I thought I was the only one. I have a degree in Media Communications but wasn't able to obtain employment after graduation. But after reading some of the things on this board. maybe it was a blessing I didn't. I always thought I wanted to be on the air, make a difference in the industry. But it seems after the Telecommunications Act of 1996 was passed, radio seemed to lose its edge and started to care less and less about their audience. Yes, I know there has always been corporate involved in radio, but when they (stations owners) were allowed to own more, competition was a thing of the past. There was a reason why the laws at first didn't allow station owners to own so many radio and television stations. So that there wouldn't be a monopoly. Now the opposite has happened.
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- Thread starter pumpin73
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It's impossible for anyone, radio, TV, or social media, to predict in the future, what media consumers want. "Missing the mark" as you put it; means something gets tried and falls flat, or at least doesn't gain significant traction. If one doesn't try, one will never find success. But those who are successful, find stacking the deck in their favor through proper research in advance, stand a better chance of success. And what is listening to listeners? Research.
And let me guess; if someone were to 'listen to you' you would say that music radio stations should have a 3,000 song playlist, and only play the variety that you personally expect to hear? If so, that opinion is nothing new around these parts. They call what radio does: Broadcasting, as in, broad to a wide audience. What someone with the everything-and-only-what-I-want, is called streaming.
Yes, it's called research.
I don't know of any radio programmer or GM who feels it ain't broke. If you hadn't noticed, over the past twenty years, there is a lot more competition for your attention. Many on this very board, have aired their frustration that radio has changed into something that no longer includes yakky jocks talking up to vocals, or time checks, or back-timing to the top of the hour newscast, or whatever. Instead, radio has reduced the talk to compete with personal playlists and streaming. So, not sure what radio stations you're listening-to, but believe me, a lot has changed since you were a kid.
Point taken, but remember that radio as an industry has not had an easy time of it in recent years, financially and otherwise. Competition from other broadcasters and in recent years other media sources and outlets is heavy. As @DavidEduardo has explained before in a few threads, advertiser revenue is way down. In order for radio to survive, with the exception of listener funded and supported stations, the best shot at doing that is to do listener polling and research (which is done and has been explained numerous times in other threads), then try and curate your format so it appeals to and attracts the greatest amount of listeners from that core demographic you're aiming to attract. That hopefully equals solid ratings which in turn hopefully allows you to attract advertisers to spend their money with your station.
While research does allow stations and media companies to LISTEN to ALL their audience, they're not going to program in an effort to keep a few outliers with somewhat unique tastes in music or content happy. Again, stations know their key demo. Their goal is to program to the greatest amount of folks within that demo. Their goal is not to be "mass appeal" or to keep ALL their audience "happy". The good news for those with unique tastes and who are considered "outliers" is that there are usually plenty of other sources for them, internet, streaming or otherwise, to get the content they seek.
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That type of response is what I am speaking of. I personally have NEVER said anything was stupid. The only thing I mentioned is about the repetition of music in radio. As long as I (as well as others) are being RESPECTFUL, you cannot tell anyone how to express themselves. This isn't an English course.
But WHO are they researching? Once again, you are twisting what I mean. I NEVER said stations should only "listen to me." But if your research only includes such a small sample of the audience, you aren't going to get fair representation of listenership.
Also, if radio is improving, why are the stop sets SO LONG??? Again, I know radio needs ads to make revenue, but there also needs to be a balance.
You proved my point with this comment. Why would people be faithful to mainstream radio when you have options such as this? Radio needs to realize there is more competition for its audience and they if don't change, it will fall by the wayside. But I guess I don't know what I am speaking of.
I will end the conversation right here. Good day.
I'm not saying it's not broke. Just yesterday I went into a lot of detail about the problems with dated regulations that are leading to quality radio stations being sold to religious broadcasters. I just posted comments about the format limitations of ad-supported media. So there are a lot of problems that need to be addressed.
Actually they have NO obligation to make everyone happy. In point of fact, there's no way they CAN do that. There are some genres of music that are so splintered and individualized that it's impossible to make everyone happy. This is when I bring up the Goldilocks comparison, where the music is either too old or too new. Having said that, radio stations, companies, and the industry in general do all kinds of surveys and studies to determine what people want to hear. We post those studies here so you can read them and understand the difference between personal taste and mass audiences. I urge you to read those studies, because you'll learn more about music and radio.
Sure you are. That is basic statistics. A poll of a small, unbiased sampling will produce results that will, almost invariably, correlate with those of the much larger whole within a few percentage points. You are not challenging radio here. You are challenging an established science.
Because---decades ago---the audience made it clear that shorter stop sets more often registered as more frequent interruptions. They hate seven-minute stop sets, but they hate seven two-minute stop sets an hour even more.
