When Tempo Shifts Gears

When Tempo Shifts Gears

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(Or “When Songs Aren’t Always In A [Single] Mood”)

By Sean Ross

How do you code tempo and mood on a song that changes tempo eight times?

Phenomenal in every other way as well, “Driver’s License” by Olivia Rodrigo is slow, but with a pulse, when it begins. Its longest section is the 45-second bridge, slow but pulsating, that ends slow and acapella. In between, it goes through at least five other tempo changes. At various times, it could be both the slowest “1” and an airy “4.” It is definingly intense, but it is never hot.

Yes, analyzing a zeitgeist song in this manner invites mockery. (“Code it as a hit!” wrote one Facebook friend.) But radio programmers have a lot to negotiate these days. The song that opened slowly and dramatically was a standout in the days of “I Will Survive.” Now, it’s a formula. Even a song like “Sucker” or “Don’t Start Now” that is uptempo throughout is sparse at the outset, so it can further “kick in” during the first 30 seconds.

In a genre starved for tempo, there is a lot that merely tantalizes pop programmers—songs that are up, but never intense (“Go Crazy,” “34 + 35”); midtempo but at least bouncy (“Mood”); slow but rousing (“Bang!”). There are still the songs that are slow but busy (“Positions”) that were the core sound of Top 40 radio during its decline. And there is still enough somber music (“Lonely,” “You Broke Me First”) that those songs don’t have their traditional advantage of sounding like nothing else on the radio.

The hottest songs on the radio right now are “Levitating” and “Therefore I Am”—midtempo but bouncy and assertive. “Save Your Tears” is up, bouncy, but dour. The Weeknd’s “Blinding Lights” had its own brief wind-up but was close enough to traditional uptempo that radio powered it for a year. We have a lot of songs now that owe something structurally to “Don’t Stop Believin’,” perhaps our most enduring Classic Hit. “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” endures pretty well itself, but one wonders if it comes in too hot to be a hit now.

Like many things in radio programming, “do listeners notice?” and “does it matter?” are not the same question. “If we’re too low key, or frenetic, for their liking, they’ll punch out and not even really think about why,” says KLJY/KXBS St. Louis PD Mike Couchman. Listeners will only know that “they got bored, or we made them feel edgy, or whatever.”

“Sometimes I listen to pop radio and think no one even looked at the music before they loaded it,” says Brian Woodward. “Sloppy segues lately.” In this column, we’re all about attention to transitions.

Asked how they coded “Driver’s License,” most PDs defaulted to one of two methods. WWCK (CK105) Flint, Mich., PD Jerry Noble offers, “There’s the ‘how it starts and how it ends’ theory vs ‘how do you feel listening to it?’”

“I’ve always coded them on the song as a whole,” says Justin Bryant of WMGB (B95.1) Macon, Ga. “The majority of ‘Driver’s License’ is medium tempo.” “I’ve coded ‘Driver’s License’ as slow, since the majority is slow,” says Michael Davis, owner/PD of Kentucky’s WMTA (Star 107.3).

“It’s all about how it starts and ends,” says Chuck Ingersoll. “Do whatever wild and crazy things you want in the middle, but let’s have some nice segueing and crossfades at the beginning and end, said the jazz show host.” (Ingersoll hosts a Sunday night jazz/R&B show on WGMC Rochester, N.Y.)

“I code it as slow,” says KFTZ Idaho Falls, Idaho, PD Viktor Wilt. “On my Active Rock station, I have a five- song separation for low-energy. There are too many low-energy new hit songs on Top 40 and Country to spread it out further than every-other-track from my experience, as much as I would prefer more energy overall in those formats.”

The late Canadian programming legend Pat Cardinal used to code only 1s and 5s. On his Classic Hits stations, Fleetwood Mac’s “Go Your Own Way” was a 5; “Dreams,” uptempo and emotionally intense, but never propulsive, was a 1.

In some ways, the recent changes in how hit songs are constructed makes it easier because a song like “Driver’s License” winds its way to the now customary cold ending. “Bohemian Rhapsody,” for all its changes, is easy to code—you wouldn’t want to play another ballad on either side of it. (It’s a minute shorter, and the changes aren’t operatic, but “Driver’s License” is, in many ways, this generation’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” in its structure.)

“I code based on mood,” says Impact Radio Boise’s J.D. Garfield. “Tempo can change throughout a song. The mood normally stays the same.” He avoids two “sad” songs back-to-back.

“Unless there is a drastic change, I code tempo based on the intro. I also have mood coding,” says WJFX Fort Wayne, Ind., PD Rob Mack. “As far as tempo at radio now, sure there are ballads and slow songs, but I actually like our variety at CHR at the moment: Ariana, Pop Smoke, MGK, Olivia, AJR, Ava Max, Chris Brown, Dua Lipa, Bieber. That’s quite an array.”

