Have you read my resume? Can you cite specific examples from my broadcast employment history to support your assertion?
If you've ever had experience programming a contemporary station (at least in the last 30 years), you would know repetition is common. Even when I worked at an AC, we played our most popular songs on a four hour rotation, meaning you would hear each roughly six times a day. Due to scheduling and integration, you would actually hear the powers between five and seven times a day, but six was the average. I had a friend who worked at a business that had us on as background music, and she swore we played our powers more than six times during her eight hour shift. She would never have heard any of them more than three times.
Do you have evidence of this? If the market has a significant number of listeners who want the format of music the station is playing, that market is significant. I believe the ratings generated by 102.5 proves that it is significant.
I have worked in a market the size of Beaumont, and the only station in our cluster that got any interest from the record labels was our AAA outlet. It only got interest from the labels because AAA stations are few and far between. The rest of our stations didn't get monitored by the trades. Labels are typically only interested in the stations that report to the trades because they drive airplay elsewhere, and the trades are rarely interested in markets outside the Top 100. I realize not every Top-100 market has an urban AC, but I can't imagine many smaller market urban AC's being monitored. About 20 years ago, I heard of a few independent promoters going to group PD's and format directors to pitch their music, and, if any of those people got paid, some of that money might show up on some of the smaller stations' books. Those promoters, though, wouldn't even set foot in those small markets unless, maybe, they were traveling between two larger markets and needed to find a place to stop and use the bathroom. Small market stations have always been followers, not setters, of the national trends.
This entirely depends on the station. Many are listener-driven, which means those who are listening to the station are actively programming the station. This can have positive or negative results.
While I did work at a small market station that played requests, that station was the exception, not the rule. Despite actually playing requests, it got very few. My experience has been that listeners are almost never programming the station. Even working in Top-40/CHR, listener requests were, at absolute most, tabulated every week to determine which songs were still popular and should still be powers in the rotation. That, though, was rarely a significant factor in selecting the music. If the trades were showing certain songs were burning out in larger markets, we could be almost certain those songs would burn a week or two later on our station depending on when we added them relative to the stations we were monitoring.
