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Songs You Remember And Like But Never Get Played

Avid Listener said:
In that respect they're right. Radio is not where one goes to hear what modern music really sounds like.
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The music industry makes music. Radio turns music into HIT music. Radio is where you go to hear the hits. I'm very proud of that. That's why I got into radio. Not to be too cool for the room. Not to play my personal favorites for a couple of friends. Not to impress people with my musical knowledge. But if you want to hear the hits, we have them organized in a way that's easy for the listeners to enjoy available on a device you can use anywhere. That's what makes us different from Pandora or Spotify. Not the music itself. You want to program your own station, you can do that at Pandora.

And look...some people HATE hits. They purposely avoid them. The minute an artist becomes popular, they stop liking that artist. They say, "I liked Bruce Springsteen BEFORE he was popular" and they take a lot of pride in that. That's not what we do.

The reason I brought country music into this discussion was to point out that some people in their 50s are listening to today's country radio. They will tell me they never liked George Jones or Johnny Cash, but they like Jason Aldean and Eric Church. I can't begin to tell you how many grandmothers tell me they love Taylor Swift, Scotty McCreery, and Carrie Underwood. Do those artists sound like country did in the 70s? I don't think so. The people who love Cash and Haggard tend to HATE those artists. But just as some people in their 20s and 30s like classic rock, you also have retired people who like today's country and alternative rock.
 
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oldies76 said:
I never doubted your "business" knowledge. You guys will never realize, what it is to listen to classic hits from a LISTENERS standpoint. And 400 songs does not and will never cut it, repeated weekly.

And if you bother reading past threads either in this topic or others, I said that listeners will get tired of the same ole, after LONG term exposure to the presentation. Listeners have and will always figure this out. So it's in the best interest for a station to change their tune every so often, which includes the playing of some lost-hits every hour, to provide that extra variety and oh-wow, many listeners are looking for. The average listener does not have to hear "Brown Eyed Girl" or any song for the 25th time in a 3 month span. For many, it's a tune out.

And for the 7th time now, you've told me to fire up my iPod instead.
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Where did 400 songs come from? Who said that was adequate, or did you just come up with that number? Seems a little low, but the playlist definitely shouldn't be in the thousands as you seem to suggest.

And yes, I will say fire up whatever personal music player you like as you have repeatedly stated radio doesn't satisfy you, so why keep beating a dead horse. McDonalds doesn't satisfy some people either, but they still are the biggest despite those people not being customers.
 
TheBigA said:
You really haven't worked in radio. You were a board op who never worked at a station that got ratings. You don't know what it's like to actually have success in radio. To see your ideas actually succeed. I don't care what your reasons were for quitting, but don't say your worked in radio, and use that as a basis for anything. Until you can show me a list of stations you programmed, and how your programming ideas made your station #1, it don't mean crap.
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You still can't b.s. me. Nice try, troll.
 
ok walters said:
Where did 400 songs come from? Who said that was adequate, or did you just come up with that number? Seems a little low, but the playlist definitely shouldn't be in the thousands as you seem to suggest.
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There is a myth that KRTH, which is a hybrid classic hits format, plays only 400 songs. In real fact, the library is over 900 songs, although quite a few play in slower rotations; about 450 titles are exposed each 7 day period.

And for some reason, the fiddlers at this barn dance are playing that tune as if all classic hits stations are playing more limited libraries.

And yes, I will say fire up whatever personal music player you like as you have repeatedly stated radio doesn't satisfy you, so why keep beating a dead horse. McDonalds doesn't satisfy some people either, but they still are the biggest despite those people not being customers.
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I think that what we have here is a failure to recognize that classic hits is not a mass appeal format. Even the biggest and best have a cume share of 20 or less, so 4 out of 5 people don't listen. The ones with the big lists tend to have cume shares of even less (as the example of the station in Jackson proves: low ratings and only a 9 cume share). The issue is not the programming... it's that most folks don't like the format and the deeper the library, the fewer the people who use the format.
 
"Radio turns music into HIT music"

Oops. BigA just admitted you have to play something for people to like it. So if you refuse to play it, people won't like it.

Explain those tests that show that people will LIKE a song more or download it more if they perceive it to be popular. So really radio is in a catch 22. They claim they only play what people like, but people like what they hear played.

I've looked for a link - not finding it, but there was a study where people were given the chance to download music and shown faked "charts" that ranked songs as popular - the people tended to download more of what they were TOLD was popular. Proving that radio does in fact, selectively program music.
 
When I go see a rock act from the 60's, 70's or 80's the audience is just full of gray hairs, like me. When I see pictures of Country Thunder or other big time country concerts there are virtually no older people in the crowd, just younger women dressed in their daisy dukes and waving liquor bottles like drunk college kids.
 
DavidEduardo said:





Freed did not program a station; he did a late night show on an also-ran station in Cleveland which ran network programming in the daytime and put Freed on the air, bought and paid for by a record store (Record Rondevous) that had its own self interest in mind (and loads of record company influences).
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Not unlike today's infomercials that run on AM radio on weekends. Only today we don't get the music.
 