Whether tempo matters will remain an open case for me until Top 40 and Adult Top 40/Hot AC put together a winning season without it. I’d be happy if programmers try to test the proposition this summer, have the right available product, and have an improving national mood to accompany.

Sean Ross is a veteran programmer, researcher, and the author of the Ross On Radio newsletter. Find him or subscribe free @RossOnRadio on Twitter. Contact him at rossonradio@comcast.net

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How The Soft AC Wars Shaped The Format

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By Sean Ross

The early ‘90s were a time of massive change on the radio format landscape: the “New Rock revolution”; the growth of Hip-Hop; the rise of “New Country,” the success of Oldies on FM, and the near implosion of Top 40. But as the decade began, the most frenetic activity was in Adult Contemporary radio, driven by the near-total collapse of the Easy Listening format.

sunnyOn Feb. 15, AC KODA (Sunny 99.1) Houston will celebrate the 30th anniversary of its switch from Easy Listening to Soft AC under Dave Dillon, the first of its two PDs. (Dillon hired the current PD, Marc Sherman, a few months later.) By that time, Easy Listening stations had been flipping to Soft AC on a regular basis for 18 months, driven by ad agency resistance to upper demos. A similar bailout would be seen with Smooth Jazz in the early 2010s, with that format’s ratings already on the decline. In 1989, Easy Listening still had nearly a 7-share in Arbitron’s national format calculations.

Typically, the EZ-to-AC transition took place even if there was another Soft AC in the market, as well as a Mainstream AC. Around the same time, Hot AC was emerging as a separate format at stations like KFMB-FM (B100) San Diego and KHMX (Mix 96.5) Houston. In the mid-‘80s, it was CHR that sometimes had three to four rivals in a market. Now, there could be four AC competitors – something which set off its own series of chess moves – in turn propelling the other fast-growing formats. In Houston, KODA’s arrival ultimately sent KFMK to Hip-Hop/R&B as KBXX (the Box). In Philadelphia, WEAZ (Easy 101) (now WBEB) prompted WKSZ (Kiss 100)’s three-year evolution to Alternative.

The format wars created other ACs including WLIF Baltimore, WLYF Miami, WSHH Pittsburgh, and KOSI Denver, that remain powerhouses today. They were also one of several factors that began AC’s 30-year journey away from playing current music. In the early ‘90s, gold-based ACs that still played currents were being forced out by the rise of Oldies on FM. Other stations opted for Hot AC. That left mostly Soft AC stations which played only a handful of proven recurrents, something reflected in today’s AC chart.

“An Evolution, Not A Revolution”
bill2The EZ-to-Soft AC exodus was a big enough story to make page one of Billboard, or the front page of its radio section, at least four times in just over a two-year-period. In December 1988, I wrote that there had been a half-dozen major defections since June. Often these transitions were positioned by client-conscious radio station managers as “an evolution, not a revolution.”

In February 1990, I wrote about how the new stations were having a hard time getting traction. PDs of incumbent stations were generally dismissive of their new rivals as redundant in the market, except in Philadelphia where Easy 101 had arrived with the sort of marketing blitz that it became famous for over the years. AC, already the biggest format nationally, went from a 17.2 share in spring ’89 to an 18.7 by summer ’90. But its gains represented a small piece of Easy Listening’s 6.8 share, which dissipated to a 2.6 share in summer ’90 as 14 stations in top 50 markets changed format in less than six months.

But by February 1991, just as KODA launched, there was another story about how many of the second-generation Soft ACs were finally getting traction. The common theme at the time was that the transitioning stations began by playing Barbra Streisand and Barry Manilow (and sometimes even Frank Sinatra), eventually downplaying that music for Phil Collins, Rod Stewart, Whitney Houston, etc.

Three Transitions
breeze2WJYE (Joy 96) Buffalo, N.Y., was relatively early among the format flips in late ‘88. Rather than downplaying its change, WJYE threw a client party where staffers put on a musical review for advertisers, including one song to the tune of “Mack The Knife” that began with “when the book bites.” PD Joe Chile, now back at the station in its current Soft AC incarnation as WMSX (The Breeze) recalls the “Lite Favorites” station as heavy on Neil Diamond, James Taylor, the Carpenters, and Carole King at the outset. Their transition sent successful incumbent WBUF to “Mix 93,” then Smooth Jazz, then Modern AC over the course of the ‘90s.

WLYF relaunched as “Today’s Life” in July 1990, according to Rob Sidney, then-MD, later the station’s longtime PD. Life initially flipped its 3:1 instrumental-to-vocal mix to 3:1 vocals, keeping Smooth Jazz titles and some “Love Is Blue”-type easy listening classics, as well as some Sinatra and Nat King Cole-type standards. The instrumentals were gone by year’s end. The MOR went away by 1994. The transition ended with another rebranding, as Lite-FM, in 1996.

