It's both. The chart editors look carefully at the playlists, and the labels quiz the music directors. If either sense the MD is just going through the motions, the station gets dropped. The labels send reps to the local markets. You'll have label reps in Buffalo when Eric Church comes to town next week. They will meet with the stations, observe the way the station presents their artists, and note the relationship the station has with the audience. There's a lot of money involved in this. It's not playtime. The music charts could be the only thing keeping local radio alive.
-
Get involved.
We want your input!
Apply for Membership and join the conversations about everything related to broadcasting.
After we receive your registration, a moderator will review it. After your registration is approved, you will be permitted to post.
If you use a disposable or false email address, your registration will be rejected.
After your membership is approved, please take a minute to tell us a little bit about yourself.
https://www.radiodiscussions.com/forums/introduce-yourself.1088/
Thanks in advance and have fun!
RadioDiscussions Administrators
More changes at TSM Buffalo?
- Thread starter DN14224
- Start date
It's both. The chart editors look carefully at the playlists, and the labels quiz the music directors. If either sense the MD is just going through the motions, the station gets dropped. The labels send reps to the local markets. You'll have label reps in Buffalo when Eric Church comes to town next week. They will meet with the stations, observe the way the station presents their artists, and note the relationship the station has with the audience. There's a lot of money involved in this. It's not playtime. The music charts could be the only thing keeping local radio alive.
This discussion has devolved into the T Boldt vs. The Big A...can't you two just do something else besides type these absurd point/counterpoint tomes? Get a life, go outside, volunteer, or do something for society. It is very tiring...isn't there a monitor on here that can limit you to one post a month?
Sir Roxalot: Same to you, back out of this, please!
You simply don't know what you're talking about. Yes, that's true at some stations. It's certainly not true at all stations.
You act as if all that music appeals to a specific group of people who all like it equally. It's not that way. Just as alt rock is actually failing in radio because there are opposing taste subsets in alt, the AAA and Americana audience is fragmented, but into far more pieces. There is no consensus that could make a radio format, so for them Spotify is a perfect fit.
Industry awards make good TV specials... although not even that today. But with few exceptions, the tastes of industry insiders don't match at all those of the public in Wichita or Winston-Salem or anywhere outside of NYC and Hollywood.
No, they are not. You are very much wrong. The important charts like BDS look at each station and if the songs mirror those of other co-owned stations, they drop the station.
Each corporate station makes local decisions, but in most cases a huge percentage of songs will be the same and in similar rotations. But some add sooner due to the market they are in, others add later to be safe. Some don't add certain types of songs within the format, such as rock-based songs in a more rhythmic CHR type market and station.
The larger markets do online current tests and Internet Music Tests (IMTs) to verify the songs. Different markets give different results.
The corporate PD may oversee weekly music meetings, but each station has to reflect certain local conditions, too. When you try to dictate all adds from corporate, you get Lou Dickey's Cumulus and a bankruptcy.
Roxalot and BigA are correct, and in this case tbolt just does not know how most corporate radio stations program their music.
That's to be expected. The best mass marketer of the last 90 years, Proctor & Gamble, fails in nearly 50% of its new products. They research with tests, test markets and surveys. Yet nearly half of all new products are gone in a year or two. But P&G is vastly more successful than its competitors, who fail even more.
Why do they fail? There are unpredictable factors in play. A competitive product makes a "new and improved" rebranding. Current product users don't see a real need. Consumer tastes change. The economy changes and people stick with tried and true products. And so on.
People get masters degrees in marketing over this stuff. And they still fail some of the time. WalMart failed in its first online purchasing initiative, so even the big guys make mistakes.
Yet over half of new radio formats succeed. In marketing, that is a stellar behavior.
Yeah, I took my degree in marketing and sociology. I make mistakes, too.
If you are talking about slight differences in the timing of adds, then fine. A station in St.Louis may add a song two weeks after one in New York. Big deal. 99 percent of the playlists will be the same on similar formats. CHR in Boston will be the same in LA. Every format is mostly cookie cutter nationally just like Walmart. Cumulus didn't go bankrupt because of playlists...
That true of some companies and some stations, not all companies and all stations. No matter how often you repeat it, it's still wrong.
The advent of the Internet... and, to some extent, the advent about 40 years ago of MTV... made national playlists very, very similar.
In fact, if you go back to the 70's with Gavin, FMQB, The Hamilton Report and then R&R that all showed all major station playlists, we started to get considerable uniformity across the country in mainstream hits in all genres. Even in the prior decade, many stations used Gavin to review their adds and to find "hot" songs.
The differences during all these decades were mostly things like Hispanic and Black influence that made some markets more rhythmic and other more rock leaning in Top 40. But national consensus in playlists within a format has been a fairly usual thing going back over 50 years.
It's funny about that... in every major city in Brazil or Mexico or France or Italy or Australia stations in a particular format play pretty much the same songs.
And we remember what happened with Cumulus with Dickey and his one-size-fits-all formats: they went into bankruptcy.
They're not the only large group that went bankrupt. Maybe grossly overpaying to buy stations had something to do with it...
No, overpaying for an LBO by an investment group was the problem with iHeart, and it had nothing to do with operations.
That's not because of radio companies. That's because of record labels. They control the releases of new music.
BTW if you go back 50 years, you'll see pretty much the same thing.
And yet another change in the wind?
Mornings. So did Joe go?
Word from a reliable source indicates Joe Chille has given notice and this Friday will be his last day doing morning drive on 96-1 the Breeze, and Townsquare Media has an ad for a morning person on Linkd-In. It's certainly curious when an Operations Manager/PD (Chris Crowley) gives notice and leaves, followed shortly thereafter by a legacy morning man deciding to depart. Then again it's radio and media in 2021. Stranger things have happened.
When Joe was shown the door a few years ago he ended up going to work as a manager for Tim Hortons. Maybe they gave him an offer he couldn’t refuse to come back. Like you said, it’s radio and media in 2021…
- Status