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Is this a new trend?

J

johnbasalla

In the Cleveland, Ohio market, there are now 3 music stations that are using a robot voice to give name of song and artist after songs are played. Two of the three do it for all songs in their regular rotation, while the third, an alternative station, does so after a new song is aired. One station ( Hot AC from 80s-90s and today) is owned by Clear Channel. Another is owned by Salem and features Christian AC/Hot AC, and the alt station, owned by CBS, laid off all of their on-air personnel as the economy tanked. Where else is the robot voice thing going on? They seem to be mostly female voices. Any guy robots out there?

I'm one who has wanted music stations to mention song/artist consistently for a long time. It's a simple, logical and important part of the service element .for music stations.
 
Are you sure that it's a 'robot', or could it be a person who simply pre-tagged the song with the artist and title? I've heard this done on a couple of stations in Atlanta, and it sounds pretty good...but it's not a robot. Even the best robotic technology still doesn't sound much better than the voice coming over the EAS.
 
WTPI in Indianapolis is doing this, even when they have a jock. Reminds one of old automation reels from Drake-Chenault, TM or Century 21.
 
We've been "tagging" songs now on my AC for about a year, I process the VO through a phone filter, and put in Audio-Vault at a pretty low volume. Many have asked about the reasoning behind it. Perceptual s have given us the feedback that they(the listener) wants to know what the Artist/Titles of the songs we play are, now, given that the songs we play in mainstream AC are almost ALL extremely recognizable, its simply a reinforcement of the artist/title id, helps in long segue sets too.
Now I CAN see it as a tool for lets say AAA format or even CHR, but given that the burn on CHR is about 1.5 hours, I can't see how it would benefit the audience. It has gotten both good and not so good phoners, most were agreeable to it, others were simply annoyed (upper end of the demo) by it. At work listening has increased though and I can't say that's the reason, but it sure hasn't hurt. Just my .02
Larson
 
I've heard this on some CHRs and I don't think it's a bad idea at all.

What I'm wondering is technically, how do you implement this from a programming/MD point of view.

Are these scheduled as 2 seperate events in the automation? or is the tag edited together in a DAW and then added?

If the second way is the answer, are their 2 versions, one with a tag and one without?

I understand There is a bunch of ways that would work, but I'm just wondering how you guys are actually doing this.

Thanks,

Randy.
 
Like most things in programming, you shouldn't ever just set it and forget it.

Set them up as two separate events, and then paint them into the log where it makes sense. When? When you go back through, hour by hour, and tighten up the station. Most don't do that of course, but you'd be surprised at how much of a difference it can make. Just because it shows up in Selector properly, doesn't mean it will come out of the speakers like you expect it to.

Going back and essentially "producing" my station after everything was in is the single best thing I've done in the past 5 years to improve the sound of the station.
 
My assumption is that this is an effort to be cool like an iPod Shuffle. My expert on things cool (daughter #1) tells me that her iPod Shuffle has a little button on the headphone cord. When you want to know the name of the music you are listening to, reach up and press the little tiny "wart" in the cord and the iPod gives you the information in that same style.
 
Goat Rodeo Cowboy said:
My assumption is that this is an effort to be cool like an iPod Shuffle. My expert on things cool (daughter #1) tells me that her iPod Shuffle has a little button on the headphone cord. When you want to know the name of the music you are listening to, reach up and press the little tiny "wart" in the cord and the iPod gives you the information in that same style.
Click to expand...

Poor assumption. Stations were doing this long before this feature was available on the iPod Shuffle.

The purpose of doing this is to tell the audience what you're playing. Has nothing to do with "sounding cool." In fact, it's a radio station's feeling of "cool," which is really just arrogance and self-focus, that tends to keep them from doing this service for the listeners in the first place. You could be 300 spins into a record and still have a vast chunk of your audience that has never heard the record, much less know what it is when they hear it for the first, second or third time.

You won't get penalized for telling your audience the title/artist of a song, even if they've heard it a ton.
 
WTNR in Grand Rapids does or did (as of last summer they did) this WITH EVERY SONG THAT COMES ON!! and they have DJ's. I actually find it very annoying to do it every time. once or twice an hour is fine, or if it is a brand new song that no one will know. Otherwise have the DJ's do it. Now some stations right before the commercials will have a something that will say "Coming up in the next..." and play ten seconds of two or three songs that are coming up. For some reason I like those.
 
I'm with Macdaddy...I don't like them after every single song. I think they sound horrible and lack personality when a jock comes on after and makes no connection with the music. Big mistake! Song tags make big sense after relativley new product and even then I want to hear a real human being with emotion make a connection with the product and not some emotionless robotic sounding no body...