KODA’s 1991 entry was relatively late, in part because previous owner Group W had tried to save its multiple successful Easy Listening outlets with an experimental mix that included Smooth Jazz and vocals. Dillon remembers monitoring the transition format before his job interview and writing “unfamiliar instrumental” next to one title after another. Like many of its counterparts, KODA was helped by a heavy reliance on music research—three or four library tests a year at a time when that was standard for many AC and Oldies stations. Now, testing is more likely an annual occurrence.

Most of the early music logs for WLYF and KODA have been lost through decades of ownership transitions. WJYE, on the other hand, having come from Easy Listening whose syndicators were secretive about their musical formulas, actually shred its old logs. Former M Street Journal/Tom Taylor Now publisher Robert Unmacht was based in Washington, D.C., and was able to supply monitors of WGAY (Easy 99.5), one of the last stations to make the transition in December 1991.

Here’s Easy 99.5 on March 22, 1992. By that time, many of its counterparts had shed some of the softest titles seen here, but there’s still an ample dose of the soft ‘70s and ‘80s titles that have been a large part of the resurgent Soft AC format in recent years. Where stations like KODA immediately made their presentation upbeat—in part to make a statement about breaking from the Easy format—WGAY kept its four-song sets and Easy Listening presentation, Unmacht remembers. It’s now CHR WIHT (Hot 99.5).

Vogues, “My Special Angel”
Michael Johnson, “This Night Won’t Last Forever”
Dionne Warwick & Friends, “That’s What Friends Are For”
Lionel Richie, “Hello”
Melissa Manchester, “Theme From ‘Ice Castles’ (Through the Eyes of Love)”
Jim Croce, “I’ll Have to Say I Love You In A Song”
Simply Red, “If You Don’t Know Me By Now”
Barry Manilow, “Weekend In New England”
Whitney Houston, “Miracle”
Tommy Edwards, “It’s All in The Game”
Cat Stevens, “Morning Has Broken”
Elton John, “I Guess That’s Why They Call It tjhe Blues”
Barbra Streisand, “Love Theme From ‘A Star Is Born’ (Evergreen)”
England Dan & John Ford Coley, “We’ll Never Have To Say Goodbye Again”
Gordon Lightfoot, “Beautiful”
Rita Coolidge, “We’re All Alone”
Phil Collins, “Do You Remember”
Stevie Wonder, “My Cherie Amour”
Bee Gees, “Run to Me”
Air Supply, “Here I Am (Just When I Thought I Was Over You)”
Fifth Dimension, “(Last Night) I Didn’t Get to Sleep At All”
Richard Marx, “Hold on To The Nights”
Neil Sedaka, “Laughter in The Rain”

An Evolution And A Revolution

It’s interesting to look at the different paths taken by the Soft ACs of the early ‘90s as the years progressed. KODA, like early Soft AC WLTW (Lite FM) New York, is more of a gold-based “bright AC” now. In many ways, those stations sound more like the early ‘80s AC stations that had a strong, uptempo oldies component, before softer outlets like WLTW arrived.

WJYE tried to follow that path, becoming WMSX (Mix 96.1) before becoming Soft AC “The Breeze,” one of several stations launched around that time for listeners who felt that bright AC had become too uptempo. In Miami, WLYF remains successful, but it’s WFEZ (Easy 93.1) that often leads the market.

Here’s Sunny 99.1 just before 11 a.m. on January 25:
Bruno Mars, “Marry You”
Def Leppard, “Pour Some Sugar On Me”
Prince, “When Doves Cry”
Maroon 5, “Girls Like You”
Savage Garden, “Truly Madly Deeply”
Bangles, “Walk Like An Egyptian”
Leona Lewis, “Bleeding Love”
Survivor, “Eye of the Tiger”
Jonas Brothers, “Sucker”
Michael Jackson, “You Are Not Alone”
Crowded House, “Don’t Dream It’s Over”
Mr. Mister, “Broken Wings” (first song of the new sweep)
Rihanna, “Love On The Brain”
Madonna, “Like A Prayer”
Ed Sheeran & Justin Bieber, “I Don’t Care”
Here’s WMSX (The Breeze), WJYE’s successor, at 10 a.m. on January 26:
Lifehouse, “You and Me”
Green Day, “Time of Your Life”
Roxette, “Listen To Your Heart”
Rod Stewart, “You’re In My Heart (The Final Acclaim)”
Whitney Houston, “Where Do Broken Hearts Go?”
Train, “Drops Of Jupiter (Tell Me)”
Billy Joel, “Uptown Girl”
Jimmy Cliff, “I Can See Clearly Now’
Beach Boys, “Kokomo”
Elton John, “Rocket Man”
Adele, “Set Fire To The Rain”
Journey, “Open Arms”
Rupert Holmes, “Escape (The Pina Colada Song)”