When you do research, it's spread out with batches of media consumers located geographically. There's actually a fairly small percentage that want to, or are qualified to participate. Sometimes research involves what's known as call-out research, where a participant agrees to be called during a period of time to answer questions related to their prior week of listening. Occasionally focus groups will be part of the research, especially if a station or group is exploring entering the market.
Because research has shown, that in order to keep listeners longer, one needs to keep the music sets through quarter hour points. The number of spots in the hour don't change. That's what pays the bills. Instead you cluster spots into a longer break, usually in the last quarter hour, so you can swing across the top of the hour with a longer sweep of music. The idea is to hold a listener through at least one, or more consecutive quarter hour points.
Okay, so if you were the King of Radio, what would you change? Keeping in mind of course, the idea is to sell advertising to keep that paycheck coming.
Good day to you sir! Pip pip, cheerio!
Everyone knows about competition. But when you talk about individualized music taste, it's not something radio can do. You have to understand what radio is and what it isn't. Radio is by definition a mass medium. It's one-to-many. Spotify is one-to-one. Very different approach. There's nothing radio can do that will duplicate the experience of one-to-one on-demand streaming. It can't be done. So the best you can do is reach a group of people in the target audience.
One example is Zach Bryan's song Something In The Orange. This is a highly polarizing song. It's among the highest streaming songs. But it tests horribly. What we see is that a small group of people stream it a lot. But a lot of women absolutely hate the song. If you're a format that targets women, it's an audience killer. But his record label keeps pointing to the high streaming numbers.
Is country radio's audience now so heavily female that what I assume is similar research on male listeners for simpering "boyfriend country" like Dan + Shay's "You" or Kane and Katelyn Brown's "Thank God" doesn't even matter anymore? The negative female call-out on "Something in the Orange" will probably limit it to the airplay top 20, but "Thank God" went to No. 1 and "You" was a solid top 5 hit.
The average male/female radio is 55/45, so it's not that heavy. But if you lose a chunk of the men, the overall share goes down. So there is an effort to provide some of the high male testing songs so they don't all go away. Kane Brown followed Thank God with Bury Me In Georgia, and that is more for the guys. Jelly Roll tests well with men. So does Bailey Zimmerman. One of my alternative friends was telling me that Bailey could have worked well in his format.
The repetition of music is part of the basis of format radio. The charts are based on repetition. The way songs move up the chart is by increasing spins of songs, which means those songs get played more times each day. The charts form the foundation of how the music industry rewards artists. So you need to understand that repetition isn't just a radio thing. It's also a music industry thing, and that's where a lot of the drive comes from to increase music repetition.
Here is one of the research studies that was just released today. If you go to the research company's site, you can see the details of who they researched, the questions they asked, and all of the metrics:
Edison: Know Who Is (And Isn't) Your Audio Medium's Core Audience.
Key to understanding each audio medium's strength is knowing its core audience, as in which age/sex demographic gives the highest, and lowest, portion of their total audio time to a
Keep in mind that research studies aren't like voting. Otherwise they'd have to poll everyone, and that's expensive and time consuming.
I think this is where a lot of younger folks get frustrated. They come out of school or enter the business, think they may know a better / smarter way to program, they believe that if they format to fit their particular tastes in music or their thoughts on programming that surely others will buy into it as well, etc. While certain facets of radio programming do evolve and change over time, as others have pointed out above, there generally are reasons that certain choices or decisions are made or programming is done.
It's also often the case where younger folks may think their ideas and concepts on programming are original and will help improve the industry, but in most cases they're not so "original" and with few exceptions, their ideas have likely already been tried and proven not to work well - Expanded playlists, throwing in an occasional random song as a "curveball" (which, rather than "delight" audiences, may simply cause them to switch off your station), trying to "educate" your audience by occasionally exposing them to new or different music, rather than doing research and giving the majority in your target demographic what they've told you they want to hear, etc. That doesn't mean that all stations' programming is perfect, or that PDs/MDs get it right every time and there are some that do it better than others, but in most cases there is a method and real thought behind what you hear on the air.
The point I (and probably pumpkin) try to get across is for not all stations to try to follow the same "formula." Some stations do okay with "standard" narrow playlists as that is what listeners come to expect from them. However, it seems like others feel like they do it and listeners aren't satisfied with them (alt. for example), so their ratings suffer because one size does not fit all. It would be like if the band geek at high school tried to fit in with the football team.
But would you agree there are more football players and fans of football than band geeks? The higher numbers are what radio is going for. Not fewer.
pumpin73 said after consolidation radio cared less and less about it's listeners. That is a complete lie. The fact these stock traded corporations exist required excessive research to prove radio was reaching the targeted audience, maximizing listening times and such. At no point in time has radio been as extensively researched as it is today. You keep your job delivering the listener and achieving the best case scenario for the sales department to command those agency buys. And the stockholders demand that.
Yes, but it is obvious to some listeners who the band geek is trying to fit in, both to the "football fans" and fellow "band people."
This is feeling oddly specific...
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