Who picks the songs???

[Imlivinontheair]

I am going to toss this out here as I am curious what the current thinking is on this.

I am not going to mention station call letters or call out anyone by name....

But having been on the listener side of radio for a while (we run the whole dial)...I have a question...who is deciding what airs and what does not???

If a station is being programmed to win a certain demo, does that require playing the same tired songs daily for months on end??? What is the purpose of this??? These songs were hits sometimes decades ago.

I understand the concept of "gold" or songs that test well...but surely there are more than 50 of these over the last half of century???

How about a nice compromise? You can keep these 50 in rotation but throw in 5 or 10 wildcards daily in order to make it interesting??? Switch it up and make it interesting.

And this disease is not unique to one station...it has infected many.

So how about it??? What is driving this and what can we do to correct it...at least here in Cincinnati?

 

[Arbitorn]

I started using SELECTOR, the music selection software, when it had four items on its main menu and used a whole rack for the computer...complete with two Winchester drives. I've done my share of music programming over several formats. As to the gold, songs to the left were played by us and the harder stations we competed with - songs on the right were played by us and softer stations. Center songs were exclusive to us, usually oldies that the competition didn't play. The last category was the mass appeal stuff that anyone would play. When we played a song to the left or right of our core, we had to go through the core before playing anything else. We had many hundreds of songs, but a lot of them were treated like spice...used sparingly and only as a flavor - not in place of the meat. The fewer spots you had in an hour dictated how much spice you played. Because there was so much of it, none of the spice burned out. You only heard that song once every six months or so, but you heard that category quite a bit outside the drive times.

I think the spice concept is gone today. Most stations I listen to play currents, recurrents and one or two levels of gold, based on research scores. If you listen to 106.7, you'll hear the spice category, typically right before a break. It sets that station apart as a special place where you can hear songs like that one. You think B105, the Wolf or 94.1 would ever play an oldie like "I Fall to Pieces" by Patsy Cline (60s), "Smoky Mountain Rain" by Ronnie Milsap (70s), or "Guitars, Cadillacs" by Dwight Yoakum (80s)? Those are all core country songs - huge hits and still relevent. For whatever reason, most big-company country stations ignore them.

I could say the same about Classic Rock.

 

[jry]

Well, i'm not sure about your question but....

I write the songs.....

that make the whole world sing...

 

[greg.hahn]

I am going to toss this out here as I am curious what the current thinking is on this.

I am not going to mention station call letters or call out anyone by name....

But having been on the listener side of radio for a while (we run the whole dial)...I have a question...who is deciding what airs and what does not???

If a station is being programmed to win a certain demo, does that require playing the same tired songs daily for months on end??? What is the purpose of this??? These songs were hits sometimes decades ago.

I understand the concept of "gold" or songs that test well...but surely there are more than 50 of these over the last half of century???

How about a nice compromise? You can keep these 50 in rotation but throw in 5 or 10 wildcards daily in order to make it interesting??? Switch it up and make it interesting.

And this disease is not unique to one station...it has infected many.

So how about it??? What is driving this and what can we do to correct it...at least here in Cincinnati?

With most of those "5-10 wildcards" that you are proposing, 60% of the audience would cry, "oh WOW!" and totally groove on it. But the other 40% would change the station. And that's what programmers want to avoid.

Time and time and time and time again I've seen stations struggling in the ratings. A consultant comes in and cuts back the playlist to only those that are sure-fire winners. And almost instantly you see the ratings go up.

Everybody complains about it all the time, but there is a reason that stations keep playing Sweet Home Alabama over and over again: it works.

 

[Imlivinontheair]

I started using SELECTOR, the music selection software, when it had four items on its main menu and used a whole rack for the computer...complete with two Winchester drives. I've done my share of music programming over several formats. As to the gold, songs to the left were played by us and the harder stations we competed with - songs on the right were played by us and softer stations. Center songs were exclusive to us, usually oldies that the competition didn't play. The last category was the mass appeal stuff that anyone would play. When we played a song to the left or right of our core, we had to go through the core before playing anything else. We had many hundreds of songs, but a lot of them were treated like spice...used sparingly and only as a flavor - not in place of the meat. The fewer spots you had in an hour dictated how much spice you played. Because there was so much of it, none of the spice burned out. You only heard that song once every six months or so, but you heard that category quite a bit outside the drive times.

