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I need some guidance for my internet station

C

Craven707

I'm the music director for a little internet station in La Grange, KY. It's a Classic Hits station. If you picture a Bell curve, the big part of the bell would be 70s and 80s. The ends of the curve would be 60s and 90s. We're a little classic rock leaning. We're running StationPlaylist for our programming. My question is directed to people who have previous programming/music directing experience. How often should we be playing our core artists. Station Playlist has a lot of different settings to address this and I'm trying to find the right balance. I currently have it set for 1 hr 50 min separation between artists. My PD is complaining that the same artists are playing too often. He wants the settings moved to 4 hour separation between artists. My argument for a tighter rotation is that it helps to ensure we're playing a familiar artist when someone tunes in and we're giving more weight to the core artists. In my mind, if you separate artist rotation too much, that puts Toni Basil on the same level as John Mellencamp. IF anyone has experience using StationPlaylist, I would appreciate some tips. We haven't yet created the new logs that reflect the changes in separation. If you want to check us out, we're called Crossroads La Grange streaming radio.

Thanks
 
I use MusicMaster for scheduling but the principle is the same. My rule of thumb for separation is to make a list of those artists with the highest number of titles in the library and divide by 20. Right now I have that set to 1 hr 20 min and that seems to work. It also helps if your other scheduling rules take advantage of bouncing titles between dayparts each time they are scheduled and in different hours within a daypart each time.

Your PD is dead wrong and what he proposes puts your power songs into the same restrictions as your accent songs. To take John Cougar Mellencamp as you did for an example, you would be restricting frequent plays of your biggest artists' biggest titles in the misguided interest of "balancing artist repetition".

Classic Hits is all about focusing on what we call the "consensus favorites" (and there are lots of ways to determine what those are so I am not going to share how I do it on The Eighties Channel™) and one of those should either always be what a listener hears when they first tune in or the next song afterwards. No exceptions.

I gather your PD has no real experience in programming. It sounds to me like he is going on personal preferences and likes/dislikes. A great many PDs have failed over the decades using that philosophy.
 
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