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KBZT needs help.
- Thread starter 34james
- Start date
They do. Every week, they switch out half of the playlist with another group of songs. For example this week they added U2 I Will Follow and Police Spirits in the Material World. They're also playing Linkin Park's Lost. At the same time, they dropped about 400 songs including INXS Original Sin and Police Canary In a Coal Mine. In fact they're doing exactly what you say they should do. In addition they alter the number of spins certain songs get. Fr example Jaded by Green Day got 5 spins last week, and only got 2 spins this week. What this tells me that even though the active playlist each week is 900 songs, they're actually drawing from a library of thousands of songs. So it's not the same 900 songs every week. It's really unique for a commercial radio station. I bet there are people in other cities that would love to have a station as varied as this.
It's not completely absent. I see Wet Leg's Angelica as well as Pierce & The Veil's Emergency Contact from 2022 among their most played. They each get 8 spins a week. I also see some songs from 2023. But the playlist is so big, they get lost amidst all the older songs. That's why stations tend to stay away from large playlists. It means listeners must wait longer to hear what they want because there are so many deep cuts taking up space. There are songs on their playlist that I never hear on the radio. Deep cuts by The Police, The Clash, and even Bob Marley. That's the trade off.
I mentioned 00s and 10s, not currents. If you look at playlist composition by decade, those eras are barely represented. My remark has much more to do with percentage of spins by decade as opposed to overall number of songs.
In terms of currents, I think 91X is doing things correctly.
In terms of currents, I think 91X is doing things correctly.
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Once again, in a 900 song playlist covering 50 years, they get lost. But I saw lots of Foo Fighters, Rage Against The Machine, and Red Hot Chili Peppers. It's hard to generalize about this playlist because of the size. Plus it changes so dramatically and so often. Between last night, and this morning, I saw some very drastic shifts in songs and spins.
91X is basically a AAA that skews heavily to gold tracks at this point.
The ones I saw were from the 2000s. The release dates are included in Mediabase.
This is true.
Also, the new music they play is spun so little I see tons of comments on their socials all the time (like for the top 91 of 2022) where people were UNAWARE they even play new music still. Playing new music 1 time per hour with a bunch of 80s/90s songs and like 1/2 2000s/2010s songs isn't going to get new music listeners tuned in.
None of those songs you mentioned ever left the library, Original Sin, Canary in a Coal mine only leave for like a week or two and return, still have been played many times since the format change, same with I Will Follow (Which was gone for like a week). I didn't see them play Lost at all but apparently mediabase said they did? The only unique song library changes happened in November, where they started rotating M83's Midnight City, Holiday by Green Day, New Moon on Monday by Duran Duran, among others, that's cool, but I think some old songs still overplay where it's not interesting to tune in all day with most of the library being the same ol' same ol' every day.
I'm a huge superfan of 91X but also a bit of a critic since this format change promised more in the video teaser. I've been checking the tunegenie playlist daily, know all the patterns, know when a song is unique to the playlist (someone requesting a song, for example, I've been able to request some 2000's stuff like Don't You Evah by Spoon, Tear You Apart by She Wants Revenge, Obstacle 1 by Interpol, others have requested Left Hand Free by Alt-J, Waste a Moment by Kings of Leon), none of those ever got into rotation though which is a shame, just a request and then retired again.
That's what you get with a huge 900 song playlist. The new songs get lost. This is why KBZT's playlist is smaller and more organized. But people complain about that too. It becomes what I call the Goldlocks syndrome, where the porridge is either too hot or too cold.
My point is they go away for a while. They left the active playlist and were replaced by others. It's not the same songs every day. Half the playlist is replaced every week.
Or the rotations on some categories are so slow that the songs come up every 8 to 15 days... what we used to call "Lunar Rotations".