I think the spice concept is gone today. Most stations I listen to play currents, recurrents and one or two levels of gold, based on research scores. If you listen to 106.7, you'll hear the spice category, typically right before a break. It sets that station apart as a special place where you can hear songs like that one. You think B105, the Wolf or 94.1 would ever play an oldie like "I Fall to Pieces" by Patsy Cline (60s), "Smoky Mountain Rain" by Ronnie Milsap (70s), or "Guitars, Cadillacs" by Dwight Yoakum (80s)? Those are all core country songs - huge hits and still relevent. For whatever reason, most big-company country stations ignore them.

I could say the same about Classic Rock.

Interesting station. I was wondering where it is...I heard Joe Z on it.

Sounds like a better formatted station than the ones we have here.

I have a friend who owns an FM down south...he came up with a hybrid format...country, classics, chr etc...he picked happier upbeat songs that sound good. He came up with the format in response to a request from his boss years earlier. The owner of the station said, "I don't know this music but I am tapping my feet to it."

Good music is good music and people today listen across such a spectrum that they will respond to original formatting like this.

And people flip channels anyway...only those of us stuck in an office who are at the mercy of what comes over the radio are forced to keep listening.

Why can't we try?? Radio used to be like this...a mixture of good music played to entertain the public....air personalities who have personalities. They used to read commercial spots live...adlib and innovate.

I think Willie does still read spots live...

Anyway...what can we do to get a good format here in town???

 

[mattsledge]

Why can't we try??

Three words:

Research and ratings.

 

[stevensonair]

I think it's actually one word.

"ownership."

Unless a station is owned by someone who's actively interested in developing a unique format, and has both the patience and the flexibility to work with it, you won't see a lot of these experiments. That isn't to say they can't work - but they don't fit the model of publicly traded companies with hundreds of stations. So you need the ownership with the passion, patience and resources to pursue it. Most of them don't have a motive to do so.

 

[greg.hahn]

I think it's actually one word.

"ownership."

Unless a station is owned by someone who's actively interested in developing a unique format, and has both the patience and the flexibility to work with it, you won't see a lot of these experiments. That isn't to say they can't work - but they don't fit the model of publicly traded companies with hundreds of stations. So you need the ownership with the passion, patience and resources to pursue it. Most of them don't have a motive to do so.

That's very easy to say from your armchair.

The fallacy is the idea that the large companies don't know how to run radio stations, and don't really care whether they succeed or fail. But if that were true, why would they spend all their marketing dollars on billboards and busboards and TV and contests and music tests? They're often throwing tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars a pop at stations in order to improve their ratings. Your way would actually be cheaper, and according to you, achieve better results. So you are saying that the leadership and consultants of large companies are grossly inept at what they do for a living. All it would take would be a private owner who could think outside the cookie-cutter box and he'd wipe up the floor with the corporate competition.

But that leads us to the second fallacy- that these small companies don't exist. The fact is, they do exist in many markets. So now all they've got to do is program it the way you are saying and they win big- completely dominating their markets.

So why don't they?

 

[stevensonair]

Except I'm not maintaining that it would achieve "better" results in major markets, to the extent we're using ratings to determine it.

Nor am I saying the majors are inept. They're great at doing what they do, and they've got systems to do it.

My position is that there are some markets, and situations, where the right operator with a longer term view and a personal passion for filling the right niche could achieve success with it. For a smaller operator, that may not be ratings - it may be maintaining a particular format or serving an audience while keeping the bills paid and taking home a comfortable profit.

I don't operate under the illusion that these types of ventures will "wipe the floor" with the corporate stations. I do however, think there are situations where owning a niche is sustainable.

 

[MTHBSTR]

Greg: excellent post!
Stevens: maybe you can give us some examples?
If you haven't seen the article, look for the one talking about formats that are dying due to low cume. It's not a diary world anymore folks. PPM is a shock to those living on heritage and legacy. No more writing down what you thought you listened to because that's the station you "thought" you were listening to. No more just filling in the diary. The PPM knows.

