Classic Hits: Evolution or Revolution?

[semoochie]

"Aternoon Delight" was performed on "Glee" last year. Maybe, that has something to do with it.

 

[PirateJohnny]

What time zone? That was 6:56am. Why Can't We Live Together was played at 4:52am. The question asked about 4:52am. "Why..." has been in my library for more than nine years, BTW.

Pacific Standard Time (KRTH Los Angeles).

By chance, did you check out the KRTH playlist log?

This one:
http://us.playlistbase.com/en/playlist/k-earth-101/2013-01-26

That's what I get for googling "KRTH playlog". I found the correct one on KRTH's website. Wonder how that other site is off two hours and one minute.

 

[michael hagerty]

"Aternoon Delight" was performed on "Glee" last year. Maybe, that has something to do with it.

That's the kind of exposure that can revive certain songs.

Looking at the super-core David mentioned...42 to 52. "Afternoon Delight" itself is 37 this year. So the oldest in the super-core were 15, the youngest 5.

For a chunk of them, there's little or no connection to the song when it was new. And it burned so badly at the time that a lot of ACs and most Top 40s ditched it when the chart run was over. No recurrent or oldies play.

If it was referenced, for decades it was the vehicle for a joke ("Arrested Development" did it brilliantly about 10 years ago).

But "Glee" is a great vehicle for taking supposedly un-hip material and giving it a fresh, non-ironic look. The performances are usually so good, they elevate the song.

 

[CTListener]

"Aternoon Delight" was performed on "Glee" last year. Maybe, that has something to do with it.

It also was featured in an a cappella performance by Will Ferrell and others in "Anchorman: The Ron Burgundy Story." It was after that movie came out that I started hearing it on DRC-FM, and it's still on the playlist. I agree that the "Glee" exposure has probably helped, too.

The Starland Vocal Band was a Bill Danoff project and they put out some high-quality, non-kitschy soft rock as well. One of the unsuccessful follow-ups to "Afternoon Delight" was the beautiful "The Light of My Life," a complete chart stiff here and a marginal AC hit in Canada. Sometimes you just shake your head at what clicks with a radio audience and what doesn't. Danoff and his then-wife Taffy (who was also in the SVB) also recorded a touching tribute to late-night radio called, imaginatively, "Late Night Radio." In fact, they recorded it twice, in an album as a duo that went nowhere and an album by the SVB that went nowhere. I was fortunate enought to be listening to two stations that were on both songs at the time, hence my memories of them.

 

[michael hagerty]

The Starland Vocal Band was a Bill Danoff project and they put out some high-quality, non-kitschy soft rock as well. One of the unsuccessful follow-ups to "Afternoon Delight" was the beautiful "The Light of My Life," a complete chart stiff here and a marginal AC hit in Canada. Sometimes you just shake your head at what clicks with a radio audience and what doesn't. Danoff and his then-wife Taffy (who was also in the SVB) also recorded a touching tribute to late-night radio called, imaginatively, "Late Night Radio." In fact, they recorded it twice, in an album as a duo that went nowhere and an album by the SVB that went nowhere. I was fortunate enought to be listening to two stations that were on both songs at the time, hence my memories of them.

I played only one other SVB single, "Loving You With My Eyes", at the AC I was programming in early 1980. Nice song. Stalled out at #71 on the Hot 100. Can't find an American AC chart number for it.

 

[Biondi4Mayor]

Again, remember, the typical target listener is there for 47 minutes (thanks, David!) at roughly the same time every day. KRTH didn't give them 13 chances to tune out The Beatles and 7 to tune out The Supremes, KRTH increased the odds that the average listener might...might...hear The Beatles or The Supremes on Monday.

The typical target listener also didn't hear a song twice.

Well, I looked at the KRTH log for the Monday you started with, and for example "Come See About Me" and "My World Is Empty Without You" were played only an hour and six minutes apart. Both great songs, but getting close to the 47 minute average, meaning roughly half will be listening beyond those 47 for some duration.