Get back to making "eye contact" with the music and the audience. Jocks should be the biggest fans of the music they play and the radio station it's played on!
 
You'd be amazed how many Top 40 jocks "back in the day" absolutely detested the music they played. Hey if I had to listen to Donny Osmond every 2 1/2 hours I might have too. Most of the song tagging I have heard has been on largely gold-based stations.
 
LibertyNT said:
Wasnt this what RDS was for? To Show The Song/Artist?
Click to expand...

Sure, but there are still A LOT (I'd say the vast majority) of radios out there that still just display the frequency. Lots and lots of 5, 10, 15 year old cars out there without an RDS readout. As for desktop digital radios...HA!...don't get me started. Suffice it to say, my local Best Buy hasn't sold out of their digital radios...ever...if they've sold any at all.

Anyways...

In any listener study I've ever seen that asked "what do you want from your radio station," one of the top 5 answers in every one of them has been "I want to know what song they just played & who does it" or some variation on that verbage. Song tags are just a quick, easy way to make sure they get that info...every time, all the time.

I can see some of the argument for only doing it for new music...BUT...how many of us have turned those calls where the listener wants to hear "you know...that song that goes.....," and the caller proceeds to hum the chorus. Turns out, the song is 20+ years old and we can't believe they don't know the friggin' name. Or you've just played a song from 15-20 years ago, and someone calls and asks "what's that song, and who does it?" I've been doing this for a couple of decades now, and one of those things happens -and has happened- on about a daily basis.

Connecting to the music? Couple of ways to look at that.

First way of looking at it: A song tag should never, ever interfere with a jock connecting with the song they just played...IF there's a good reason to connect with it. Nobody cares who produced it, unless the producer grew up in your town. Nobody cares who the drummer is, unless he was in the local high school band. If there's a story behind the song THAT YOUR LISTENERS WOULD BE INTERESTED IN, don't let the song tag stand in the way.

Second way of looking at it: Any jock who is connecting with the music is missing the point. The jock's job is to connect WITH THE LISTENER. If there's something about that song that the listener is going to care about (besides title & artist), then talk about that song. If all the listener wants to know is title & artist then the jock is now free, courtesy of the song tag, to skip the needless jabbering involved in backselling & get on with the business of saying something the listener will find relevant.

At my cluster, only the AC station is doing song tags. To answer an earlier poster, we tagged each and every song so that there's never any question as to whether or not the proper tag (if any tag) will play after each song. It's all one file, but that's just our system. We also have another category in our automation system of the exact same songs NOT tagged. When new songs go into the Tag category, untagged versions go into the other category. That way, one of these days, when we no longer want/need the tags, we've already got a mirror library ready, sans tags.
 
Song tags have all the appeal of skin tags. Worst thing I ever heard of ! One of the things missing from radio today is a passion for the music by the jocks.
 
Here in Salt Lake City, there are a good number of stations using the tagging. I think the first was CC's My99.5. Fully Automated HotAC/Modern station and it works. It doesn't detract from the station's flow or imaging. There are a few others including an Alternative that is partially automated and the live jocks can delete the tag (which is a male, non-monotone voice) as they wish. We talked about it on our local radio forums a bit. My feeling is that a fully or partially automated station can and does benefit from this tagging. A fully staffed, live radio station, IMHO, does not benefit as it is just redundant as the jock can do it just as well and hopefully better.

We have an independent country station, KSOP. They are fully staffed 24/7 and their PD makes the jocks back announce each song. They are pretty passionate about it and it really makes the listener feel comfy and taken care of. With all the PPM stuff going down, stations are backing off of this practice as it's just not as important to ID yourself for the sake of getting ratings. I still think it's incredibly important to make your station identifiable and unique, especially in such a heavily radioed market like SLC. Our PPM is starting pre-currency pretty quickly and I'm pretty excited to see how things start shaking out.
 
Back in the early days of automation, it was common for TM Century or whomever, to include generic back-announce liners after four or five songs. This concept is nothing new.

As mentioned earlier, focus groups and audience research continues to show, no matter what market I might add; listeners want to know what songs were played. What younger listeners DON'T want, is some gabby DJ going on about his/her experience at some concert or their take on how good a song is. "I just want to know the artist and title of a song then have the DJ shut up", is a frequent comment made in the research I've seen.
 
Obviously there was tons of research that said the backannounce voice should be a monotone female sounding like she was fed through a phone line..I was a little shocked to hear the song tags on a local, very conservative Christian station but found they carry blocks of praise and worship music from Salem. Still, think those older ears might prefer a more pleasant voice.
 
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