 

[BobOnTheJob]

The answer is far different now than 40 years ago. I'm still waiting for someone to explain why the top 40 powerhouse in Cincinnati (WSAI 1360) never played the #1 version of You've Got A Friend by James Taylor, opting instead to play the Roberta Flack & Donny Hathaway version that peaked at #29. Back then the PD got to make local decisions because he/she thought a song was right for the market (even though the chosen version in the above case was awful IMHO). And it exposed some mighty good songs that would never have seen the light of day otherwise. But to play devil's advocate with my own post, there was exactly 1 station playing top 40 hit music in the market at the time. It was that or listen to your own record collection. In their case, they had a lot of room to experiment with little to lose. Different world today...

 

[greg.hahn]

Except I'm not maintaining that it would achieve "better" results in major markets, to the extent we're using ratings to determine it.

Nor am I saying the majors are inept. They're great at doing what they do, and they've got systems to do it.

My position is that there are some markets, and situations, where the right operator with a longer term view and a personal passion for filling the right niche could achieve success with it. For a smaller operator, that may not be ratings - it may be maintaining a particular format or serving an audience while keeping the bills paid and taking home a comfortable profit.

I don't operate under the illusion that these types of ventures will "wipe the floor" with the corporate stations. I do however, think there are situations where owning a niche is sustainable.

Sustainable, huh?

So... what you seem to be saying is that it's not the way to have big ratings, or big sales, but if you work at it hard enough, and show enough patience, you can eventually make a modest profit, enough to stay in business with your niche format.

But who wants to work that hard for little money, when there are obviously more successful ways to do business?

 

[mattsledge]

But who wants to work that hard for little money, when there are obviously more successful ways to do business?

A quote from the former owner of WOXY, when it was 97X:

"We have a responsibility to be profitable, but not an obligation to be greedy."

Said station was a "niche" for 21 years, then the owners sold and retired in 2004.

 

[microbob]

I love that quote. 97x was a great station.

 

[BobOnTheJob]

But who wants to work that hard for little money, when there are obviously more successful ways to do business?

A quote from the former owner of WOXY, when it was 97X:

"We have a responsibility to be profitable, but not an obligation to be greedy."

Said station was a "niche" for 21 years, then the owners sold and retired in 2004.

Worthy to note that WOXY was a Class A station with their transmitter in a location that placed a city grade signal over 1 city : Oxford,OH. It was 25 miles from downtown Cincinnati and 35 miles from downtown Dayton. Might the format have been different if the stick was in the middle of a populated metro area? Worth noting that when the CP was granted to get the signal into a more populated area, the "niche" format apparently was not seen as the best choice--as least to the people who bought the station.

 

[mattsledge]

But who wants to work that hard for little money, when there are obviously more successful ways to do business?

A quote from the former owner of WOXY, when it was 97X:

"We have a responsibility to be profitable, but not an obligation to be greedy."

Said station was a "niche" for 21 years, then the owners sold and retired in 2004.

Worthy to note that WOXY was a Class A station with their transmitter in a location that placed a city grade signal over 1 city : Oxford,OH. It was 25 miles from downtown Cincinnati and 35 miles from downtown Dayton. Might the format have been different if the stick was in the middle of a populated metro area? Worth noting that when the CP was granted to get the signal into a more populated area, the "niche" format apparently was not seen as the best choice--as least to the people who bought the station.

I'm well aware of WOXY's history - after all, I was the APD when we shut down 97X and was the PD when First Broadcasting took over. The new owners went with a satellite modern rock format as a placeholder for whatever they were going to do down the line... and we know what happened after that.

97X as a niche format got it's start in 1983 after several focus groups with Miami University students, because that was the music they wanted to hear. So, the station was modeled initially after KROQ in LA, and grew from there. It certainly didn't draw massive ratings, but it did find people that were passionate about the music and the image that we projected.