Also, a lot of listening is done going to and from work. So, I took for example the 8AM hour, and the 5PM hour (if someone worked 9-5 with and hour-ish commute or so). On Tuesday, Elton John had one song played during the 8AM, and the 5PM hour. The previous Monday, another Elton John song was played in the 5PM hour. Stevie Wonder, Fleetwood Mac, and others also repeat in this way. Repetition doesn't just mean "to not like", be really hearing only a handful of artists' same songs.

Also, from what I've seen, lots of at work listening is done in two ways. Either, a worker streams from online (making it difficult or unproductive to be changing streams everytime they hear something they don't like), or the radio is a central part of the office and tuned to one station (meaning someone's not going to be getting up every 10 minutes to change it because they alone don't like something). Now view the at work hours: plenty of artist repeats, and by the end of the week, songs are repeating.

For the record, nothing stands out at KRTH (actually WLS is even worse), but again asserting my disbelief in an ample selection of songs getting tested.

 

[davideduardo]

That's what I get for googling "KRTH playlog". I found the correct one on KRTH's website. Wonder how that other site is off two hours and one minute.

Could that by any chance be the difference between your local time and the station's local time?

 

[michael hagerty]

Again, remember, the typical target listener is there for 47 minutes (thanks, David!) at roughly the same time every day. KRTH didn't give them 13 chances to tune out The Beatles and 7 to tune out The Supremes, KRTH increased the odds that the average listener might...might...hear The Beatles or The Supremes on Monday.

The typical target listener also didn't hear a song twice.

Well, I looked at the KRTH log for the Monday you started with, and for example "Come See About Me" and "My World Is Empty Without You" were played only an hour and six minutes apart. Both great songs, but getting close to the 47 minute average, meaning roughly half will be listening beyond those 47 for some duration.

Also, a lot of listening is done going to and from work. So, I took for example the 8AM hour, and the 5PM hour (if someone worked 9-5 with and hour-ish commute or so). On Tuesday, Elton John had one song played during the 8AM, and the 5PM hour. The previous Monday, another Elton John song was played in the 5PM hour. Stevie Wonder, Fleetwood Mac, and others also repeat in this way. Repetition doesn't just mean "to not like", be really hearing only a handful of artists' same songs.

Also, from what I've seen, lots of at work listening is done in two ways. Either, a worker streams from online (making it difficult or unproductive to be changing streams everytime they hear something they don't like), or the radio is a central part of the office and tuned to one station (meaning someone's not going to be getting up every 10 minutes to change it because they alone don't like something). Now view the at work hours: plenty of artist repeats, and by the end of the week, songs are repeating.

For the record, nothing stands out at KRTH (actually WLS is even worse), but again asserting my disbelief in an ample selection of songs getting tested.

I can't argue with anything you've said (I doubt we'll ever agree on "adequate" testing), except to suggest that if KRTH's getting an average of 47 minutes a day, there aren't a lot of 8-hour at work listeners (ACs with no-repeat 9 to 5s do well there).

But remember one thing: The average listener isn't keeping track. If they listened both to and from work (and you need to divide that 47 minutes into two 23.5 minute stretches), after 8 hours at work, attention to driving, thinking about what needs doing, they're unlikely to register that they heard a different Elton track on the way in to work. And if it's not happening daily, over time it'll blend in the brain.

Most 40-something adults don't attach that much importance to the radio, other than when it fails to meet expectations. Then, they don't dwell on it or analyze it, they just push the button.

 

[davideduardo]

For the record, nothing stands out at KRTH (actually WLS is even worse), but again asserting my disbelief in an ample selection of songs getting tested.

Artist repeats in any gold-based format are going to be much harder to separate than song repeats. In some variants of the format, separations of more than about an hour are very hard to achieve.

Repeating an artist that is core to the era a station covers is not necessarily a bad thing... as long as the individual songs are good.

That said, KRTH has about the worst horizontal and vertical hour rotation of any major station of its type I've ever looked at. A concerted effort is just not evident in the underlying rules in their scheduling software. Ugly, ugly repeats are all over the place.

