Exactly. I like this novelty song, but not that. Someone else wants the exact opposite. Someone wants religious. Someone else doesn't. I'd call it a fine line to walk, but there really isn't a line to walk so much as a minefield to be navigated.
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KOST Goes All Christmas Friday
- Thread starter CaliRadioFan
- Start date
I did read what you wrote...and responded to it.
Unless something is different this year, WLTW and KOST were not playing the Chipmunk song (OK, someone will prove me wrong that they played it as a one-time thing). But I don't recall Dominic the Donkey, Barking Dogs Jingle Bells nor the Chipmunk Song was part of their regular Christmas rotation.
It may have changed, but as of 4 years ago, there was a policy (or should I say "guideline") at Clear Channel against playing novelty songs.
BTW....as another poster mentioned, Vince Guaraldi's music is not "novelty" songs.
Did I say they were in "regular rotation?" No. But The Chipmunk Song got played Friday afternoon. Dominick The Donkey got played Friday Night.
Dominick the Donkey
Lou Monte
10:40 PM
The Barking Dogs tests very badly. Ten seconds is more than enough before people tune away. No upside to doing that. Might as well play Bobby Goldsboro.
No, but *I* did. ;-)
Maybe for the first day of Christmas music? Who knows. Mileage may vary.....
Like I said, possibly things have changed, but they had Clear Channel guidelines in the past to avoid novelty songs. (And, again, Vince Guaraldi is not considered by that definition a novelty songs.)
The thinking at the time was that with novelty songs, a little bit goes a long way to impacting your Christmas image.
I was at a CC station, and I allowed a jock to play Dominic the Donkey *once* for fun. 11 months later I was told (in a focus group) that our station played it "all the time"! I wanted to burst into the room, and tell them their is a BIG difference between "once" and "all the time"! lol!
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As I said, Post #64 was in response to post #63, who was saying KOST doesn't play Snoopy Christmas. How was I to know he meant the song by the Royal Guardsmen? I thought he was talking about Vince Guaraldi. I have never heard it. Never heard Dominick the Donkey either. But I know Leroy the Redneck Reindeer. I don't play it though. I see a lot of songs in their recently played list that I'd consider novelty, such as "You're A Mean One Mr. Grinch" and "Mele Kalikimaka." I think there's enough variety to keep everyone happy.
"Snoopy's Christmas" is the song I referred to as being part of the WRCH Hartford playlist. "Dominic the Donkey" -- which, I believe is a purely regional favorite in areas with a large percentage of Italian immigrants and first-generation Italian-Americans (Connecticut and Rhode Island, I believe, are No. 1 and No. 2 in this category) -- has been played in past years, when WRCH was owned by CBS. It is sung in a heavy, stereotypical Italian-American accent, reminiscent of "Shut Up You Face," a novelty hit that also used to get a lot of airplay in these parts. Whether Entercom will give WRCH the leeway to include "Dominick"-- or the Royal Guardsmen -- this holiday season remains to be seen.
And as you will say over and over again I'm sure!
I'm sure it will depend on where they get their music. I'm sure WLIT isn't playing Mele Kalikimaka because of the large percentage of Hawaiians living in Chicago.
That seems to be a (relatively) new Christmas-format standard, because it's been played locally for years now. I don't know whether it's a novelty or not. I guess if you consider a song sung in something other than English to be a novelty when played on an English-language station, I guess it qualifies -- as do "Feliz Navidad" and secular oldies such as "Eres Tu," "Dominique" and "Sukiyaki."
You always say the terrestrial radio "(has) enough variety to keep everyone happy" even though for years people like Super, Oldies, and I among others have told you that we are not satisfied. As for the Christmas songs, frankly, if I had to listen to a KOST Christmas for seven weeks I would lobby to cancel the whole holiday. Such repetition is mind numbing to those of us who actually have one.
If terrestrial radio was so great, satellite radio and all of the online stuff wouldn't exist. As an on-topic example, I think by the time it is all over SiriusXM will have sixteen channels this year devoted to the holidays covering just about every genre of holiday music one could imagine* including new channels like 70's/80's Christmas, Chill Out Christmas, and the Mannheim Steamroller Channel. That is enough variety to keep almost everyone happy.
*well, I do see there is no Special XMas channel which features all novelty tunes this year which they have had in the past. That would really make the line-up complete! (Hint, Hint, SiriusXM brass!)
Except that in in 17 years, satellite radio's market share has yet to reach even a modest 10 percent. I've had XM (now SiriusXM) since January 2003 and listen a lot, but still turn to local FM occasionally, mainly for noncommercial programming and a '60s-through-'80s classic hits station that I find more enjoyable to listen to than the decades channels on satellite.
As for the all-novelty tunes channel, that was Lee Abrams' idea. Sirius brass basically laughed at his goofy format ideas -- lounge lizard music, progressive rock, Latin jazz, rock channels named after characters from "I Love Lucy" -- and got rid of all of them when Sirius bought out XM. The service may be less quirky, but quirky was never going to drive subscription growth beyond the early adopters,
That's OK. The other thing I've always said is OTA radio is supposed to be the free sample. It's supposed to be the introduction to make you want to BUY the music, and spend money to keep that music coming. We will NEVER satisfy the die-hard music fans. NEVER. There will NEVER be enough time for us to play all the music in your own personal libraries, and that is NOT our intent. No one I've ever talked to in radio wants to replace the personal collection. And if at your age, you're now done with us, then we've done our job. We've done our job with you, and it's time for us to focus on the next generations and inspire them the way Top 40 inspired you and your generation. The "mind-numbing repetition" you mention is what made Top 40 great when you were a kid. Now you hate it, but 40 years ago, it wasn't a problem. But we don't lose a moment of sleep because you're using other devices for music. We've done our job.
