I'm curious as a listener. I've seen some stations which really play it "safe" with their music choices eventually fold, while others do fine with a very conservative playlist (mostly Chrs.) I'm wondering, if songs test well and are overplayed or become repetitive to a group of listeners, if they might tune out. For example, what's preventing"don't stop believing" being played 3-4 times a day on a station? This is pure curiosity and I don't want to ruffle any feathers (though I know how thin skinned some can be.)
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Is it possible for a station to have too "safe" of a playlist?
- Thread starter tall_guy1
- Start date
My advice to listeners who find certain stations repetitive: Change the station. There is no reason to listen to one station all day if you have a dial filled with choices and options. From the station side, the currents-based stations are playing their heavies pretty much every other hour. That means 12 times a day for 84 spins a week. That's how CHRs work, as well as some country and urban stations. The way they make new releases familiar is to play them a lot. They're also cycling in new songs and dropping songs that have peaked into recurrent, so the playlist is constantly changing. They don't expect everyone to listen non-stop, and neither do the advertisers. You're likely hearing a lot of the same commercials over & over as well, because they're buying flights that are based on so many impressions. While you have some stations built on "safe" playlists, you also have AAA and some other non-commercial stations that are doing the complete opposite. That's why I suggest to dial around.
I'm proud to say that I do! I don't settle for repetitive music. đź¤
Hya Tall Guy 1. At a towering 5'9 I'm kinda tall myself. 26 years as a DJ, music director, fill-in PD , newsman, two major markets, and at 23 years OUT of the industry am probably old enough to be your older brother.
Two things:
1) Imo, the Standards lasted for some 35 years on radio as a renewable format and was still viable into the 70's in refreshing itself for 'adults'. 'Nostalgia' stations turned 35 years of music into 300 song lists.
Oldies, the natural sequel to Top 40, survived about 16-17 years on its own before the initial air in the dragster tires started to wear in the 70's.
The pop music demo window kept moving, and AoR predictably turned into Classic Rock. At the time AoR turned into that big nostalgia stuff for car buttons, current Album Oriented Rock already had turned into @$$#Ole Oriented Rubbish to appeal to an all-male audience of mid teens. Elapsed time for that outturn to manifest was maybe 8 years at the most.
In each pop music case: Diminishing returns. It's the law.
2) A talk-show host on an upstate NY station and a poster to another radio forum detected a notable erosion in listenership at the younger end -- the 12-17 demo. His observation was just about 20 years ago! I haven't seen anyone who has refuted his findings. Naturally, erosion and rust leakage do not improve with time without remedies.
So with, basically, three music companies issuing modern pop music that sounds like cereal filler ...... and with ten radio stations in each major market aiming 25-49, the desired radio-audience candle has been blazing at both ends for quite some time.
Nothing notably new and exciting musical form has been spotted for youth and us older youths. 12-17 (12-24 if you will) used to replenish musical matters on the radio dials. Such influence as that has waned for half abeen waning for a generation.
So for the time being, get used to tolerating 'Hotel California' and its ilk, TallGuy1. There really isn;t likely to be anything better to be coming along soon.
Two things:
1) Imo, the Standards lasted for some 35 years on radio as a renewable format and was still viable into the 70's in refreshing itself for 'adults'. 'Nostalgia' stations turned 35 years of music into 300 song lists.
Oldies, the natural sequel to Top 40, survived about 16-17 years on its own before the initial air in the dragster tires started to wear in the 70's.
The pop music demo window kept moving, and AoR predictably turned into Classic Rock. At the time AoR turned into that big nostalgia stuff for car buttons, current Album Oriented Rock already had turned into @$$#Ole Oriented Rubbish to appeal to an all-male audience of mid teens. Elapsed time for that outturn to manifest was maybe 8 years at the most.
In each pop music case: Diminishing returns. It's the law.
2) A talk-show host on an upstate NY station and a poster to another radio forum detected a notable erosion in listenership at the younger end -- the 12-17 demo. His observation was just about 20 years ago! I haven't seen anyone who has refuted his findings. Naturally, erosion and rust leakage do not improve with time without remedies.
So with, basically, three music companies issuing modern pop music that sounds like cereal filler ...... and with ten radio stations in each major market aiming 25-49, the desired radio-audience candle has been blazing at both ends for quite some time.
Nothing notably new and exciting musical form has been spotted for youth and us older youths. 12-17 (12-24 if you will) used to replenish musical matters on the radio dials. Such influence as that has waned for half abeen waning for a generation.
So for the time being, get used to tolerating 'Hotel California' and its ilk, TallGuy1. There really isn;t likely to be anything better to be coming along soon.
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That's the part of this that doesn't get mentioned. Three music companies: Sony, Universal, Warner. Controlled by three very rich men.
You think the music sounds the same? Maybe that's why.
I like nearly every genre of music and my problem is that FM stations are extremely repetitive across formats. Even worse than CHR stations, IMO, are some of the Classic Hits stations out there. Cox and iHeart Classic Hits stations are seemingly the worst offenders. Country stations are much more repetitive than they were in the 1990s or 2000s.
I seek out stations that have broad playlists. Some of the Jack formats are pretty broad, but some aren't (Ben-FM in Philly, for example, leans far too heavily in the Classic Hits direction; Big 103 in Boston is much better). My favorite station is Easy 99.1 out of Plymouth, MA. While it leans Soft AC, it has the broadest playlist I have ever seen, and the station also has nightly "decades hours," starting with the "60s at 6."
