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What happens to songs not in a station's active playlist?
- Thread starter tall_guy1
- Start date
K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
If they are resting with the intent to be brought back later, they stay on the station hard drive and moved to a "holding category" in the scheduling software.
If research shows that the audience's interest has waned, they go away.
Did you really expect a different answer? It is so rare for a song dropped years ago to get renewed interest that it makes more sense to just upload a new copy when that happens.
If research shows that the audience's interest has waned, they go away.
Did you really expect a different answer? It is so rare for a song dropped years ago to get renewed interest that it makes more sense to just upload a new copy when that happens.
No, but is there an archive they go in?
There are isolated areas in the Arizona desert where old songs are stockpiled. You can see them in satellite images, not far from where decommissioned aircraft are lined up.
Old songs are also dumped into the ocean, where they become artificial reefs for all types of marine life.
Some songs, if they have the right material, can have their notes and lyrics shredded, melted, and recycled into new songs.
………………Okay………………couldn’t resist.🤪🤣
D
Deleted member 108832
Guest
What K.M. is telling you is no, and I'll add other than the digital fingerprint that every listener, every broadcaster, and every soul leaves behind. That's way above what we discuss around here, so maybe start with calling your local ombudsman and working your way up the government chain to see about access to that particular database.
Now, if it was 30 years ago, we could tell you all about "archives". Imagine hundreds and hundreds of records surrounding you, pretty much in each direction you look up. You may have heard these referred to as "stacks of wax".
K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
Not to mention "mounds of sound".
Some of the larger broadcasters have a centralized "audio storage" system where things ranging from audio sound bytes to deep collections of music are stored.
Since those companies have their stations all "connected" to that system, if a morning show wants to play the top song on the date that the Wright Brothers flew at Kitty Hawk, they might even find that.
Otherwise, such songs may be stored and pulled up if a famous artist dies... for example. A show might not even play the whole thing, but the deep library may just have it stored for such occasions.
But, @tall_guy1, most stations will keep no longer used songs on their system for "a while" just in case they come back. Otherwise, it gets deleted. And if a format changes, some stations, to avoid accidental play from the old format, may just delete them all.
Since those companies have their stations all "connected" to that system, if a morning show wants to play the top song on the date that the Wright Brothers flew at Kitty Hawk, they might even find that.
Otherwise, such songs may be stored and pulled up if a famous artist dies... for example. A show might not even play the whole thing, but the deep library may just have it stored for such occasions.
But, @tall_guy1, most stations will keep no longer used songs on their system for "a while" just in case they come back. Otherwise, it gets deleted. And if a format changes, some stations, to avoid accidental play from the old format, may just delete them all.
Whats the holding category?
How many songs are stored? I remember my CHR has a throwback song a day in the afternoon. Once the song played with the original "sweeper" from like 2007.
K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
You have a very strange concept of how radio works, @tall_guy1. You also ask for a lot of detail which stations would consider proprietary information.
How many songs? Depends on the station. As has already been said, if a station flips format that number as applied to the predecessor format could be zero. A company like iHeart might have a copy of every song any of their stations ever played ... but don't expect them to tell you how many. Proprietary.
What your station does for throwbacks isn't going to be typical for every station, even with the same format in different markets. They'll save whatever they need to, based on storage space. It's even possible that your station has a library of all the promo CDs they got back then, and they're playing your flashback from one of those.
And the "holding category" is going to be whatever the PD decides to name it. Do you honestly believe there is some kind of standard that all stations, everywhere, follow in lockstep?
Worst of all, you ask questions that you should already know the answer to -- or can at least make an educated guess -- from your other question threads.
I'm done trying to teach Radio 101. It's just not sinking in with the student.
How many songs? Depends on the station. As has already been said, if a station flips format that number as applied to the predecessor format could be zero. A company like iHeart might have a copy of every song any of their stations ever played ... but don't expect them to tell you how many. Proprietary.
What your station does for throwbacks isn't going to be typical for every station, even with the same format in different markets. They'll save whatever they need to, based on storage space. It's even possible that your station has a library of all the promo CDs they got back then, and they're playing your flashback from one of those.
And the "holding category" is going to be whatever the PD decides to name it. Do you honestly believe there is some kind of standard that all stations, everywhere, follow in lockstep?
Worst of all, you ask questions that you should already know the answer to -- or can at least make an educated guess -- from your other question threads.
I'm done trying to teach Radio 101. It's just not sinking in with the student.
The 45rpm copies are used as frisbees.
Here's a related question:
The libraries maintained by the mega-owners like iHeart, Audacy, Entravision, and SBS ... where do they source their copies from?
I've often wondered if the labels run web portals now for broadcasters, streaming companies, and other mass corporate users permitting individual and mass downloads of WAV (PCM) quality copies of everything in their catalogs.
The libraries maintained by the mega-owners like iHeart, Audacy, Entravision, and SBS ... where do they source their copies from?
