Do you think Mix 96.9 will be around for too much longer. They are starting to play Bon Jovi Aren't they basically the same as KESZ. I enjoy the station also
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- Thread starter CassChopper96
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Yes.
Why? Because if you took the former Clear Channel's gamut of stations, boiled them all down into a super-concentrated extract, and made a brand out of that soup, you'd get a "Mix" station. A beast researched and focus-grouped into the ground with the least offensive and most-tested music for the target demo, an air staff that was scientifically designed to reap the most rewards from the People Meter methodology, and a sales staff that knew exactly how to get the most value out of a jumble of statistics given to advertisers.
As an old radio guy who thinks entertaining and unique stations are always better than bland brands, I didn't get it at first. In fact I didn't get it for a long time. I thought Mix was boring and uninteresting.
Yet Mix is not just a bland brand. It's the pinnacle of bland brands. That's the point.
You will never hear anything on Mix that surprises you. You will never hear a song that makes you think "oh wow, I haven't heard that in a long time," or a jock who does an outrageous or dangerous bit, and the stuff in between the songs and jock talk - that stuff called "imaging" that some of us spent a good part of our careers trying to make entertaining? - you'll never hear anything other than a carefully crafted slogan that lasts exactly as long as research says people will listen.
The worst part about Mix? It works. All that research, focus groups, data analysis and music testing has produced a station that us old radio folks see as the epitome of everything wrong with radio, but that listeners mindlessly tune into over and over again. They can put it on in the office and tune out, or hit the button on their car radio and zone out. It will never take them out of their comfort zone at work, in the car, or anywhere else. That's the idea. That's why it's worked for so long. It will continue to work.
Why? Because if you took the former Clear Channel's gamut of stations, boiled them all down into a super-concentrated extract, and made a brand out of that soup, you'd get a "Mix" station. A beast researched and focus-grouped into the ground with the least offensive and most-tested music for the target demo, an air staff that was scientifically designed to reap the most rewards from the People Meter methodology, and a sales staff that knew exactly how to get the most value out of a jumble of statistics given to advertisers.
As an old radio guy who thinks entertaining and unique stations are always better than bland brands, I didn't get it at first. In fact I didn't get it for a long time. I thought Mix was boring and uninteresting.
Yet Mix is not just a bland brand. It's the pinnacle of bland brands. That's the point.
You will never hear anything on Mix that surprises you. You will never hear a song that makes you think "oh wow, I haven't heard that in a long time," or a jock who does an outrageous or dangerous bit, and the stuff in between the songs and jock talk - that stuff called "imaging" that some of us spent a good part of our careers trying to make entertaining? - you'll never hear anything other than a carefully crafted slogan that lasts exactly as long as research says people will listen.
The worst part about Mix? It works. All that research, focus groups, data analysis and music testing has produced a station that us old radio folks see as the epitome of everything wrong with radio, but that listeners mindlessly tune into over and over again. They can put it on in the office and tune out, or hit the button on their car radio and zone out. It will never take them out of their comfort zone at work, in the car, or anywhere else. That's the idea. That's why it's worked for so long. It will continue to work.
They are made to fit right between the chr and ac station to give the cluster the wall of women.
It can be done very well in its own lane though.
It can play the gold songs that are too much for the AC station, it must be the place for the biggest pop hits after they have been exposed but they can also pepper it with some songs that aren't quite "hip" enouch for chr as well.
Also, they should be doing all 90s weekends until a station focused on 90s is an option.
All of this executed correctly can keep the station safe and familiar but also add some variety and some excitement as to not hurt the cume but make people listen longer and more frequently.
You have the ac, hot ac and chr to adjust just right so that they give each other a nice lane to own. You also should make sure that your hot ac is playing music when the chr and ac go into spots, that's a no brainer yet you still hear over-lapping spot breaks in a cluster where there is a great deal of shared listening.
Right now, it is not as if America radio is doing things wrong, the answer is to do it better.
Listen to heart out of London. That's a hot ac station that is defined by its market. The drivetime talent there also flawlessly adds personality and resonates with the target audience all while within the flow of the music, talking just enough and making perfect use of each second.
It can be done very well in its own lane though.