I seek out stations that have broad playlists. Some of the Jack formats are pretty broad, but some aren't (Ben-FM in Philly, for example, leans far too heavily in the Classic Hits direction; Big 103 in Boston is much better). My favorite station is Easy 99.1 out of Plymouth, MA. While it leans Soft AC, it has the broadest playlist I have ever seen, and the station also has nightly "decades hours," starting with the "60s at 6."
OK, dumb question time. Did we end up with three music companies because of market forces from the ground up, i.e. the internet competing with the recording companies?
We see this happening in book publishing -- the 'democratization' of book publishing, after the Kindle was introduced and opened up to independent publishers -- has cut into the big book publishers' revenues, causing consolidation. It hink the Big 5 is now the Big 4. And it's partially because of the internet.
I'm just wondering if the consolidation was due to internet competition, or was it some other reason.
All good points, but the irony is: This exact same question has come up since originally Top 40 was a thing. Back in the late 70's when I first started on the air, seems like everyone had an opinion about how broad a playlist should be, or how 'safe' stations played it. Comments like: "Oh, you play the Eagles too much", and yet they LOVED the Eagles and it obviously tested well. Could name countless artists who back in the day, and even today, are still considered popular and would rather be heard than something else. In other words, it all boils down to listeners who claim they want a broader playlist, are usually the one's who actually don't.So for the time being, get used to tolerating 'Hotel California' and its ilk, TallGuy1. There really isn;t likely to be anything better to be coming along soon.
Fast forward to current times: Here we are on a radio discussion board, talking about the exact same thing. And yet, unlike back in the day, you have the ability right now, to create your own customized or randomized playlist on a device called the smartphone. My take? Doesn't matter whether it's 1978 or 2022, radio fan's just love to bi*ch. Same happens with sports fan's. 'I love MY team, but I hate the: (owner, coach, defensive coordinator, quarterback, team logo, stadium/arena, etc.)' Now I get it with TV too: 'I love MY station or network, but I hate the: ( way some anchor dresses, that YYYY show was preempted, X-street reporter needs to talk slower, "scummy news" writers, etc.)'.
Well, a lot depends on rotation. No one is listening 24-7, and (depending on the market) few are tuned in for extended stretches of time. So a song played four times a day is probably a song most of a station's listeners didn't even hear once that day. In another thread a few years back, we figured out that, in a market like Los Angeles, where the typical listeners in the 25-54 demo share their listening among six stations, you could play a song five times a day and that typical listener was going to hear it once every three weeks.
CHRs refresh themselves. More slowly than they did decades ago, but there's new material coming in. It's in gold-based formats that the danger occurs. Probably the best example was KRTH, Los Angeles from 2001-2005. The PD at the time boiled it down to a safe list of about 300 tracks, most from 1964-1972, and then broke a select group of "powers" out from that. So "Satisfaction" and "Do Wah Diddy Diddy" were getting seven plays a day for four years. Eventually that catches up with you.
The goal is to always be playing a great song when a listener punches in. And if it's a great song and you're managing your rotations well, that can even be the same songs over a period of months. But years---that's a bridge too far.
No, it all happened long before the internet. What really happened in US companies wanted to get out of the record business. So you had RCA, Arista, and Columbia all sell around 1988. RCA went to the Germans, Columbia went to the Japanese. A few years later, MCA sold to the French conglomerate, Vivendi. That company also bought Mercury in the mid 90s. Around that time, Warner Brothers sold its music division to a Canadian billionaire. Then the Germans sold RCA to Sony in 2002, bringing RCA, Arista, Columbia, and Epic all under the same company. Consolidation in the music business happened at the same time as consolidation in the media and radio business. The only recent purchase was Vivendi's purchase of Capitol from EMI about ten years ago.
Conversely, if a "safe" music playlist does not line up with local music tastes, then playing it "safe" may not be a real success.
And why is that? Because the majority of radio listeners are transitory. They listen in short periods, not for long periods. We can see this behavior in PPM. Those who listen for long periods use radio as background music. Large playlists mean listeners wait longer between hit songs.
The way to check this is to study streaming playlists. If you do this, you will see that the typical music streamer has a pretty small personal playlist. And they tend to mirror the radio playlists. Statistically, the music lovers, the ones who have large personal playlists, are less than 8% of the population. The larger the playlist, the smaller the percentage of the population.
Exactly, because the feelings for those who do complain boil down to: 'I listen to the radio because it's free whereas streaming and music downloads aren't.' 'Therefore each time I tune in there should be only songs and artists that I enjoy or find interesting.' 'Besides, everyone else must have the same tastes as me.'
On the book side, I have a friend who writes best-selling business books. He self-published his first couple, got a book deal for a third that included doing the talk show circuit, then found he got advertisers to pick up the cost of several more books.
I believe Spotify and Apple Music have charts for many cities around the world.
Why do they call it a safe list? Because it's a consensus list that won't cause tune-out. People say they want large playlists, and when they have a choice, they tune out, because the station plays too many duds. Or the audience is all over 65. Safe lists reflect the listeners.
The motivation is similar to getting a record deal. Anyone can self-publish a book, just as anyone can release their own music. But if you want a cash advance, if you want someone to invest in advertising and promotion, if you want someone to pick up the expenses, then you sign a book or record deal. In radio, you can own your own VT business, or you can work for iHeart and get regular checks and health benefits. These are lifestyle decisions.
And, considering what's going on in these modern times; if you want to be on the bleeding edge of new music? They should be on Tiktok, not waiting for radio.
There's that old PD saying that I'm sure holds true today: 'Never give them a reason to tune-away'. In studies it's been proven that adding too many 'oh-wow' songs to a playlist runs exactly that risk.
There's an art and science to it, and your "oh wow"is my "what the hell is that?"
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