CBS-FM Adjusting Playlist

[vw86]

I don't think so because one of the things Nielsen likes to brag about is how PPM has shown that weekend middays can draw in as many listeners as morning drive

 

[secondchoice]

We have been doing this for about 50 years now.

If everyone in the business had that attitude there would have never been Top 40 radio.

That's sounds like the attitude the big three had before the Japanese auto makers decimated Detroit.

Not counting the covid bouce when folks had to return to work has radio listenership gone up?

I am not saying do away with testing. This is just a "check" for tune out factors. It might be a song, or an announcer bit, newscast, traffic report. Especially in the top makers, in a competitive demo a 10th point can move you from 4th to 5th. If an agency is only buying the top 4 stations in a demo it will not care that you are only a tenth of a point from being #4. Your still #5.

Now with modern clusters one person is doing multiple formats they really don't have time to "tune" each station. National format "captains" are just that national. If you could get a report that shows where your station is losing P1 listeners and there is something in common with a lot of the losses you might be able to fix it.

 

[davideduardo]

If everyone in the business had that attitude there would have never been Top 40 radio.

That's sounds like the attitude the big three had before the Japanese auto makers decimated Detroit.

Not counting the covid bouce when folks had to return to work has radio listenership gone up?

I am not saying do away with testing. This is just a "check" for tune out factors. It might be a song, or an announcer bit, newscast, traffic report. Especially in the top makers, in a competitive demo a 10th point can move you from 4th to 5th. If an agency is only buying the top 4 stations in a demo it will not care that you are only a tenth of a point from being #4. Your still #5.

Actually, since music radio was invented around 1951 in Omaha with Todd Storz' first Top 40 station, music stations have done research by checking record sales of 45's and jukebox spins. But when 45 sales declined and jukeboxes went out of fashion, we had to come up with a new system. By as early as 1975 a couple of programmers in Phoenix and San Diego and Miami were doing primitive call-out. By 1980 it was tabulated on early S-100 bus computers. And early in the 70's the Auditorium Music Test became the way to test library songs.

Stations that tested beat ones that did not. Badly. And that is because those stations, when managed by a good GM and a great PD, learned what listeners wanted and gave it to them.

I've got a record as being a pretty successful programmer. Yet when I was about to do my first music test in the 70's I took the first 100 songs and scored them by my "gut feel". Then I compared with the test results. I had about 20% of the songs that I thought were very good which were stiffs. And I was way off on about half of the other songs. So much for a "golden ear".

 

[K.M. Richards]

Only 18 days? Are certain days removed from the 28 day period?

I think this is more of a case of the "1" key being next to the "2" key on the keyboard.

 

[secondchoice]

Don't worry David I have a super power: the ability to "kill" radio stations just by listening regularly. I was successful at radio stations I hated the music. I never listened to a station I worked on the air.

Even now If I really like a station in Atlanta, it will be flipped within a year. But I am out of the money demos. Like they say "nothing personal just business".

I have had this power for sometime, I just didn't realize it. My listening has killed entire sub types of music: Southern Rock in the late 1970's, the British synthesiser bands in the early 1980's. While I am at it I should apologize to the folks that liked music videos on MTV.. I would have enjoyed that job. I did get to audition for a Veejay gig but I was 20 or 30 pounds too heavy and had to wear glasses to read the script. TV is much harder than radio. I admire anyone who can do it.

I have developed a taste for clean comedy.
Seeing how far a comedian can go without swearing is pure artistry. Henry Cho is LOL in my opinion. Howard Stern should "go back to work" and do OTA radio. Anyone can cuss, a real artist doesn't have too.

Because of my exposure to several music industry workers while in highschool (Springfield TN. just north of Nashville) and crushed dreams of becoming a songwriter / performer, I listen to music differently than most folks. There are artists in Nashville that talent wise should have been major stars like Gene Cotten RIP. The music industry really is a

 

[K.M. Richards]

Because of my exposure to several music industry workers while in highschool (Springfield TN. just north of Nashville) and crushed dreams of becoming a songwriter / performer, I listen to music differently than most folks. There are artists in Nashville that talent wise should have been major stars like Gene Cotten RIP. The music industry really is a

And at that point, Audacy sent someone over to smash @secondchoice's computer so he never got to finish his thought.

 

[secondchoice]

I have started to like a couple of their stations.

 

[RMarino]

If I spend ten minutes in a store which (illegally, but that's not the point) has the radio on for background music, the PPM will count that as my "listening" as well. Again, when I left the store the timing was not based on what was playing at the time.

To take that one step further, you could be in that store listening to something with your earbuds, while Lite FM is played on a radio in the store. The PPM device would pick up Lite FM even though your ears never actually heard it.

Feel free to substitute store for workplace, doctor’s office, cab, public beach, wherever. Just goes to show you how many flaws PPM has.

 

[secondchoice]

Actually I shouldn't try to message in an airport. Cleveland has marginal wifi at the Southwest gates.

I meant to say the music business is really a crapshoot. If I anyone could accurately predict hits they would be a billionaire.

 

[davideduardo]

Only 18 days? Are certain days removed from the 28 day period?

LOL. Of course, it is a 28 day, 4 week cycle.

And for those not on the PPM "list" there actually are weeklies... and you can extract individual days and times if you want. Nielsen does not give the weeklies to agency subscribers, though. But in the firs year or so of PPM programmers and managers and sales managers could often go hysterical over a bad week or send out for Dom Perignon for an upward wobble.

And that is why agencies look at rolling averages of three, four, even six months. I met with one media director who had his planners and buyers look at 8 or 9 months, excluding the three summer months and at least December and January.