Sean Ross is a veteran programmer, researcher, and the author of the Ross On Radio newsletter. Find him or subscribe free @RossOnRadio on Twitter. Contact him at rossonradio@comcast.net

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What I Learned From Scheduling Christmas Music

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By Sean Ross
xmas2Every programmer should have the experience of scheduling an all-Christmas format at least once. You will never make as many listeners as happy as you will at the holidays. You will never see as much of your market gathered in one place either. Whether you miss having programmed radio in the ‘70s and ‘80s or missed the chance to program in that time of double digit shares, it’s a chance to see one station unify the market again. Even knowing that listeners are responding to the holiday, more than your individual programming choices, it’s still very gratifying, even if your job is just to wrap the presents.
I had been scheduling other formats—Classic Hits, Adult Hits, Hot AC, Urban AC—for more than a decade before I edited my first yule log. I wondered if scheduling AC Christmas would be too proscribed. Would there be any need for programmer judgment? As programmers, we’ve known since the mid-‘00s  what the holiday hits are. Around that time, we also realized there was indeed a wrong way to play Christmas music: a second or third station would pop up in the market and find that there was no upside to being newer or broader or more tempo-driven. Before long, programmers were comfortable with a relatively tight universe of holiday hits.
The AC Christmas template took hold in the mid-‘00s, a few years ahead of the advent of PPM measurement in the top 50 markets, but its success was part of what emboldened programming in the PPM era. By 2010, Christmas radio had shown that listeners cared more about hearing a favorite right now than about niceties of artist or song separation. The same impetus that led programmers to spin a Christmas favorite 50x a week (and a few to go even higher)—the “Top 40 approach to Christmas”—was the one that drove Top 40 ever upwards of 100x a week on its biggest powers.
By the late ‘10s, when I started scheduling holiday music, that sort of “overindulge the hits” approach was becoming an issue in other formats—Top 40’s issues were the most noticeable, but also the Hot AC and Country stations most built on a similar template. Broadcast radio was suddenly challenged from various sides for both instant gratification and variety. And COVID-19’s changes to listening habits seems to have most punished those formats built around nine-minute listening spans.
But when I began scheduling Christmas music, I found that I wanted to overindulge the hits, too. I was happy when it was time to reach for “A Holly Jolly Christmas” or “Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!” again. I didn’t want to put “Where Are You Christmas” next to another “new” song, even if that “new” song was the 25-year-old “All I Want For Christmas Is You.” I suddenly felt like I was making a holiday mixtape for each listener and each one had to have all the songs they expected.
That didn’t mean there was no room for programmer discretion. WLTW (Lite FM) New York spins its powers 44x a week, played some version of “Frosty the Snowman” 20x yesterday. CHFI Toronto successfully plays songs 27x a week and only cracked 10x a day on its most-spun title. (Canadian AC is also a little bit newer, partially because Canadian content has prompted them to let songs like Justin Bieber’s “Mistletoe” grow into playable songs over the years.)
Scheduling Christmas has taught me that it was okay if the brush strokes are different. WBEB (B101) Philadelphia has successfully played songs over the years that aren’t on the safelist at WLTW and its iHeart sisters. Some stations still hold off on “O Holy Night,” “Away In A Manger,” and “O Come All Ye Faithful” until Christmas gets closer; some successful stations are playing those songs already. If that mixtape were actually a cassette, some stations would be able to get all the hits on a C-90. (I’ve seen one station that lets different versions of the same song play within the same clock hour.) The station I worked with was plenty successful itself using a C-120 to cover the big songs.

Scheduling Christmas
xmas1The U.S. Thanksgiving holiday, always the last Thursday in November, tends to mark the time when programmers ‘flip the switch’ to activate their Christmas Clocks. This can be full-on 24/7 all-Christmas, or a slow build – having worked out unwritten formulas that progressively introduce more and more Christmas songs per hour until they reach ALL Christmas on the 25th. Either way, it’s all controlled by programming clocks that are used for a relatively short period of time each year.
For many programmers, it can be a real headache to keep track of and maintain dozens of Christmas clocks. Powergold has developed a clever way around this with ‘Special Programming Tags.’ A ‘tag’ in this case is whatever the user wants – a number, letter, or even a word, then placed on any or all clock positions. Schedule generation is then paused as Powergold asks what the user wants to substitute into the ‘tagged’ position. If that tag is ‘X1’ for example, the user can tell Powergold to schedule a song from a Christmas category. PDs can create and assign unique tags that substitute regular programming with Christmas programming without the original clocks ever changing. Fewer clocks, fewer headaches.
While Christmas programming is special programming, one of the most important rules besides artist separation is title separation (same title, different artist). I always see a surprisingly high number of misspelled titles – mostly due to punctuation. An extra comma to your scheduling system means it’s suddenly a different title. I also see a lot of titles that contain extra information, like “(remix),” or “(feat. Mariah Carey).”
Jimmy Edwards
Powergold Music Scheduling Software
Director – Client Services
(501) 821-1123
jimmy@powergold.com


