Sometimes I look at a station and can see very brief influences (if marginal) of a station's "personality" at work. This is a lot of times strategic, but can sometimes be the work of a program director or consultant. When things get competitive though, the playlists become more narrow and those edges are shaved off. Sometimes I wonder whether or not a program director would make a station sound completely different if they had full control over their "vision" of the station. What do you think?
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I wonder what program directors would want to play?
- Thread starter tall_guy1
- Start date
No, that would not happen. Music lists are directly or indirectly the product of listener based music research. Neither the PD nor the consultant picks anything except the brand new songs... and if they do not research well, they are gone, too.
After a number of on-air plays (usually two to three weeks) the song is included in "call out" research (actually online today, not a call) along with other currents in a two to three week repetitive cycle.
Where does the research come from? Album sales are non existent now.
A random sample of regular users of your station is found (usually by recruiting via phone of other method) and they are invited to score songs online after listening to a "hook" of the song. Usually such a test will cover perhaps 25 to 30 current songs, including ones that have just been added to the playlist but that have been on long enough for the average primary listener to have heard them around 5 or 6 times.
Stations either do this themselves or have a specialized company do it for them.
Here are some pictures from about 10 years ago of the call center I had for Univision Radio; https://worldradiohistory.com/research_callout.htm
Obviously, data on streaming is also consulted, as is the playlist of similar stations in other markets that the PD has learned to respect for their music choices.
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Streaming is a great way to see what songs cause people to tune out. If a lot of people stop listening to the stream when a certain song comes on, it’s probably that song causing people to tune out. These days it’s easier to ask Alexa to listen to another station than to tune a radio.
Call out research was great when it started in the 70s, back then people wanted to rate the songs, while taking the survey on the phone. Today it is very difficult to find normal people who will sit there and listen to the hooks of songs.
That's what we have PPM for.
This is a variation of those who want DJs to pick the music, thinking it would be better than what the PD picks or what the corporate PD picks. That was behind the concept of Jack FM: "Playing what we want." There are lots of radio stations where DJs pick their own music. They tend to be college stations or non-commercial stations. There are stations where the PD has full control over the vision, and they tend to be at small groups, such as John Sebastian at KOAI in Phoenix. If you attend radio conferences around the country, you'll see a lot of these PDs describing their "vision." What I'm saying is that it happens, and it works if the PDs vision is in sync with the taste of a large number of people. If not, then it's horrible, described as basically listening to someone else's personal playlist.
When I worked for a small market AC, research was looking at what larger market AC's were playing and adjusting our playlist accordingly. The station did an auditorium test in 1995, and that was the last one ever done by that company. We had no in-house call out, though we worked with outside companies from time-to-time. We also had a consultant who recommended songs. The local company sold to Cumulus in 2004, and Cumulus had its own way of researching music and listener preferences. I'm not sure if Cumulus did that in house or contracted with an outside company for research, but, at the time, its brand managers determined which songs could fit in which categories and which ones could be added to playlists on any given week.
I understand that has changed since the Dickeys were pushed out, but I suspect the end results are similar as the suggestions coming from brand managers are probably still the only information most PD's have.
We used to call ours: 'The Mutant Genepool'.
So true about smaller markets. I was a PD in a market of about 250k at the time. We just copied the big markets. We did use a consultant for a brief period, but became evident he was being paid by record companies to get their product on air.
When KMET, Los Angeles went freeform in June of '68, it was two guys---Tom Donahue via tape from sister KSAN in San Francisco and B. Mitchel Reed. I was only 12, so it's only through airchecks that this became clear---Donahue was striving for balance and wasn't opposed to the hits. BMR was trying to educate the audience as to what he thought was cool---20 minute sets of piano jazz from Bill Evans, if that's what he thought the audience needed to hear.
That incarnation of KMET got 1 shares when it got ratings at all. When they started paying attention to the audience and what people wanted to hear, that's when KMET became a major force in the market.
When I was programming in a really small market (Ukiah, California---population 10,000---100 miles north of San Francisco), I used to say that if KFRC had a promo running ten times an hour saying "We hate you. Don't listen"...I'd have probably copied it.
No, it is not that difficult if the methodology is moved to new platforms.
The problem with using the PPM to rate music is that the "sample size" is very low.
Take a station with a 5 share in a market with 1200 meters. At any average given time, there are less than 120 meters actually logging stations. The 5 share station is getting 6 meters.
Of the 6, the ones that change station might have simply stopped listening as they got out of their car or stepped away from their radio. You don't know if the song is bad, or it was just listening patterns. So the song is being judged by 3 or 4 people at the most.
That is totally invalid research.
A stream could have over 1000 listeners at a time. Every listener is counted, not just some of them. And the streaming listeners are also over the air listeners if they’re local.
And, again, you don't know if a cessation of listening is due to dislike for a song or the end of the listening period.
But, even worse, you do not know the demographics of the listener. What if all the listening cessations for a song are "out of target demo" listeners but the in-target ones just love the song?
Or what if all the tune-outs are from people who are not in the local radio market and are of no value to you for ad sales? (They might be "local" to a particular ISP, but not within the area your clients attract customers from; my FiOS provider shows me to be in Riverside, CA... but I am actually in a totally separate Nielsen radio market that shares no media usage at all.)
And you are exaggerating the number of simultaneous streamers of all but the biggest stations. Start calculating the cost of the stream based on the rights for labels and artists. Here is a discussion of what one streamer pays per song...
How much does Spotify pay per stream? Streaming payouts comparison [2021] - Blog - FreeYourMusic.com (note: commercial radio pays a different rate but I could not find an easy-read article about that). Just for your curiosity, though, this is why many smaller stations limit their streams to their local area to prevent the rights payments eating their lunch... and dinner.
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