It can play the gold songs that are too much for the AC station, it must be the place for the biggest pop hits after they have been exposed but they can also pepper it with some songs that aren't quite "hip" enouch for chr as well.
Also, they should be doing all 90s weekends until a station focused on 90s is an option.
All of this executed correctly can keep the station safe and familiar but also add some variety and some excitement as to not hurt the cume but make people listen longer and more frequently.
You have the ac, hot ac and chr to adjust just right so that they give each other a nice lane to own. You also should make sure that your hot ac is playing music when the chr and ac go into spots, that's a no brainer yet you still hear over-lapping spot breaks in a cluster where there is a great deal of shared listening.
Right now, it is not as if America radio is doing things wrong, the answer is to do it better.
Listen to heart out of London. That's a hot ac station that is defined by its market. The drivetime talent there also flawlessly adds personality and resonates with the target audience all while within the flow of the music, talking just enough and making perfect use of each second.
Why is talking to listeners, finding out what they want on the radio, and providing it "worst"?
I've always thought that this is exactly what we are supposed to do!
Exactly and Bob Pittman was an early believer in radio research. In the 60s, he was research director at WDRQ Detroit, and used what he learned there to program WPEZ in Pittsburgh. He was able to excel in multiple formats because he focused on research rather than his own personal taste. So it's no surprise that iHeart stations are well-researched.
You will note that the poster admitted that the formula he was criticizing nonetheless was hugely successful, as it gave listeners what they wanted. If the radio audience gravitates towards bland, repetitive and predicable formats, you give it to them. It's good, smart business.
If you are running a restaurant, and you determine that your customers want food that tastes like dog poop, you make sure the chefs in your kitchen are well fed canines.
WDRQ did not debut until 1971, part of the WMYQ and KSLQ trio of FM Top 40's under Bartell.
WPEZ did not debut until November of 1973, and Pittman was only there a short time before he moved on, beaten by Bill Tanner's 13-Q, a horribly directional AM station that was infinitely better programmed under Heftel ownership.
Pittman has always seemed to fall upwards.
He became music director of WMAQ Chicago when it flipped to country in 1975. At the time he had no real experience in the format. But his main area was research, and he claimed to do hundreds of call-outs a week to choose the music.
I personally believe that this is revisionist history.
In 1975, call-out was just being developed by the team at KCBQ in San Diego and by Todd Wallace in Phoenix. It was very primitive and involved tearing pages out of a phone book and "calling every 10th number" and playing the songs on a cassette player wired into the phone handset.
The results were manually tabulated and had, of course, few age and gender breaks. It was not until Coleman developed a S-100 microcomputer system around 1970 that the results became computerized... but with manual data input.
So "doing hundreds of call-outs a week" seems mythical along the lines of the King Arthur legends.
Maybe, but it was reported in Billboard at the time. So they may have been lying, but it's not revisionist.
January 11, 1975 page 67. "The first 100 phone calls helped us devise a questionnaire."
An old radio friend of mine once said "research is a tool, not a programmer."
The restaurant analogy is apt, because it gives an example of what could have been. If everyone just followed the mass market research and served up bland but predictable and inoffensive food, there would be nothing but chain restaurants and major fast food franchises. Those things are ubiquitous, but at the same time there are also very successful independent restaurants that serve a wide and wild variety of great food. Chefs have become celebrities, there are cooking shows on network TV and an entire network dedicated to cooking and cooking competitions. Those chefs and restaurant owners take risks, but it can pay off greatly.
Will more people go to Olive Garden and McDonald's? Yes, but enough people will frequent the higher end Italian place or the gourmet burger joint to make them successful as well.
Radio is becoming (or has become) nothing but the equivalent of fast food for your ears. There's no more gourmet burger joints. No more celebrity chefs (personalities), and fewer and fewer people grow up thinking "wow, I want to be on the radio one day."
Speaking of Mix, around 20 years ago (jeez, has it been that long?) I knew some people who worked for the old Zone. A lot of people forget that Holmberg got his start there. That was an interesting station. Creative personalities, stand-out imaging, unique promotions (they had a gold tournament named the Yeti), and an attitude. A friend who worked there pointed out something I didn't notice:
They were playing almost exactly the same music as Mix. If the Zone played a Dave Matthews song and you switched over to Mix, there was a good chance they'd be playing the same song. The playlists were very close, but it was the presentation that made the Zone different. If I remember correctly, the station was very successful.