Some stations are comfortable overindulging the “sweater guys” of the MOR era. I tried to keep Andy Williams and Dean Martin at least a song apart from each other. Some PDs code for songs about Santa. Some, this year, are keeping an eye on songs about coming home for the holidays. Even the PDs most devoted to “just playing the hits” generally have their own guidelines—just not the same ones.
The sound that I found myself most having to keep an eye on, surprisingly, was “Spector.” Because of “All I Want For Christmas Is You,” the sound of “A Christmas Gift To You” (a/k/a the Phil Spector Christmas album) is now the sound of the few new holiday songs that get traction as well as new arrangements of some of the standards on major-artist albums.
As superstar holiday albums proliferate, so do variations in arrangements and thus judgment calls. If Michael Bublé does an uptempo “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” in the style of the Darlene Love/Spector version, is it okay to play him next to Dean Martin? If he does a lounge-flavored “All I Want For Christmas Is You,” is it okay to play it next to another relatively contemporary song? I’ve always tried to avoid “two-of-the-same” segues. But what about “one-and-a-half of the same” segues?
Within days of editing my first Christmas log, I’d come across plenty of those ironic scheduling juxtapositions that I often tweet out as #MomentsOfMusicSchedulingGrace: “Blue Christmas” into “White Christmas”; “This Christmas” into “Last Christmas”; “The Christmas Song” into “The Chanukah Song.” Finally, it happened: “The Christmas Shoes” into “Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer.” I changed that one.
I’ve often likened music scheduling to Sudoku—change one song and the others around it are now wrong. In some ways, Christmas is the easiest format to schedule because we know what the hits are, and the audience is forgiving of the details. It’s also the most difficult because of the relatively tight list of titles, artists, and styles. Some segues are more like Jenga—one change can upend an entire sweep. It’s okay to care about those details. The audience will be even happier to have the Christmas format in this difficult year. But people still notice a beautifully wrapped gift.

Sean Ross is a veteran programmer, researcher, and the author of the Ross On Radio newsletter. Find him or subscribe free @RossOnRadio on Twitter. Contact him at rossonradio@comcast.net

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We’re Going To Slow It Down Just A Little Here

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By Sean Ross
How would you handle a transition between “Welcome to the Jungle” by Guns N’ Roses and “Someone Saved My Life Tonight” by Elton John?
What about “Renegade” by Styx into “It Might Be You” by Stephen Bishop?

Would you follow “I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me)” by Whitney Houston with “Tears In Heaven” by Eric Clapton?

logan-weaver-PJYOpJCcbRg-unsplashThe dramatic fast-to-slow segue is always one of the challenges of music scheduling. Do you let a tempo crash happen and try to finesse it with the presentational elements between the songs? Would you rather stairstep your way down over the course of several songs, perhaps making your Classic Hits station too slow, or your Adult Contemporary station too hot, in the process?

Yes, it’s possible to go uptempo too abruptly as well. Radio veteran Ron Parker cites the station he heard recently going from “Piano Man” into “Mickey.” Any ballad needs a big finish to stand up to the first few notes of Lee Ann Rimes’ “Can’t Fight The Moonlight.”

arrowUpYes, some up-to-down segues sound great, especially if you’re going into a song with a dramatic opening. “Careless Whisper” always holds its own. The segues that make me happiest on the air are the up-to-down transitions that work, but one doesn’t remember them like the train wrecks.

The first two segues are ones I’ve heard on the air recently. Styx-into-Stephen Bishop was on a small-market Classic Hits station. Guns N’ Roses to Elton was on a successful major-market Classic Rocker.

The third segue was one that I once encountered editing an AC station log. Sonically, I probably could have made it work—especially with a slightly longer sweeper or hook promo that would have washed the first song away. But there was also the mood-shift to consider as well. I found another ‘90s song to replace Clapton.

Recently, I put the “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” to “Tears In Heaven” question to my Facebook friends, both radio and non-industry readers. Would programmers have allowed the segue? Would listeners, assuming they liked both songs, still have found it jarring? There were more than a hundred responses.

The majority of the programmers who chimed in would have allowed that segue in some form. The largest number (40% of the total) say they could have made it work with a jingle or sweeper. But nearly as many (35%) would have had no reservations about that segue. Only 25% wouldn’t have allowed the segue at all, although that included many of the non-industry listeners.

rollerA few of programmers who were comfortable with Houston-to-Clapton were those in favor of using dramatic segues for effect. Veteran PD Pat Holiday recalled being told by Ronnie Stanton, now Corus national MD, that he used noticeable segues to make a tight library sound larger. “An amusement park roller-coaster without steep ups-and-downs and twists-and-turns is a pretty boring ride,” says WINK Fort Myers, Fla., PD Chuck Knight.