 

[storrs19]

The answer is far different now than 40 years ago. I'm still waiting for someone to explain why the top 40 powerhouse in Cincinnati (WSAI 1360) never played the #1 version of You've Got A Friend by James Taylor, opting instead to play the Roberta Flack & Donny Hathaway version that peaked at #29. Back then the PD got to make local decisions because he/she thought a song was right for the market (even though the chosen version in the above case was awful IMHO). And it exposed some mighty good songs that would never have seen the light of day otherwise. But to play devil's advocate with my own post, there was exactly 1 station playing top 40 hit music in the market at the time. It was that or listen to your own record collection. In their case, they had a lot of room to experiment with little to lose. Different world today...

This can really be expounded out by comparing local Top 30 surveys between WKLO and WAKY. Both were Top 40 in Louisville, Kentucky but often as many as 10 songs would be on one stations survey that were not on the other. Both had different PD's and they would often play different songs and thus those songs became popular enough to enter the respective station's survey.

Sadly now a days you can drive cross country and you will hear the same 20 current songs on every CHR station no matter where you go. There is no local live entertaining CHR radio any more and that's very sad but it is what it is. Me? I just use my i-Pod and listen to whatever I want.

 

[Imlivinontheair]

The answer is far different now than 40 years ago. I'm still waiting for someone to explain why the top 40 powerhouse in Cincinnati (WSAI 1360) never played the #1 version of You've Got A Friend by James Taylor, opting instead to play the Roberta Flack & Donny Hathaway version that peaked at #29. Back then the PD got to make local decisions because he/she thought a song was right for the market (even though the chosen version in the above case was awful IMHO). And it exposed some mighty good songs that would never have seen the light of day otherwise. But to play devil's advocate with my own post, there was exactly 1 station playing top 40 hit music in the market at the time. It was that or listen to your own record collection. In their case, they had a lot of room to experiment with little to lose. Different world today...

I got one for you...how about a DJ who locked himself in the booth and played "That'll Be the Day" by Buddy Holly until the ownership broke in with the cops.

Doug Balogh owned WOXY lock, stock and barrel and if he wanted to play X or the Clash or whatever he could do it...and SDS pizza would continue to buy advertising even if the DJ said BOOGER on the air.

Hence the value of independent ownership.

What then would be a happy compromise between what Mr Balogh did and what we have now...

You aren't competing against other stations only as much as you are the Ipod, satellite radio, I Heart Radio. How can you compete with no commercials and variety as great as the listener wants???

Possible Answers:

How about REALLY taking requests all day long and not at lunch hour?

How about phoners???? How many listeners would love to know their DJ will play back their birthday shout out???

How about bringing back concert promotion: Q-102 and WEBN brought everyone to town. Doug Balogh had the Bare Naked Ladies play on the station's back party porch...a free concert with food for the listeners who would come listen.

Can you imagine what kind of buzz would happen if Aerosmith came to town and played an impromptu show on the Fountain Square stage at lunch hour...whatever station managed to pull it off would be the subject of buzz for decades.

More contact with the public by the talent....I remember when Janeen Coyle and Cool Ghoul hosted the St Rita's Haunted House on Ch 19!

Effectively radio gives the listener one thing...live interactive listener satisfaction. It costs nothing or practically nothing.

How about stunts? Like when WEBN was going to dye the river green... actually it already IS but it was in celebration of St Patrick's Day!

Be silly, be original, do SOMETHING. Make the public think that you are here and you do care.

I remember after the flood how CC sent trucks to collect donations to send down to the affected areas.

Why wait until there is a flood??? Matthew 25 Ministries needs supplies year around in event of disaster or need.

Stations can be number 1, 2, 3 etc and bring in good revenue for the owners and still play a good variety of songs, have a strong local presence and fill the listeners with sense that the station is here for THEM.

How about ways under the current circumstances that this can be done???

This is brainstorming...the people who make the decisions do read these boards and can use good ideas. How about it???

 

[partymarty]

Ha. Why did WSAI (or any major station) play or not play a song... Hate to say this, but follow the money.. I'm not claiming to be aware of any specific situation, but I can tell you there were many freshly paved driveways, sweet swimming pools, kids braces, and "blow-a-plenty" parties to influence play back in the day..

I play oldies and love it.. No record folks care about what we play... But I can tell you from my short stay in country radio.. This still happens all the time.

 

[microbob]

The word Payola comes to mind but they just don't use that term any longer. It's called promotion now.