Yes, research is important. Finding out what the audience wants is good business. Simply following the research and building a product that does not stray from a research-driven formula? That's boring. Now if you'll excuse me I've got a six inch cold cut combo from Subway I need to finish...
There is, but it's typically in the non-commercial part of the band. But yes, we program for the WalMart shoppers. Those who can afford better can subscribe to streaming services. That's how radio has changed in the last 20 years. I don't program to people who don't listen. Programming to the Whole Foods folks doesn't make us more money. But it works for non-commercial radio. It ain't the 80s or 90s any more, and programmers have mainly become schedulers in today's work plan, especially in the context of cluster management.
As for people growing up wanting to work in radio, you'd be surprised. But their view of radio is different. They grew up with digital editing and niche formats. They see radio as a multi-platform operation where the air signal feeds other content platforms where there's more money to be made.
If it was not true then, it's not true now. An hour, a year or a decade, it is revisionist.
Callout began around 1975 in both PHX and SDO. AMT's seem to have begun in '72 or '72 (even the creators can't remember exactly and I've talked with several of the pioneers).
What may have been done was a phone station survey. Those began sometime between 1929 and 1930, so there is nothing innovative about that.
This all is more likely hyperbole or puffery.
And something like 75% of all independent restaurants fail in the first two years. That's because they did not fill a need and / or did not create a partisan base.
That is where the highest rate of failure exists. And the life cycle of many "hot" restaurants is now very short.
I've been at this for 61 years and the stations that were not mass appeal are either public stations or gone.
Yes, there are niche stations, such as foreign language operations... but they have to have broad popularity among their subset of the audience to satisfy advertisers.
I don't know anyone who implements research without a strategy.
Format search research requires analysis and evaluation of whether a slightly different approach or format can take listeners from existing stations. This often takes the for of ATU studies, standing for Awareness, Trial, Usage. Awareness of a specific format, willingness to Try a new station in what was presented as a sample, and probability of Usage. This will include data on the strengths and weaknesses of other stations playing on the same field. Then a strategy to implement and be distinctly different, distinctly better has to be created. In other words, the research is like the key to a car: you can get started, but you have to know how to drive and know where you are going and know the rules of the road, too.
Music tests, whether "call out" or music tests (much of this is now done online), involve getting actual and potential listeners to score songs as to how much they would like to hear them on the radio today. It takes skill to select more than the core songs... lots of "what if" tunes are needed to make sure the mood of the audience has not changed since the last test. Another analogy: it's like having a map of sea lanes, which is useless unless read by a good captain.
Focus groups (I hate them and have used them seldom) and one-on-ones (done hundreds and hundreds of 'em) attempt to find the emotional base for listening to stations and shows with the intent of getting insight that will guide you. It takes a very, very skilled interviewer to do these, and then it may take viewing videos of certain interviews over again along with lengthy discussions to wring out actionable data.
All these research types require enormous skill to implement. They don't implement themselves. As an example, following a music test it has often taken me a week (or more) of work to implement because putting the pieces together and getting optimum scheduling in MusicMaster or GSelector takes lots of trial and experimentation to get the feel you want.
If you think we all don't do this, you are wrong.
Believe what you want to believe. Here's a link to the archive, scroll down about 25%. It's Billboard by Claude Hall January 11, 1975.
https://www.radiotimeline.com/radio-articles/
Here's what he says: "Requests will be tabulated, but we'll be involved in a lot of call-outs. If they like country music, we go into specific questions about artists and songs." So it sounds like they weren't playing bits of songs in the call out, but just asking questions.
Bob & PD Lee Sherwood were basing playlists on what they called "attitudinal research," rather than record sales, because the local sales information they were getting at that time wasn't large enough on which to base decisions. "We're more interested in what kind of country music listeners want to hear rather than what they want to buy."
If a song is not sampled, the research is totally stilted. I've seen a sample of people scoring a text list of songs and then scoring based on hooks. Different planets.
They were doing research, yes. Music testing without actually playing the song is actually "text testing"
As I said, Pittman has great skill in the art of hyperbole. Still.
