Nobody wants to be considered the lowest common denominator, but the cold hard truth is that's what the average listener to a mainstream musical format represents. Successful stations play songs that turn the fewest listeners AWAY from the station, which, amazingly, is also the way to maximize the station's total listenership.
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- Thread starter pumpin73
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The Telecommunications Act resolved in part the problems the FCC created with Docket 80-90 with severely overpopulated the dial in most larger markets and ruined radio in nearly every smaller one by adding double and even triple the number of stations.
And consolidation has increased the number of formats in most markets. Cleveland in 1960: 3 formats on 8 stations. Today, at least 15 distinguishable major formats and several niche ones.
When I built my first cluster in the mid to later 60's, I was able to use the ratings power of my three biggest AMs to support the development of the market's first FM station because I already had the major overhead covered. I ended up with 5 FMs and 4 AMs and was able to even offer all-classical because sharing of admin costs made even that format profitable.
Playlists are not "narrow". They are, not more and not less, the number of songs the audience for that format can agree on. In some formats, that is less than 100 songs and in others it is over 500.
I'll remind you that the stations in the 50's and earlier 60's that got shares in the 20 to 40 percent range were playing less than 40 total songs.
In fact, when I managed a radio research company, we did a music test over 4 times as large as normal. Then we extracted random 100 person sets from the sample (keeping the same recruit specs on men, women, younger, older) many, many times. The results on song scores were nearly identical on every subset.
We then did random balanced subsets of 80 repeated times. They were statistically identical to the 100 person sets and to the 400 person test.
So, if a station researches a well recruited sample of 80 persons to 100 persons in most formats and markets, they will do just as well as with much larger samples or, even, with every listener.
In one large market (over 20,000,000) we did a music test with 100 people. We also did the test on the air using a form for scoring published in the largest newspaper (1.2 million circulation) and handouts at convenience stores. We tabulated a random batch of the 80,000 "tests" we got back from the on-air test and the results were identical to those of the 100 person AMT that we did.
As you say, this is science and has predictable accuracy.
That is interesting it was that few back then! Playlists since expanded, but contracted more and more in recent years. It seems in general playlists are very narrow and tailored (moreso than decades prior) to the success of some and not of others
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But they don't and you bring up stations that don't follow the formula. There are reasons why they don't. The easiest way to find alternatives to the formula is look for stations that have different revenue streams. So non-commercial stations won't use the commercial radio formula because their money comes from listeners, not advertisers.
But in general when you talk about format radio, they will likely follow a formula because the first four letters of those two words are "form." Formats follow formulas. By definition.
It always depends on the format. The main thing is that "narrow" to you means one thing, and to me it means another. To me, narrow is a bunch of songs that sound alike. That's not good. I'm more interested in seeing playlists with diversity, in terms of tempo, topic, male/female, instrumentation, and other factors like that. The reason the country format has been successful over the last few years is because of song diversity, not because of playlist size.
It was brought up though in a thread of mine about station individuality how investment firms (I know Wilks was one) own a lot of radio companies and they depend on stock prices not to go down so they play as safe as they can. That makes sense from a business perspective, but something that might possibly hinder some prospects and make it more "uniform" as a whole.
Stock price and radio ratings are not related. Audacy has some of the most-listened-to stations in the country, and they're a penny stock. They play it safe because most people have very simple taste in music.
That is just not true.
Station owners want each station to make money. That is the purpose of businesses.
So they pick and research formats to get the greatest reach. Period.
Oh, while investment firms may put money into station groups, station operators are broadcast companies.
I don’t see an expansion and contraction issue with radio. I see it with record companies. So if there are fewer good and playable currents in a format, stations play less currents and mor gold. Stations simply react to listener likes and available music.
My point is not about high rated stations, but low rated stations and how they can be utilized though.
That's up to the owners. If that's what they want to do, there are no laws or rules forcing them to play certain songs.
It's not radio's responsibility to help the band geek to fit in with the fans or players. Radio's role is to appeal to the largest number possible within the demographic range it's targeting. If that's football players and fans 18-34, then that's the audience a hypothetical station would play-to. Rather than arguing, or being upset because their unique/esoteric tastes aren't being met, band geeks should consider streaming, or creating personal playlists on their smartphone.
That's great. If you were Bill Gates wealthy, and wanted to buy a station and play an eclectic format of EDM and classic country, you could. Obviously the station wouldn't make any money, nor would there be enough advertisers to pay even the utility bill, but there's no law against doing something dumb on the radio. There are plenty of failing/failed LPFM's that are examples therein.