If you have a category that plays once an hour, if there are... let's say... 200 songs in that category, you will hear each one about every 9 days. The interesting thing is to see if they control the "next play" to be in a significantly different daypart than the prior one. A typical rotation would be AM drive, Nights, Midday, Overnights, PM drive and then back to the same sequence but with different times in each daypart. Not terribly hard to set up, and you could go about 5 to 6 weeks without the song playing in the same hour again.
There was also this weird but cool time between June-July where they brought back some newer songs (mostly late at night), stuff like Creature Comfort by Arcade Fire, Happy Idiot by TV on the Radio, Lost in Yesterday by Tame Impala, Bury Me With it by Modest Mouse, and others. These songs just appeared out of nowhere, disappeared again, and then they didn't do a similar practice until October or so where on the weekends Little Talks by Of Monsters and Men, Wish i Knew You by The Revivalists and She's Kerosene by The Interrupters returned, then never appeared since. I wish they did that more tbh, I bet most listeners didn't even notice some new songs still have appeared since this direction.
I LOVED top 20 weekend back in 4th of July since they played the top 20 of EVERY year since 1983 (they did skip 2009, 2005 and 2010 on accident since the weekend ended before they could fit those), but it was still great since it felt like what I expected their direction to really be like in that video they have on their youtube. A love and appreciation for their entire history. It's why i've stuck around, I just think the playlist in between could use a bit of fixing, play less Nirvana and Smashing Pumpkins every day (they do NOT need to be played every 2 hours), play Lust For Life, Rebel Rebel, other offenders not everyday, return recurrents and play more currents sometimes, idk something where it's more unpredictable.
I like what Halloran (legend) did last week while filling in for the music director last week, he brought back some classics I'm surprised they didn't bring back in the past year (Tones of Home by Blind Melon, Cloudbusting by Kate Bush, Search and Destroy - Iggy and the Stooges, Beetlebum by Blur), it was great. He also did a Burt Bacharach tribute, I can forgive many hits playing, that's important, but daily you should try to do a couple interesting things to have a bit of a balance so listeners who are tuning in even casually will be surprised hearing something they didn't expect, because I can tune in to the afternoon as a casual listener for 2 weeks and catch a lot of the same classics in like 3 hours. Station is too legendary and big of a library to do that, they were playing more classics in the 2000s than they are now, I think if they want to do something cool for the gen X'ers they should also play more resurrection sunday cuts. They seem to have the freedom to do things, I think it would help their ratings and it wouldn't hurt to try to be daring and outside of the box more.
I LOVED top 20 weekend back in 4th of July since they played the top 20 of EVERY year since 1983 (they did skip 2009, 2005 and 2010 on accident since the weekend ended before they could fit those), but it was still great since it felt like what I expected their direction to really be like in that video they have on their youtube. A love and appreciation for their entire history. It's why i've stuck around, I just think the playlist in between could use a bit of fixing, play less Nirvana and Smashing Pumpkins every day (they do NOT need to be played every 2 hours), play Lust For Life, Rebel Rebel, other offenders not everyday, return recurrents and play more currents sometimes, idk something where it's more unpredictable.
I like what Halloran (legend) did last week while filling in for the music director last week, he brought back some classics I'm surprised they didn't bring back in the past year (Tones of Home by Blind Melon, Cloudbusting by Kate Bush, Search and Destroy - Iggy and the Stooges, Beetlebum by Blur), it was great. He also did a Burt Bacharach tribute, I can forgive many hits playing, that's important, but daily you should try to do a couple interesting things to have a bit of a balance so listeners who are tuning in even casually will be surprised hearing something they didn't expect, because I can tune in to the afternoon as a casual listener for 2 weeks and catch a lot of the same classics in like 3 hours. Station is too legendary and big of a library to do that, they were playing more classics in the 2000s than they are now, I think if they want to do something cool for the gen X'ers they should also play more resurrection sunday cuts. They seem to have the freedom to do things, I think it would help their ratings and it wouldn't hurt to try to be daring and outside of the box more.
oh no I agree, that’s why I stick with them.
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