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What makes some of the smaller town stations better?
- Thread starter 97chris
- Start date
The secret to small market radio is local information. Many times you are the only source of local news, weather and community activities on a daily basis. There is a certain amount of truth in a statement a manager told me early on: the music is just the filler between the important stuff.
The music variety proponents will say that smaller market stations play lots of songs that the "over-researched safe corporate stations" in bigger markets.
So in many cases, those smaller market stations don't play the same lists as the big market ones.
The real fact is that smaller market stations don't have the budget to really find out what listeners want to hear, so they overcompensate. And since they generally have less over the air competition, they have survived and been successful up to now. But with so many alternative audio sources this limited competition situation will not last.
I'm in a market just outside of the top 100. I got Sirius XM and 4 Echo devices, as between poorly produced local spots and playlists with too many secondary / dreadful songs, I gave up on local radio years ago.
I grew up from age 9-18 in a small town (Bishop, California), population 3,500. There was one radio station in the market that tried to be all things to all people. Every time a new option came along (Los Angeles FMs on translators or cable, 8-tracks, cassettes, CDs, satellite radio), the town became a case study in early adopters. And the "captive audience" grew smaller and smaller.
Surely you must have SOME songs that test poorly and would never be played on any station you've ever had a hand in running that qualify as personal "guilty pleasures" -- songs that bit the spot for you, and plenty of others, but are such automatic station-switchers to a significant percentage of all potential listeners that they can;t be played, don't you? For example, I'm fine with my local classic hits station, as well as the Scott Shannon True Oldies affiliate I listen to on trips north, but if I ever heard "Kung Fu Fighting" or "Winchester Cathedral" on either, I'd be grinning from ear to ear. The negatives of both songs, even though they were big hits in their day, are obvious, and it's understandable that a good chunk of oldies/classic hits listeners today want no part of them, but dammit I like them. So come clean, have you ever had a personal guilty-pleasure experience while listening to a station from a smaller market that doesn't do the research major-market stations do?
The music industry seems to think the smaller markets are where they can break new songs. So when you study the charts, and you compare the monitored chart to what they call the "indicator" markets, you may see some new songs or artists getting more airplay in those smaller un-monitored indicator markets. It really helps if you're getting a 20 share in your small market, and there aren't many of those any more. And we're mainly talking about CHR & country. since labels don't work all genres any more
Obviously, there is an element of personal preference in selecting new songs... which is why we have music committees in some stations or look at BDS and MediaBase and the on-demand trending to get information that keeps us from missing songs that we did not "see" as being potential hits.
For recurrents and gold, research has guided me for the last 35 years or so, and if it did not do well overall and with all the key subsets of the demos, it did not get played.
I understand, but what I was addressing was your statement that you have abandoned small-market radio for satellite and other audio sources because you hear too many "secondary / dreadful songs" on those stations. My question was whether the playing of a secondary or "dreadful" (not to your ears, but to the ears of enough people in the demo to make the song unplayable on major-market radio) song on such a station has ever delighted you despite all you know about why it should never, ever be played on commercial radio?
You are assuming we all agree that they do! ;-)
Given that....Smaller markets have no money for research, so they can "try" more things. Also, they are nbot playing a high-stakes game of ratings/revenue...giving more latititude and freedom in programming.
On the other hand, many smaller market stations sound inconsistent from day to day...from daypart to daypart.
Also, they typically have lower caliber jocks/announcers/hosts.
If I want to be "delighted" by songs, I play them on my own collection or watch them on YouTube. I know enough about nearly every song in my personal collection to analyze if it has mass appeal and what ages and groups it appeals to.
I tend to actually like songs that were hits better than esoteric songs, and I tend to tire of them at about the same rate as the audience.
Mostly, though, the songs I listen to on my own are ones that would not be played on any US station... 60's Italian and French pop songs, 60's and 70's Cumbia and Vallenato, Mexican and Spanish 70's and 80's AV / pop. 70's and 80's and some 90's salsa.
But when I hear on the air some song that I know is wrong, even when I like it, two things happen: first, I generally was not listening to that station for some weird song and am disappointed and, second, when I hear that kind of song that is out of place, I was not in the mood to hear it at that time or I would have played it myself.
From a technical point of view, Voltaire was a huge negative impact on sound. It severely damaged the sound quality in major markets where it was used. I traveled through a large market when the Voltair was a craze, and the scan button found an iHeart classic hits station. It sounded about as bad as a compact cassette tape from decades gone by. Maybe even worse than SiriusXM. I couldn't believe how bad they sounded - so I kept scanning and found all the other stations in the cluster sounded just as bad.
It's not the Voltaire... the problem is in the settings used which tend to be excessive for Un-fatiguing listening.
You're kidding, right?
No, he is absolutely right. Excessive Voltaire insertion has horrible effects on sound, producing extreme fatigue and the creation of un-natural artifcacts.
I've heard that with every type of processing back to the audimax/volumax units. ;-)
Have there been any studies, etc? Or is it my ears / your ears kind of thing?
The Voltaire is not a processor like the Audimax/Volumax or the like. It is not a compressor or a limiter or an AGC device.
The Voltaire is a unit that attempts to raise the level of any audio in the set of frequencies that the PPM encoder can use so that encoding will happen and listening will be registered on the individual PPM meters in the field.
The result of "setting the volume to 11" is that the Voltaire raises even background noise if there is nothing in the "real" audio of the station programming in its attempt to create a high enough level for the PPM encoder to insert a PPM tag.
Stations that believe that they are losing PPM listening because it is not being detected are prone to raising the activation level of the Voltaire. The result is noxious audio.
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But how come people in Dallas like listening to the stations in my area (Sherman-Denison)? My local radio stations probably just barely make it into Dallas but yet a lot of people are talking about how good they are.
Other than anecdotal personal experience, what evidence do you have that Dallas metro residents listen at all to those stations?
Before the new listing rules, KHYI and KLAK never got above a 0.1 in the Dallas book, and usually got a 0.0
What makes small town radio stations better??
Well......the "freedom" of being able to do more what you want without worrying about corporate consequences.
More old school style broadcasting and programming.
Larger, thorough playlists
Weekend specials, if desired
Less advertising on some occasions
No worries about spending a fortune on research and music testing and other large market expenditures
Attracting a specific audience that will accept your style and presentation
Yeah, they usually rate much lower, but frankly, who cares if you are pleasing the smaller audience you are targeting. They are happy and that's what matters.
Thankfully there are plenty of them to go around, whether an LPFM or a small AM. The mom and pops of radio. I'll gladly take their great music over any 200 song playlist any day of the year.
Well......the "freedom" of being able to do more what you want without worrying about corporate consequences.
More old school style broadcasting and programming.
Larger, thorough playlists
Weekend specials, if desired
Less advertising on some occasions
No worries about spending a fortune on research and music testing and other large market expenditures
Attracting a specific audience that will accept your style and presentation
Yeah, they usually rate much lower, but frankly, who cares if you are pleasing the smaller audience you are targeting. They are happy and that's what matters.
Thankfully there are plenty of them to go around, whether an LPFM or a small AM. The mom and pops of radio. I'll gladly take their great music over any 200 song playlist any day of the year.
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