But with more stations owned by a few national companies the national owners are more beholden to the stockholders and quarterly stock results. When you had many more smaller, local or regional companies owning stations if they were privately owned and publicly traded in the stock market there was less emphasis on short term (quarterly) results and it was easier to experiment or take a chance without stockholders breathing down your neck. I also think with more huge national companies owning so many radio stations formats have become more national and homogenized and there are less likely to be smaller local or regional hit records
Actually there are FEWER stations owned by national companies. They're selling to religious companies. That's what Audacy & Cumulus have done. So that's becoming less of an issue. I used to buy stock in radio companies. I stopped in 2008. I'm not the only one. There's no money in buying stock in radio anymore, and most people know that. Take a look at Audacy. Nobody wants to buy their stock. That's why I suggest they go private and remove the embarrassment of the penny stock price from their name.
Conversely what's starting to happen is retired radio people are buying small stations and running them like hobbies. The morning DJ at KUZZ in Bakersfield just retired, and he is now running three small stations in a small town somewhere.
It seems like smaller companies (off the stock exchange) make more "big swings" than ones with a lot of stockholders like Audacy or Cumulus. For example, Steel City Media has KCKC which is a station which is unlike any other AC and even tinkered with its legacy stations when it came to town in 2014 (KMXV bordered on Rhythmic CHR which it had never done before for a small period, and I heard there were big changes to the country ststions which only lasted a bit.)
I'm sure Cliff Dumas and his partners have every intent to run those stations professionally and make money, and you probably won't see any major eclecticism from their playlists, but they're experienced enough to run them well, yet flexible enough as a private, small operator to be hyper-local, and some of that does affect programming and playlists. No doubt, the iHeart style of programming works for a lot of people. But there's no "right way" to program per se, of course there's best practices - but presentation and playlist can be variable by market size, region and even just what one finds creatively satisfying as a smaller owner, within the boundaries of what your audience will tolerate. It's a business. There's also an art to it. And there's as many different degrees of that as there are owners.
Personally, I appreciate the people trying to do it and putting their unique spin on it. Sometimes it works, other times not. But I appreciate that some radio people (and non radio people) are taking an interest in some of these smaller operations. I prefer Saga's stations to most of iHeart and Audacy. They don't run exclusively niche formats. But they do, where it makes sense, run some good Triple A outlets, and have shown a willingness to try other things. The lack of debt and not being over extended. Same with Bonneville, again, not a "niche" company but a quality operation, on air and behind the scenes.
I wouldn't necessarily assume all future sales to non-comm have to be religious operators. Only certain ones, like EMF, have national appeal and that level of ambition. And they're going to reach saturation. So, there is always the possibility that a good major market facility (take for example a recent discussion on these boards of KRTH) could go to, say KCRW to do a 24/7 music format. Or KCSN could expand and divest the two 88.5 frequencies. Point being, I think some non-comm secular operators may well pick up some of these FMs.
Personally, I appreciate the people trying to do it and putting their unique spin on it. Sometimes it works, other times not. But I appreciate that some radio people (and non radio people) are taking an interest in some of these smaller operations. I prefer Saga's stations to most of iHeart and Audacy. They don't run exclusively niche formats. But they do, where it makes sense, run some good Triple A outlets, and have shown a willingness to try other things. The lack of debt and not being over extended. Same with Bonneville, again, not a "niche" company but a quality operation, on air and behind the scenes.
I wouldn't necessarily assume all future sales to non-comm have to be religious operators. Only certain ones, like EMF, have national appeal and that level of ambition. And they're going to reach saturation. So, there is always the possibility that a good major market facility (take for example a recent discussion on these boards of KRTH) could go to, say KCRW to do a 24/7 music format. Or KCSN could expand and divest the two 88.5 frequencies. Point being, I think some non-comm secular operators may well pick up some of these FMs.
Sounds like wishful thinking to me. Colleges are becoming less supportive of broadcast radio stations. Cal State was looking into outside professional operation at KCSN at one point. I don't know the status there. Non-com stations across the country are forced to cut costs, not because of stockholders, but because of lack of listener support. That's a different problem. Somebody has to pay so these radio stations exist. Right now, listeners for the most part don't want to pay.
But I believe that we are now seeing the end of investor-based or stockholder-based radio. There will be no more Audacy-type or iHeart-type companies that go after investment money and buy hundreds of radio stations. Right now, it appears that model is dead. Where things go next, and who will buy these stations, is yet to be determined. What we're starting to see is ideological based groups investing in radio to promote their ideology. But I'm not seeing any old style investment companies looking at radio as a place for growth.
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