With an 800 song library, it is possible to go 15 to 18 days without repeating most songs in a daypart, and nearly a month without repeating them in the same 2-hour window. And vertically, even powers should not come up more often than somewhere between "a day and a daypart" and "a day less a daypart".

 

[Biondi4Mayor]

Again, remember, the typical target listener is there for 47 minutes (thanks, David!) at roughly the same time every day. KRTH didn't give them 13 chances to tune out The Beatles and 7 to tune out The Supremes, KRTH increased the odds that the average listener might...might...hear The Beatles or The Supremes on Monday.

The typical target listener also didn't hear a song twice.

Well, I looked at the KRTH log for the Monday you started with, and for example "Come See About Me" and "My World Is Empty Without You" were played only an hour and six minutes apart. Both great songs, but getting close to the 47 minute average, meaning roughly half will be listening beyond those 47 for some duration.

Also, a lot of listening is done going to and from work. So, I took for example the 8AM hour, and the 5PM hour (if someone worked 9-5 with and hour-ish commute or so). On Tuesday, Elton John had one song played during the 8AM, and the 5PM hour. The previous Monday, another Elton John song was played in the 5PM hour. Stevie Wonder, Fleetwood Mac, and others also repeat in this way. Repetition doesn't just mean "to not like", be really hearing only a handful of artists' same songs.

Also, from what I've seen, lots of at work listening is done in two ways. Either, a worker streams from online (making it difficult or unproductive to be changing streams everytime they hear something they don't like), or the radio is a central part of the office and tuned to one station (meaning someone's not going to be getting up every 10 minutes to change it because they alone don't like something). Now view the at work hours: plenty of artist repeats, and by the end of the week, songs are repeating.

For the record, nothing stands out at KRTH (actually WLS is even worse), but again asserting my disbelief in an ample selection of songs getting tested.

I can't argue with anything you've said (I doubt we'll ever agree on "adequate" testing), except to suggest that if KRTH's getting an average of 47 minutes a day, there aren't a lot of 8-hour at work listeners (ACs with no-repeat 9 to 5s do well there).

But remember one thing: The average listener isn't keeping track. If they listened both to and from work (and you need to divide that 47 minutes into two 23.5 minute stretches), after 8 hours at work, attention to driving, thinking about what needs doing, they're unlikely to register that they heard a different Elton track on the way in to work. And if it's not happening daily, over time it'll blend in the brain.

Most 40-something adults don't attach that much importance to the radio, other than when it fails to meet expectations. Then, they don't dwell on it or analyze it, they just push the button.

Thank you. But I must say, that if you feel listeners become detatched to even music (the reason the radio's on), then this would even further detatch them to things like advertising, making the ferocious marketing and advertising behind radio seem silly.

Question regarding KRTH - the playlist and songs are extremely close to WCBS. So, my question is, would CBS provide some sort of general programming suggestions that KRTH and WCBS follow, or test or whatever, or would the testing at CBS stations be entirely independent and up to the PD's of the stations?

"Adequate Testing" - so Michael I must ask, do you feel that the songs played on Classic Hits stations around the nation are truely representative of what needs to be played? The big hits that are ignored you really feel are rightfully ignored because they failed testing in every market?

 

[Biondi4Mayor]

For the record, nothing stands out at KRTH (actually WLS is even worse), but again asserting my disbelief in an ample selection of songs getting tested.

Artist repeats in any gold-based format are going to be much harder to separate than song repeats. In some variants of the format, separations of more than about an hour are very hard to achieve.

Repeating an artist that is core to the era a station covers is not necessarily a bad thing... as long as the individual songs are good.

That said, KRTH has about the worst horizontal and vertical hour rotation of any major station of its type I've ever looked at. A concerted effort is just not evident in the underlying rules in their scheduling software. Ugly, ugly repeats are all over the place.