There were also a significant number of programmers who agreed with reader Rob Walker that “it sounds worse in your head than it does as an actual segue. Listeners don’t care. Only radio people care about stuff like that.” “Do you think anyone stood up and turned off the radio screaming, ‘that was a terrible segue. You can’t make a transition like that?” asks WRBQ (Q105) Tampa p.m. driver Mason Dixon. “I think you know the answer.”

Accusations of “overthink” are inevitable whenever you discuss scheduling issues, although if you’re reading this story on a music scheduling software website, you have perhaps decided already that “overthinking” is part of the job. “As an on-air jock, I’d have been pissed that the PD or MD didn’t do their job,” says radio and label veteran Scott Gordon.

“Listeners may not verbalize it, but it destroys the mojo,” writes Latin radio programmer Ben Reed. When several PDs noted that listeners are already used to sharp curves from their own music collections on shuffle, Reed replied, “That’s a reason why I can’t stand shuffle.”

womanHP“The goal of any AC station is to keep as many women listening for the longest possible time,” wrote former KSWD (The Sound) Seattle APD/MD Jeanne Ashley. “I always tried to curate for the one woman who was having the worst possible day. That particular segue is yet another emotional roller-coaster to her and shouldn’t happen.” Former KSWD PD Smokey Rivers adds, “I prefer single lane changes in tempo when decelerating.”

Most readers felt they could pull off the segue with jingles or other presentational elements. WBVX (Classic Rock 92-1) Lexington, Ky., PD Ange Canessa has a sweeper that declares, “As crazy as this world is, sometimes you have to rock acoustically.”
Then there was the use of transition jingles, although not every programmer believes in jingles now. “Didn’t Bill Drake solve this problem 55 years ago?” asked WNAV Annapolis, Md., sales manager Dan O’Neil. iHeart Radio Cleveland AE Don Blesse also cites the Drake jingles, although he notes that “a good percussion downbeat, like ‘Ooo Baby Baby’ or ‘La-La Means I Love You’ would get you there on your own.”

(After this article was initially published, KNCI Sacramento, Calif., PD Joey Tack wrote in praise of “strategic use of key-matching songs and/or cold intros.” He sent a few sample cold segues: Lee Brice, “Rumor” into Luke Combs, “Lovin’ On You,” and then into Kenny Chesney, “American Kids,” as well as Jon Pardi, “Dirt On My Boots” into Dan + Shay, “I Should Probably Go To Bed.”)

Rico Garcia, brand manager of Sacramento’s Results Radio cluster says, “I have all my jingles and imaging coded for tempo and energy control. Once we’re done editing a log and timing it out with spots, we then have our music scheduler schedule the jingles and imaging categories and that coding places everything where it belongs, amazingly. It takes time to set this up at first, but it’s a huge time-saver [later on] because things are scheduling in the way you designed them to.

“We also have a few longer imaging pieces (8-12 seconds) that rarely get used but are available in case we need to let the palate cleanse for a few seconds to help with a transition. They are personality-focused and produced in a way to help with these very rare occasions,” Garcia adds. “Overall, we try to avoid this type of whiplash, but it will happen on occasion. I agree . . . that listeners just want the songs they love, but I also think there is something about a presentation that is easy to listen to.”

Song Transitions

Proper song coding is the critical first step in controlling segues when you create a schedule. In Powergold these codes are called ‘Properties,’ and are entirely user-created and defined.

To prevent ‘train wreck’ segues between songs I would have in mind a tempo identifying how a song starts and ends. In this case I would create two Properties – ‘Tempo IN’ and ‘Tempo OUT’ – each having values of ‘Slow, Medium, and Fast’ and assigned to the songs appropriately. In the rules I would tell Powergold that a song coded as ‘Tempo OUT: Fast’ is not allowed to segue into a song with ‘Tempo IN: Slow.’ This happens because I can control the direction in which the rule gets tested – back only, both directions, or ahead. In this instance, the ‘OUT: Fast’ rule is testing ahead only, against the ‘IN: Slow’ rule which is testing back only. That segue is a ‘no no.’

Controlling the Property rule test direction also makes it possible to segue to the correct jingle in between two songs, or any combination.

There are other kinds of segues than just between songs that many PDs try to prevent when possible. These can include restricting slow songs at the top of the hour, or immediately out of a commercial break. Any position on a clock can be tagged to schedule a song that includes and/or excludes songs that have been assigned specific Properties.