Yet the restaurant industry is diverse. Yes, there are low end fast food places and high end niche restaurants, but there is a lot of real estate in between. There's plenty of very successful "fast casual" places like Chipotle. More expensive sit-down chains like P.F. Chang's. Regional successes that have expanded beyond their original locations. It's not just fast food, Applebee's, and then you're into high-end gourmet restaurants with nothing in between.
You're presenting a false dichotomy...either a station is mass appeal or it is a "niche" station like public radio or foreign. That's rapidly becoming the case - as TheBigA says it's just about programming for the WalMart shoppers - but does it have to be? Take our two country stations. One day I was flipping between the two, and actually forgot which one I was listening to. They sound almost identical. The imaging is built on the same formula, the stopset placement is almost the same, they both run national contests on almost the same schedule, etc. It isn't even McDonald's vs Burger King anymore. It's McDonald's vs McDowell's (if you get the Eddie Murphy reference).
Now, I haven't been at this for 61 years, but awhile back I was sitting in a meeting at a local station where the ratings were being discussed. The PD was imploring the staff to hit the stopset a minute earlier to beat the competition a bit and maybe squeak out that .1 or .2 of a point that will allow the morning show to pull even in the ratings with the competition. Go into the spots teasing the next contest or celebrity tidbit coming up, and make sure you tell the listeners how many minutes it will be until the "payoff."
Then I look up at the numbers, and can't help but notice that while our morning show is neck and neck with the other one, they're nowhere near the top of the list. Who is on top? Holmberg. A guy who targets men almost exclusively, has 20-30 minute uninterrupted interviews with comics a couple days a week, and routinely blows through stopset times with impunity. I've heard the "Guadalupe Squares" bit sweep the top of the hour too many times to count. If John's having fun, he'll go over.
He's not talking in a foreign language or speaking to the Whole Foods shopper. He's being entertaining. And it works.
Again, I'm not discounting research. I know there are companies who are crunching numbers and hyper-focusing on Nielsen households and micro-targeting neighborhoods with direct marketing and working hard to implement the latest results of the music test.
What I'm saying is the result is - while successful at the moment - also very boring. There are all these people working very hard to craft the perfect station that will appeal perfectly to the target listener and...it's Mix. Or KEZ. Or KOOL. Or Kiss. Or Live. Or any number of stations which are interchangeable with one another because they're so similar. They're all trying to manipulate the meters and game the system for a few tenths of a ratings point of an audience that's been shrinking for a long time now.
I think it was back in 1995 or so that I was at a Morning Show Bootcamp where Kidd Kraddick (RIP) put on this presentation about how "the internet is coming" and if we (radio) didn't do something, it would eat our lunch. You could log on to AOL or search on Alta Vista and find an internet radio station that played your music or had your type of show and it would make our mighty towers irrelevant. He was a bit off with his prediction, but ahead of the curve in a very real way.
Lately I've been using that internet to watch car review channels on the You Tube. The car is one of the last bastions of radio listening...or so we're told. Many of the reviewers are "millennials." You know what they never talk about? "The radio." Oh, they extensively cover the car's "infotainment" system. Does it have Apple Car Play? Android Auto? Does it have wireless charging? It's own navigation or is your phone's navigation better? Not a single one of these "influencers" has ever mentioned the terrestrial radio function. I've been watching these channels for a few years, and they just don't care.
What are we doing about that?
We find out what listeners who like the ease and convenience of radio stations (whether streamed or on-air) actually want and like.
We know that we can't do on-demand, so we have to program to a consensus.
We know that we have ads. Some people won't listen for that reason. Nothing we can do there.
We know that not one of the streaming services makes money. We do, so we don't try to do things that are not profitable.
As long as these conditions exist, radio will keep on keeping on. Stations with bad signals will try to do niche programming. The rest will compete for ad dollars, with prices set in accordance with listening levels and the desirability of the format by advertisers.
And more than likely, given the success of Seacreast and Bones and others, we will see more and more national shows which will provide content that can't be had on streaming on-demand music sources and is only minimally met on satellite.
Trying to find ultra-niche formats does not ring the cash register for clients. And today, few stations are dealing with positive cash flow. This is not a moment where innovation may step in like The Lone Ranger... with or without a horse and a sidekick named "Stupid" .
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