With an 800 song library, it is possible to go 15 to 18 days without repeating most songs in a daypart, and nearly a month without repeating them in the same 2-hour window. And vertically, even powers should not come up more often than somewhere between "a day and a daypart" and "a day less a daypart".

Hey, here we agree. I feel that Classic Hits stations (and KRTH being a bad offender) are horrible at rotating songs. In fact, if they were good at it, as you say it could be at least two weeks without repeats in dayparts, then this argument might never have taken shape. Your phrase "ugly, ugly repeats" is like music to my ears - this is what I see too!!!!

And absolutely there's nothing wrong with making Elton or the Supremes more key than other artists, but they've got to be managed properly. I don't see this being handled well in any big market stations.

 

[davideduardo]

I can't argue with anything you've said (I doubt we'll ever agree on "adequate" testing), except to suggest that if KRTH's getting an average of 47 minutes a day, there aren't a lot of 8-hour at work listeners (ACs with no-repeat 9 to 5s do well there).

Here's what happens: listeners in the PPM world spend on average around 15 minutes each time they listen.

That's because the workday (and non-working hours, too) are broken up by times listening stops. Potty breaks, coffee breaks, phone calls, lunch breaks, meetings, conversations with co-workers and clients, working on something in another person's work area, etc., etc.

I was at a big Arbitron PPM meeting a few years ago when they showed an example of a good PPM performing station. The meter carrier obviously listened at work, but they listened on about 12 "occasions" during the day, ranging from 10 minutes to as much as 20 minutes each. But the person did not change station... they just were not listening for about 5 or 6 hours of the 8 hour workday because they were away from the radio.

Arbitron's presenter hailed this station for its ability to create repeat listening occasions... that is, having a compelling reason to return to the station each time. It was nice to hear, as the station was a San Francisco classic hits station that I programmed!

The key element here is that during a work day, even those who listen "to the same station all day" miss 75% or more of the songs played. Similarly, any listener any place misses most of the programming because they interrupt listening constantly to do other things, like taking out the trash or changing the water bottle in the kitchen or getting on the phone or...

Most 40-something adults don't attach that much importance to the radio, other than when it fails to meet expectations. Then, they don't dwell on it or analyze it, they just push the button.

Yep, I think that has to do with it the fact that mature listeners have certain broad expectations about a station. Only if those expectations are not met do they switch.

They expect commercials. They expect the big artists fairly often. They do not want or expect bad songs.

 

[davideduardo]

Well, I looked at the KRTH log for the Monday you started with, and for example "Come See About Me" and "My World Is Empty Without You" were played only an hour and six minutes apart. Both great songs, but getting close to the 47 minute average, meaning roughly half will be listening beyond those 47 for some duration.

See my prior post. The average length of each "listening incident" is around 15 minutes.

47 minutes is the average time a listener spends a day with KRTH. That may be on 3 or 4 different occasions. It almost certainly is not 47-minutes-in-a-row.

 

[Biondi4Mayor]

David, could you elaborate on how you created "repeat listening occasions"? What did you do that set your station apart, because frankly, almost all classic hits stations are the same for me?

 

[davideduardo]

Question regarding KRTH - the playlist and songs are extremely close to WCBS. So, my question is, would CBS provide some sort of general programming suggestions that KRTH and WCBS follow, or test or whatever, or would the testing at CBS stations be entirely independent and up to the PD's of the stations?

While there may be considerable corporate guidance in format selection at the offset, the day to day programming is done locally. Since the demos and ethnicity of NY and LA are so different, and CBS has a terrific corporate research person who looks at the details of each market, they would quickly understand that the formats need to be implemented locally.

Obviously, the testing is going to be done by CBS's preferred research provider in all markets. And each station will share their research with other similarly formatted stations around the country. I often used cross checks with tests from different markets to make sure no song got left out, and that songs that might be worth a try... or a retest... got a chance.

"Adequate Testing" - so Michael I must ask, do you feel that the songs played on Classic Hits stations around the nation are truely representative of what needs to be played? The big hits that are ignored you really feel are rightfully ignored because they failed testing in every market?