That is just absolute total BS. I know because I was there when all that stuff came about, and I know why it exists. It's because we will NEVER have enough space or enough stations for all the music. So we created 100 non-duplicated radio stations to cover it. We wanted it to be by subscription, and the FCC wouldn't allow us to do that with AM & FM. And even then, I know the channels don't go deep enough for you. I read your complaints about the satellite channels becoming too repetitious, or not going deep enough. I know all of that. But once again, we don't want to replace your personal collection.
Don't try to make me feel guilty about your insatiable need for music. I don't feel any guilt because if it wasn't for the radio, you wouldn't HAVE that need. Terrestrial radio IS so great because we now have lots of other platforms to use for our content. We have satellite, we have online, we have podcasts, and many other places to tell our stories. In my world, radio isn't just AM & FM. So I don't feel bad about radio today. If you like Sirius, great! I hope you keep paying your subscription money. That's a good thing. Celebrate the radio, whatever radio you choose to listen to.
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We really don't have apples to apples comparisons of satellite to terrestrial. We know that satellite is in around 30 million vehicles, out of 268,000,000 in the US. That is a little over 10% of all vehicles... but then we get into how satellite counts subscribers... so the 10% active number is likely a little high.
And we know that, still, more than half of all terrestrial radio listening is not in the car. And we know that satellite radio shares with terrestrial in the car, and is not an "either/or" situation.
So were I to make a guess at the percentage of radio listening going to satellite when OTA and satellite (without streaming) is compared, I'd say it was around 3%.
It's a niche, but now a profitable one.
Certainly more profitable than Pandora or Spotify. Now that Sirius owns Pandora, it'll be interesting to see how they make it profitable.
I remember when I applied to the Communications Ministry of the government of Ecuador for the first FMs in the country. The first response was, "why would you want that?".
I was looking for a way to have more voices in the market. If an additional band had been developed, I would have asked for a presence there, as well.
New things exist because, mostly, of technology and consumer interest in products tailored to their precise needs, whether it is laundry detergent or radio.
The ultimate step in variety is on-demand, where we can have an infinite music collection at our command. Yet over 90% of Americans choose to use radio at least some of the time each week. It must be that it fills a need.
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Grinch, yes. Mele and Feliz, no.
Well, you have the 50's, 60's, 70's, 80's, 90's, 00's and 10's to sort out. Seven decades of rock and roll. And since you have nearly 70% of a century's worth of music to sort from, yes it will be difficult, since everyone has their favorites. You program to researched individuals. 99.9% of the population remains untested and they want different things, so yes, you can't please them all and never will. You will always have the difficulty in pleasing listeners til the end of time. That's a given.
The question remains: how many people will actually listen to those millions of titles, as opposed to a couple of hundred of their favorites? I know the folks who claim to like everything that was ever committed to vinyl are loud, what perentage of the population is that? How much time do people have to listen to music?
Exactly why I rarely listen to the radio for Christmas music. How many times must we hear the "I Melt With You" of Christmas music, you know, the overplay by Mariah Carey? Two or three times is sufficient for me. I have my own playlist of 150 separate classics I play on the evening of the 24th. (You know...us Latinos celebrate at midnight.) and everyone loves it! No commercials, no jocks, no fillers, no clutter......nada! Just genuine Christmas glory, the best way possible.
As I have said many, many times over the years, the listener concept of "variety" is based on not playing songs individual listeners don't want to hear. In nearly 100% of the cases where a person has commented negatively on variety in research I have conducted (and sometimes moderated) further digging reveals that the lack of variety comment is based on the playing of "too many" songs that the individual does not like.
"Variety" to the average listener means, really, never playing songs that each individual listener does not like. So the burden on radio stations is to find only the songs that a consensus of listeners like, and to avoid ones that are polarizing, with some "love" opinions and some "hate" ones.
That means that loads of songs are eliminated because some part of the audience does not like them. That's why stations do music tests... so they can see which songs are dangerous. But we also do them to play "what if" with lots of songs just in case we can find a few that fit the constantly changing nature of the bigger formats that play older music.
There is no rule that says that mainstream AC stations have to have 300 songs in the library. That just happens to be the number of songs that test positively in market after market, from Seattle to Santiago. We'd like nothing more than to find more songs that fit our formats, but the fact is that we consistently, market after market, we see fairly limited ranges of songs in each format.
Which brings us to your comment: there are, indeed a small number of people who are musically adventurous or who like a lot of songs "nobody" else likes. They were not happy with radio in 1940, and they are not happy now. But there is absolutely nothing that radio could do 80 years ago or today to make them happier without decimating the contented regular listeners.
I have often done music tests where listening to a particular station was not in the recruit specifications. Instead, sample pods of music that represented a particular format were played, and to be invited to the music test a person had to like 3 out of 5 or 2 out of 3 such pods (for example). So we got partisans of a style, era or type of music. And we'd occasionally get one person (seldom two) out of a 100 person test that would score every song quite high. At the end, we would remove such "outliers" as they were not typical and their high scores on what, to everyone else, was a dud, distorted the results. You and Oldies76 and Super and other occasional posters are definitely outliers: radio knows that you can't be pleased and, further, we know that trying to do so puts our core in peril.
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