I would caution against the over restricting of song segues or clock positions with Properties or other rules until a complete analysis is performed to determine if the content of your library can support it. Don’t hesitate to reach out for help in meeting your scheduling goals.

Jimmy Edwards
Powergold Music Scheduling Software
Director – Client Services
(501) 821-1123
jimmy@powergold.com

WRNR Annapolis, Md., owner Steve Kingston was famous for his attention to detail as PD of WHTZ (Z100) New York. “This segue isn’t ideal, but it can certainly be done. In the rare instance you have on-air talent, be it live or voicetracked, it’s up to them to make the transition work. Proper levels and mixing of the voice over the music always works. Swim in the music—the ‘Tears’ intro should be hitting zero dB. The air talent should be the lead singer over the intro. No jock? Imaging works. No imaging? It’s all in the mix and the timing of the segue.”

The scarcity of on-air personalities to control the segue is an issue. Australian TV anchorman and veteran host Peter T. Hughes recalls the late colleague who knew when to hit Juice Newton’s “Angel Of the Morning” so it sounded OK out of AC/DC. “Sweet Child” ends with Axl Rose’s sustained acapella note; “Someone Saved” begins with piano chords. It might have worked as a straight segue, but the on-air personality still came in slightly ahead of the transition. (So, for that matter, did the jock segueing Styx-to-Stephen Bishop.) As often now, even the smoothest musical transition can be drowned out by carelessly inserted voice-tracks or derailed by automation tones that are too tight or too loose.

On-air execution becomes an extension of the scheduling process It often happens that even the smoothest musical transition can be drowned out by carelessly inserted voice-tracks or derailed by automation tones that are too tight or too loose. And soon, programmers, particularly those mixing holiday music into their regular format will have another challenge: “sleighwrecks”!

Sean Ross is a veteran programmer, researcher, and the author of the Ross On Radio newsletter. Find him or subscribe free @RossOnRadio on Twitter. Contact him at rossonradio@comcast.net

 

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What Is the Sweet Spot for CHR Power Rotation?

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Over the years, it has been hard for radio programmers to know when they’re playing their power rotation songs too much. And for some, the prevailing “radio law” is that there’s no such thing.

CHR programmers in America had long become used to a listener misperception that they played “the same songs on the hour every hour,” even before that inched closer to being reality over the last decade. When broadcasters saw research tagging their stations with the “plays the same songs over and over” image, they took it as affirmation that they were “playing the hits.”

In the mid-to-late-’90s, stations that spun their powers in the 90-100x-a-week range were typically insurgents — second CHR stations in a market looking to make an impact. In the late ’10s, as second CHRs proliferated, that strategy more often meant 122x a week. The switch to PPM ratings measurement brought with it an almost existential approach to power rotation for incumbents and challengers alike, one that emphasized having the best hit song in the moment above everything else.

That strategy took hold during a particularly strong period for CHR in 2009-11, driven by up-tempo music that reflected an overall societal optimism. Even before COVID-19, CHR radio was dealing with diminished shares, greater competition, and a rapidly proliferating second and third tier of music driven by streaming stories but very few consensus power-rotation songs.

The mother/daughter coalition that propelled CHR a decade ago was already faltering, at best. During COVID-19, when there wasn’t even a 20-minute ride to and from school to bring parents and kids together, CHR stations were among those most sharply affected. A format built on cume and multiple short listening occasions was now particularly vulnerable when cume was down so sharply and in-car listening was most threatened.

I’ve long sensed there was a difference between listener complaints about CHR stations playing their hits 70x a week in the mid-’90s, 90x a week a decade ago, and 120x a week today. Perhaps there was a tipping point where too much repetition really did become too much? But since listeners have been complaining since the days of 70x a week, it all sounds like “sure, that’s what they all say” to PDs.

But now there are some numbers you should look at.

For the August monthly, I tallied the 6+ numbers for 78 CHRs in Nielsen’s PPM-measured markets and measured them against the station’s highest spin count on its most rotated power. Some stations, like New York’s WHTZ [Z100], have significant numbers in multiple markets and were counted once for each market. At this writing, September ratings are starting to roll out, but won’t be complete until Friday.

The average ratings share for these 78 CHRs was a 3.6 share. The average power rotation for these stations was 119x a week.

When you look at the stations by spin count, a dramatic pattern emerges:

Top Spin On Powers Average Share Number of Stations
130x or higher 3 13
120x-129x 3.5 30
110x-119x 3.8 21
100x-109x 4.1 9
Under 100x 5.5 5

Similarly, when you look at the highest-rated CHR stations vs. the lowest, there is a clear pattern:

Share Range Top Spin On Powers Station Count
5-Share or Over 112x 11
4.0-4.9 share 117x 18
3.0-3.9 share 120x 26
2.0-2.9 share 123x 14
2-share or under 126x 9

To be fair, there are asterisks here. WXKS-FM (Kiss 108) Boston, tied for the top-ranked CHR in August, played its top power 98x in the week measured. Kiss 108 is buoyed by a heritage morning show that plays 4-5 songs an hour in morning drive, thus lowering its spin count. A few stations with big morning shows have weathered the CHR downturn better than others, and some programmers might see lower spins as a byproduct, not the driver. And yet, there’s a clear pattern across 78 radio stations with a wide range of circumstances but generally aggressive spins.

