doowopvault said:
Eduardo....you said radio stations "get feedback from their listeners"....maybe in the land of OZ, but not here.
That is a totally disingenuous statement. Were you correct, companies like Edison Reasearch, Coleman Insights, Dialsmith, Troy Research, Harker Research, and a dozen or so more would not exist. All of these derive a significant part, if not all, their income from radio station research.
Significant music stations in medium to large markets do music research by consulting with their listeners on what songs to play and what songs not to play. Tens of millions of dollars are spent each year just on Auditorium Music Tests. Millions more are spent on tools like MediaMonitors' "MScore" tracking, another form of measuring acceptance and rejection of songs.
A Columbia University study proved that the big Corporate Labels along with the Corporate owned stations mold the taste of the zombie public who just follows along.
Citation please. When? Methodology? Sample size? Proportionality and projectability?
Considering that the major labels are losing money or minimally profitable, and seeking to squeeze radio for royalties, your conclusion or that of this "study"
A group of 14,000 people were given access to a web site where they could download and rate it's "quality".
The quality of what? The website?
How were the 14,000 recruited? Was it a true random probability sample, projectable into the universe? Otherwise, it is without value. Totally.
The study shows, and the sociology professors at Columbia concluded, that people make their musical choices based on popularity and not quality. It turns out that when you let people know what other people think...or tell them the lie that this is what people think, just to draw attention to an artist which increases record sales, the popular things become more popular...said Columbia sociology professor Duncan Watts.
The problem with that is that the aspect of "quality" is unmeasurable insofar as music is concerned. While "hits" get attention because they are hits, radio does not continue to play songs if there is no ongoing acceptance of each song.
But people tend to go with what is popular because, in general, what is popular is what other people with similar tastes will like.
However, if other people don't like something, they don't consume it.
Example: Last week, Big Bang Theory was the most viewed show in 18-49 in the US. It got about 6.1 million viewers... yet the US population in 18-49 is over 150,000,000. So about one person in 25 watched it... showing that people generally decide if they like something or not on their own and don't just, in this case, watch because the show is popular.
So as I have been saying for years on this board, and the study proves it's true, the crap that is played today isn't popular because it is quality, because people want to hear it, it is force fed, they are molding the taste of the public.
The charts of the last hundred or so year are littered with examples of songs that shot up initially, and then went into a nosedive into oblivion; those were wildly anticipated songs (whether sheet music, records, tapes, CDs or MP3s) that turned out to not be as good as the public hoped. They were initially sucked up, but discovered to be defective and rejected. The public knows what it wants, and can't be duped.
Since most stations aiming at people over 25 play all or a majority of songs that are not current hits, and stations check with listeners regularly as to which ones they want to continue hearing, listeners are selecting songs they like. Individually.
"Quality" is not a term I would ever use in selecting songs for my own collection or in programming. That is because the term is one of the most subjective terms in the language. Music has to be looked at with a view to "appeal" with no judgmental metric applied.