I've often wondered if the labels run web portals now for broadcasters, streaming companies, and other mass corporate users permitting individual and mass downloads of WAV (PCM) quality copies of everything in their catalogs.
If you want to see how a completely modern automation and scheduling system works, we have lots of how-to videos and even downloadable demo software at www.myriad.radio.
Even if stored as .wav files, a typical cluster's entire library of audio is usually measured in a few thousand items - a few hundred songs in regular rotation, maybe a thousand or so that don't get regular play, and spots and liners and sweepers and other pieces of audio that might also number in the hundreds or thousands.
You're talking about usually no more than a few hundred GB at the most, though there are exceptions. KEXP in Seattle uses Myriad to keep tabs on 1.5 million audio assets. I don't even know how much storage that entails but it has to be well into the terabytes. For most stations, though, the amount of data needed to keep active and semi-active audio available isn't a huge burden.
As with *any* data that's critical to a station's operations, it's up to the IT team to establish and enforce policies for backup and retention. In addition to offering storage on-site in a station's own servers, at Myriad we also have a cloud option that will constantly sync the on-premise audio library (and all the data that goes with it) into the cloud for emergency backup and playout.
But as others have suggested, it's really not like the days when there was a physical library of records or carts or CDs that had to be maintained and purged. It's all just data storage and data storage these days is pretty cheap. At least with Myriad (and it's the same for other major systems), removing a cut from active rotation is as simple as editing the categories for that file so that our scheduler won't schedule that cut.
If you need it again later and your IT people don't have a policy of purging inactive cuts, you search for it, change the category and there it is again.
Do the thousand or so songs that don't get regular play live anywhere particular on the computer that is different than something likely to get played? What about sound-do some songs started auditorally sound "softer" when not updated?
K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
Once again (and I don't know why I am having to repeat myself):
IT DEPENDS ON THE INDIVIDUAL STATION.
In general, as Scott explained, those songs (if they are being kept) don't get physically moved. They are just moved to a holding category in the scheduling software.
P. S.: WTF is "auditorally"?
IT DEPENDS ON THE INDIVIDUAL STATION.
In general, as Scott explained, those songs (if they are being kept) don't get physically moved. They are just moved to a holding category in the scheduling software.
P. S.: WTF is "auditorally"?
WMEX Boston had a jock named Mel "Miles of Music" Miller back in the day, but all but one of those miles were in Boston Harbor and the open Atlantic. The songs were never heard, or heard from, again.
A thousand years ago when we were among the early adopters of DigitalJukebox, the playlist was set up with songs that were labeled corresponding to their position on the clock. For example, a Power 10 could be labeled 'A', recurrent was a 'D, and so on. This is just an example. When the clock was set up, each song position was set as say, TOH A, then a B, then a C, stop set, then A, and so on. If we took a song out of rotation, we removed the label, and the computer couldn't play an unlabeled song. If there was request for a song, or doing an all-90s hour was happening, the talent could see the unlabeled songs and could insert them into the clock manually, as long as they had the access to it. I didn't trust my talent after being burned by allowing them access to the programming. The song was always there, it just wasn't available to the music selector program to use. No archive folder.
If a station still uses a hard drive of sorts for music storage, a 1TB drive can hold over 35,000 songs. No need to move them.
Maybe it's different today, but it makes no sense to move songs one-by-one to an archive folder.
K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
It's a little different, but not by much. The basic concept of what you did back in the day with DigitalJukebox still is the basis behind Selector, MusicMaster, and the rest of today's scheduling programs. We still have categories, the songs are moved between them as needed, and the clock simply consists of the categories as elements.
I don't blame you for not letting the jocks have access. That was what made the old card file system ultimately fail. (I could tell you stories.)
As I said, the OP has a strange preconception of how radio stations work, even after things have been explained.
I don't blame you for not letting the jocks have access. That was what made the old card file system ultimately fail. (I could tell you stories.)
As I said, the OP has a strange preconception of how radio stations work, even after things have been explained.
So all the stiffs that got a week or two of light/overnight airplay before being dropped still exist, but they're not going to be played again, even by request? One of the country stations up here added a song by Dierks Bentley called "Something Real" in 2023. His previous single, "Gold," was a Billboard Airplay No. 1, so it seemed a safe pick. Except the song bombed. It was a hit nowhere, spent exactly one week in the airplay top 50 -- at No. 50. The station played it for a week, all dayparts, then discarded it. Similar story with Beyonce's "Texas Hold 'Em," last year, except that one lasted two weeks and got a decent push the first week. Off to Never Play This Again-land after those 14 days were up, though.
I've been involved with a station that believed that if a song ever made the top 40, even for one week at #40, that it was a hit and therefore belongs in the playlist. Listening, the format sounds like "flipsides and stiffs." Or maybe "big songs by the wrong artist."