Of course, if a station has a lower current month, the agency folks will use only the last two months and beat on the station for lower rates based on the bad month. Media buyers could give lessons to used car salesmen.

 

[tall_guy1]

Interesting thread, but don't CHRs play stuff that old still? I think even Z100 spins Complicated by Avril Lavigne. It seems like the flow of time has kind of slowed down on most formats, and oldies used to add stuff newer than what they are doing now.

 

[TheBigA]

Interesting thread, but don't CHRs play stuff that old still? I think even Z100 spins Complicated by Avril Lavigne. It seems like the flow of time has kind of slowed down on most formats, and oldies used to add stuff newer than what they are doing now.

The pop chart has slowed way down. Last time I looked, Harry Styles was still a current.

 

[davideduardo]

Interesting thread, but don't CHRs play stuff that old still? I think even Z100 spins Complicated by Avril Lavigne. It seems like the flow of time has kind of slowed down on most formats, and oldies used to add stuff newer than what they are doing now.

Some historical points:

From its inception in 1961 to the mid-60's, most Top 40 stations did not play any non-currents.

Then the mid-60's saw big stations like KHJ and on down the list adding "gold" cuts. But currents that faded out were dropped. Move another decade ahead, and we started having big-when-current songs move to a lighter rotation as "recurrents".

So, from the 70's on, Top 40, now called CHR, was playing songs 8, 10, 12 years old. So if you were a teen in the 90's, you likely heard a bunch of 8'0's songs. That means that even if a person was just in grade school when a song was a current, they likely grew up hearing it as a gold category song as they grew up.

 

[tall_guy1]

Some historical points:

From its inception in 1961 to the mid-60's, most Top 40 stations did not play any non-currents.

Then the mid-60's saw big stations like KHJ and on down the list adding "gold" cuts. But currents that faded out were dropped. Move another decade ahead, and we started having big-when-current songs move to a lighter rotation as "recurrents".

So, from the 70's on, Top 40, now called CHR, was playing songs 8, 10, 12 years old. So if you were a teen in the 90's, you likely heard a bunch of 8'0's songs. That means that even if a person was just in grade school when a song was a current, they likely grew up hearing it as a gold category song as they grew up.

Interesting points. It seems like CHRs which leaned Hot AC used to go back 15-20+ years, but in recent years, it seems more common. But interesting the early top 40s did not go back at all.

 

[MTNProductions]

I have started to like a couple of their stations.

Me too! WCBS-FM was the station that I don’t listen to anymore. I stopped listening to the station back on March 29th when Race Taylor was my favorite, and it was the final time I listened to until I flipped the following Monday and listen to Mike McGann on WLML’s “Legends 100.3” from down in South Florida and he does a great job taking over Race Taylor’s time slot. He plays great music like Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., Tony Bennett, Peggy Lee, Nat King Cole, and more. Plus, they throw in some Bobby Darin stuff in during his later years before “If I Were A Carpenter” in 1966, and some other ones that I have never heard of before.

That show kinda harkens back to the days of WNEW-AM (11-3-O) in the 1980’s and WQEW at 1560AM which was a easy listening station from 1992 through 1998, and New York City has not been running MOR/standards during the last 25 years. In addition, they added a Saturday edition replacing “Sunny” Joe on WGNY-FM’s “Fox Oldies” where they include the “Local Artist and Friends Spotlight”. I have Airchecks of Mike McGann’s show in my collection.

 

[K.M. Richards]

Interesting points. It seems like CHRs which leaned Hot AC used to go back 15-20+ years, but in recent years, it seems more common. But interesting the early top 40s did not go back at all.

There's a very logical reason for that. If the early top-40s were to play gold, it would have been Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, and Perry Como, Never would have been accepted by the audience.

 

[TheBigA]

There's a very logical reason for that. If the early top-40s were to play gold, it would have been Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, and Perry Como, Never would have been accepted by the audience.

They really were different genres. The early Top 40s struggled with older artists having hits, like Sinatra, Martin, or even Louis Armstrong. The problem was that pop music changed so much between the 50s and 60s, and then compared to what preceded it. Whereas now, there's been a consistency in the sound and style from the 70s to now. Even hip-hop music, which is considered new is 50 years old. EDM can be traced to a lot of the European pop music of the 70s. So there's more of a library of music that fits the formats than there was back then.

 

[K.M. Richards]

Even hip-hop music, which is considered new is 50 years old.

Case in point: The iconic "Rapper's Delight" by the Sugarhill Gang was released August 2, 1979.

 

[kevtronics]

There's a very logical reason for that. If the early top-40s were to play gold, it would have been Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, and Perry Como, Never would have been accepted by the audience.

At least some of them would. The 1961 doo-wop song "Those Oldies but Goodies (Remind Me of You)", which popularized the term "Oldies", wasn't singing about rock'n'roll, which by then was only a few years old. It was singing about the big band and crooner music of the '30s and '40s.

 

[davideduardo]

I changed the title to "adjusting playlist" as we know that they were not "experimenting" with "new songs". They were just doing what all major market stations do, which is to use research to make sure that their age target is being best served.

Again, for those not "inside" station I'll mention that stations periodically "consult" with a sample of their core listeners (the ones that listen the most) and ask "how much would you like to hear this song today?" They also ask about songs they don't play, including ones that did not quite pass in the last few tests and a bunch of "what if" songs to see if listeners now want to hear them.

One of the reasons for testing is that a station might target 35-54 listeners, but every year those who were 54 are now out of the target and new potential listeners have reached the minimum age for "core listeners" and the station wants to make sure that some songs are not negative with that group. In fact, a station targeting 35-54 for ratings may actually test 34 to 49 since they know from lots of past testing how the older listeners behave.