The "big hits that are ignored" are songs that used to be big hits but are not big hits anymore. The job of a classic hits station is to play today's big hits from a list of songs that is 30 or 40 years old.

 

[davideduardo]

David, could you elaborate on how you created "repeat listening occasions"? What did you do that set your station apart, because frankly, almost all classic hits stations are the same for me?

Simple: we did not play weak songs or stiffs. The listener who had to stop listening for any reason came back to listen some more because they knew that ever song was a good fit for their taste... today.

Additionally, I'd spend up to a week implementing each music test (at one point, 5 times a year) so that artist rotation and song rotation created the biggest separations possible and thus the greatest perception of variety.

Each music sweep had to average very high in P1 / heavy user scores, and back-to-back lower-scoring songs could never happen.

The rules on all this stuff were quite extensive, but the idea was to get consistency in song separation, artist separation, high average scores and a good blend of styles (tempo, era, and things like rhythmic or mellow or acoustic sounds) in each sweep so that the station did not derail at any point.

 

[oldies76]

The key element here is that during a work day, even those who listen "to the same station all day" miss 75% or more of the songs played. Similarly, any listener any place misses most of the programming because they interrupt listening constantly to do other things, like taking out the trash or changing the water bottle in the kitchen or getting on the phone or...

So if this is fact, then why bother testing songs?? If that many workers "listeners" are "too busy" to thoroughly enjoy at-work music, then it really should be somewhat irrevelant what songs get aired, as long as there's "background music". And with 75% of the workers, really not listening or caring much what's on the radio, why bother delivering a set list of songs. It's background music.

Now of course, this really would not apply to people listening in cars (since you once said that the vast majority of radio listening is not in a car), which leaves people at home or people out for a jog.

 

[Biondi4Mayor]

David, could you elaborate on how you created "repeat listening occasions"? What did you do that set your station apart, because frankly, almost all classic hits stations are the same for me?

Simple: we did not play weak songs or stiffs. The listener who had to stop listening for any reason came back to listen some more because they knew that ever song was a good fit for their taste... today.

Additionally, I'd spend up to a week implementing each music test (at one point, 5 times a year) so that artist rotation and song rotation created the biggest separations possible and thus the greatest perception of variety.

Each music sweep had to average very high in P1 / heavy user scores, and back-to-back lower-scoring songs could never happen.

The rules on all this stuff were quite extensive, but the idea was to get consistency in song separation, artist separation, high average scores and a good blend of styles (tempo, era, and things like rhythmic or mellow or acoustic sounds) in each sweep so that the station did not derail at any point.

Would this happen to be one of your "Recuerdo" stations? We're those, for lack of a better term, "Spanish Classic Hits"?

And, again, it's great you do such thorough testing, but as I illustated before from first hand experience, not all stations do it this way. Again, leaving room for lackluster programming.

 

[Biondi4Mayor]

The key element here is that during a work day, even those who listen "to the same station all day" miss 75% or more of the songs played. Similarly, any listener any place misses most of the programming because they interrupt listening constantly to do other things, like taking out the trash or changing the water bottle in the kitchen or getting on the phone or...

So if this is fact, then why bother testing songs?? If that many workers "listeners" are "too busy" to thoroughly enjoy at-work music, then it really should be somewhat irrevelant what songs get aired, as long as there's "background music". And with 75% of the workers, really not listening or caring much what's on the radio, why bother delivering a set list of songs. It's background music.

Now of course, this really would not apply to people listening in cars (since you once said that the vast majority of radio listening is not in a car), which leaves people at home or people out for a jog.

Now this I gotta see a response to!

 

[oldies76]

Would this happen to be one of your "Recuerdo" stations? We're those, for lack of a better term, "Spanish Classic Hits"?

The "Nueva Ola" (New Wave) of the 60's and early 70's Latin hits from Argentina, Peru, Chile, Ecuador, Spain....etc. are some of the best "Recuerdos" around....too bad we don't hear them much.