. Guarantee.

If THIS is how YOU would program a station... I may have to consider getting back in so I can take a job at your main competitor and bury you in six months time.
 
Status
This thread has been closed due to inactivity. You can create a new thread to discuss this topic.


Back
Top Bottom