Why Are there so many stations in New York Playing the same Music ?

[oldies76]

The songs that mass groups agree on are what radio plays.

Yeah, based on "a needle in a haystack" testing groups, and through replication...it means that the entire cume agrees on what less than 1/100 of a percent of them, decided for the rest.......

 

[davideduardo]

"400" is an estimated number that was a "ballpark figure" brought up in similiar discussions in previous posts dating back a few years. Stations with very tight playlists were always thought as having far less songs in rotation, while others had more. As a rule, CBS-FM has a smaller frequency of repeated songs (which in turn provides opportunity to play more cuts during regular times) than most other classic hits stations. Stations like CBS-FM with its wide selection of songs, can have up to 800-1000 or more "available" songs easily, but others with extremely tight and repetitive rotations will have far less.

In other words, you can't answer the question.

"400" is not a standard or norm for stations. Each format has a fairly consistent range, but there is nothing hard coded in this.

CBS-FM has around 800 songs in regular rotation. That can be seen by looking at individual weeks, excluding specialty shows (which seem, for some reason to be programmed in dayparts when there is virtually no listening to radio). That is within the range for similar formats.

A CHR that plays the power hits 90+ times a week is not "more repetitive" to the listeners. In fact, in perceptual questioning we usually find the highest perceptions of variety and the lowest perceptions of repetition among core listeners to CHR because the songs they want to hear are being heard often enough to satisfy their desires to hear their favorite hits.

Perceptions of repetition come most often because a station plays too many songs that appeal only to a sliver of the potential audience.

The goal of stations, including CBS-FM, is not to play more songs. It is simply to play all the songs that fit the format and which don't have big negatives on them. If there were only 500, that is what they would play. If there were 2,000, likewise.

 

[davideduardo]

The songs that mass groups agree on are what radio plays.

Yeah, based on "a needle in a haystack" testing groups, and through replication...it means that the entire cume agrees on what less than 1/100 of a percent of them, decided for the rest.......

You don't understand replication... at all. Replication is a test of the reliability of the size of a sample.

We test 100 people selected at random from the target audience of a station or a particular format. At the same time, we test another group, and maybe another. If they all come up with results that are identical, then testing 400 or 500 or 1000 or 10,000 people will not yield any more accurate results.

In practice, the way replication is often done si by testing 200 or 300 people. The results are tabulated, and then, using random number generation, 1/2 of the sample is pulled and looked at. And then 1/3 and 1/4 and so on. In music testing, the results tend to be identical once you get over 60 or 70 people, no matter how much larger you make the sample. Given that sample is the biggest cost (fee to recruiter and fees to respondents) there is no need to test more than an average of about 100 people no matter what.

The samples used are ultra reliable when the research, recruiting and implementation are done by skillful people.

 

[TheBigA]

Yeah, based on "a needle in a haystack" testing groups, and through replication...it means that the entire cume agrees on what less than 1/100 of a percent of them, decided for the rest.......

And clearly that process is delivering results. In fact, in market after market, those songs and that system delivers results.

Which gets back to my first post: A hit is a hit. There aren't a lot of them, but radio plays the hits.