Tibbs2 said:
I would love to see a playlist of what songs you would play on Perfect 109, if oldies, ok and firepoint did the programming. Maybe 30 songs. Just remember, you have a playlist of like 20,000, so you can't just put the best and best sounding songs all in these two hours, because you would have a crappy couple of hours elsewhere. Create it and let's see who would listen. Just know I have the Eagles, the Beatles, any other band named after an animal or insect, city, state, egotisical person who named their group after themselves or anyone wearing make up, so leave all that off for me. :)
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Tibbs, did you venture into the Pensacola/Mobile area while you were there? We were there two years ago, and want to go back in a couple of months. We may retire there, but still keep our home here in the good ole midstate.

I did some research and found out that there is a new classic hits station that wasn't there when we were there two years ago. WJTQ. Unfortunately, it is a come-in-last station and is already off to a bad start!

http://www.examiner.com/article/wcoa-fm-becomes-wjtq-fm-switches-to-new-programming-format

From that article, (there was a brief break between 8:00 a.m. and 8:35 a.m. that lasted until sometime before 8:45 a.m., during which there was no programming at all). Damn, they can't even get STUNTING right, with possibly up to 45 minutes of DEAD AIR!

Oh, and come-in-last is going to stick them with Bob & Tom in the morning, so no listening then, either!
 
DavidEduardo said:

I think that what we have here is a failure to recognize that classic hits is not a mass appeal format. Even the biggest and best have a cume share of 20 or less, so 4 out of 5 people don't listen. The ones with the big lists tend to have cume shares of even less (as the example of the station in Jackson proves: low ratings and only a 9 cume share). The issue is not the programming... it's that most folks don't like the format and the deeper the library, the fewer the people who use the format.
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Jackson (TN) is still a relatively small town, and that station does not have a lot of direct competition in that format. Yeah, move it an hour or so west (to Memphis) and they would probably have to tighten up the playlist a bit if they were really going to compete head-to-head with 'KQK. Most info that I have still lists Kool 103 as "oldies," so despite that word supposedly being poison nowadays, they still use it. And again, we were in their listening area on Sunday. Don't know what they are like during the week. If they were to go head-to-head against 'KQK, they would probably have to change formats, because there probably isn't enough audience for two stations in the same municipality having that same format. At the very least, one of them would have to change, or at least rebrand.
 
landtuna said:
Country Thunder or other big time country concerts there are virtually no older people in the crowd, just younger women dressed in their daisy dukes and waving liquor bottles like drunk college kids.
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Are we talking about country radio or attending big festivals? I was talking about the radio.
 
Unregistered said:
"Radio turns music into HIT music"

Oops. BigA just admitted you have to play something for people to like it. So if you refuse to play it, people won't like it.

Explain those tests that show that people will LIKE a song more or download it more if they perceive it to be popular. So really radio is in a catch 22. They claim they only play what people like, but people like what they hear played.

I've looked for a link - not finding it, but there was a study where people were given the chance to download music and shown faked "charts" that ranked songs as popular - the people tended to download more of what they were TOLD was popular. Proving that radio does in fact, selectively program music.
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Yep, that's the sad and sorry truth of it. The suits claim that only "play what the people want", but what the people want is the stuff the suits spoon-feed them.
 
Avid Listener said:
Yep, that's the sad and sorry truth of it. The suits claim that only "play what the people want", but what the people want is the stuff the suits spoon-feed them.
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You are oversimplifying and painting with way to broad a brush.

Gold based stations, about which this particular section of the board is concerned, don't play new music. So you and the nonbelievers have brought up a moot point.

Stations that do play currents have found via research and trial and error that each format's listeners can assimilate only a few new titles a week. It might be 4 or 5 in CHR in a hot music week, but it might be 3 or 4 a month at an AC station. We've seen that adding too many titles results in none becoming hits in our market, while too few does not sustain the format as nothing flows from current to recurrent to gold.

CHR, with now 62 years of history behind it, shows us that the desire for discovery is vastly exceeded by the desire to hear familiar favorites. But CHR, by nature, burns through songs and needs new fuel. So we are constantly trying to balance established strong hits and recurrents with the best new songs... and we look everywhere for evidence of new material "breaking" even if we were not among the first to add them.

Nobody is "spoon feeding". We are programming according what listener behaviour and feedback tells us will maintain or increase our ratings.
 
TheBigA said:
Are we talking about country radio or attending big festivals? I was talking about the radio.
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Not to mention that country concerts I have attended have very little "Dukes of Hazard" types and very few, if any, drunks. For the more than 25 years that I have been involved with country or followed the music, I've found the concert crowd to be perhaps the best behaved of anyone except, perhaps, symphony orchestra attendees.
 
firepoint525 said:
Jackson (TN) is still a relatively small town, and that station does not have a lot of direct competition in that format. Yeah, move it an hour or so west (to Memphis) and they would probably have to tighten up the playlist a bit if they were really going to compete head-to-head with 'KQK.
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And since they have little competition, it is all the more surprising that they have such a low cume share. Were they well programmed, it would be expected for them to reach a larger portion of the total population, not less, because there are fewer local choices.

Most info that I have still lists Kool 103 as "oldies,"
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The station's self-identification in its Nielsen SIP is "classic hits".

so despite that word supposedly being poison nowadays, they still use it.
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They may use it on the air, but not for sales. "Oldies" is not negative to listeners; it is toxic when seen by media buyers and planners who dismiss such a station as being "out of demo" just based on the format.

There are plenty of industry format names that are not used on the air. But for sales, the terms are very clear ways of identifying who you are and who you target.
 
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