Here’s one more calculation:

We also looked at the top two stations in each PPM market in formats that play some current-based music. Those stations could range from the very conservative — Mainstream AC and Adult R&B — to R&B/Hip-Hop stations with rotations in the same neighborhood as CHR. The 98 stations we looked at included eight CHRs, but the most represented stations were Country (20 stations), AC (19), Adult R&B (16), and Hot AC (9). The average rating for those stations was a 6.6. The average top spin was 55x.

headphones-kidTop 40 and Mainstream AC aren’t supposed to run on the same paradigm, of course. In ways other than power rotation, CHR has taken various programming tenets from AC and Country (particularly a blurring of the lines between current and recurrent), and I’m not sure that has helped either, particularly as the format tries to sort out how to acknowledge and rotate the many stories created by streaming. But our belief that listeners consciously want every format to be programmed for listenability over longer spans except CHR, Rhythmic CHR, and Hip-Hop/R&B, may reflect industry habit more than COVID-era usage.

We also should consider whether the current CHR product supports an average spin of 119x a week. CHR is currently plagued by glacial turnover among powers and brutal churn among sub-powers, leaving few songs able to make the leap to power. Besides the nine-month run of The Weeknd’s “Blinding Lights” in power, CHR has also seen many stations go from playing two powers by Dua Lipa, one of them effectively a recurrent, to two powers from Harry Styles, one of them also effectively a recurrent. The upshot is that an artist with three CHR hits (Lipa) and an artist whose only solo CHR hits are his currents (Styles) are separated by a half-hour or less, thus also increasing the claustrophobia of the format.

If you’re one of the European programmers reading this column on Powergold’s site, you are correct in noting that the ultra-high-spins are a particularly U.S. issue. In the U.K., the top spin among the three CHR networks is 81x a week. (In Canada, only one top 10 market CHR cracks the 100x level in a given week.) It’s also worth noting that European listening levels have remained comparatively strong over the last six months, and many of them have relaxed rotations. So have some medium-market U.S. CHRs with more relaxed rotations.

Long-term, more than power rotations are likely to change at CHR as stations grapple with the format’s multiple competitors and multiple issues. The intent here is only to suggest if the threshold between “you are always playing my favorite songs” and “you are always playing the same damn songs” is perhaps lower than we think it is. Instinctively, I now wonder if the sweet spot is somewhere more like 100x a week than 120x—still aggressive and hit-driven, but not draconian.

There are numerous other challenges from our contracting corporations to our competition to the world we live in. But there’s little evidence at the moment that the thing listeners need now from CHR is the same song every 1:10 for nine months.

Sean Ross is a veteran programmer, researcher, and the author of the Ross On Radio newsletter. Find him or subscribe free @RossOnRadio on Twitter. Contact him at rossonradio@comcast.net

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Rebuild Morning Drive, Don’t Move It To Middays

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What do radio listeners want during the workday now? Do they want continuity? Do they want the morning show they’re not hearing anymore in the car on the way to work?

I’ve been wondering for a few months now how the audience of the AC radio station I schedule is hearing the things I do. Playing a power at 9 a.m. Tuesday and 3:30 p.m. on Wednesday would have been OK before on this station. Now, I wonder if any repetition on two consecutive workdays makes the “Groundhog Day” syndrome worse. Is “Every Breath You Take” becoming “I Got You Babe”?

At the same time, I’ve also wondered which basic tenets of scheduling still matter. What’s AM/PM drive protection if there is, effectively, no AM or PM drive commute for so many people? I’ve never known for sure if listeners notice the same song in the 3 p.m. hour on consecutive Wednesdays, but it seemed like a reasonable thing to avoid when possible. But now listeners aren’t even sure if today is Wednesday.

I’ve also noticed the success in the U.S. of some stations that wouldn’t have been big winners in the metered listening measurement era before. Whether it’s the Classical stations in Washington, D.C., and Seattle, or the Classic Country station in Cincinnati, or the ongoing success of Contemporary Christian KLTY Dallas, formats programmed for long stretches of Time Spent Listening, something which has been against PPM law for the last decade.

While I’ve been wondering if my station needs a little more variety, some U.S. broadcasters have made a more dramatic change. Almost from the beginning of the pandemic, stations have been extending their morning shows past 10 a.m. The changes have been spurred by the clearly reduced morning usage in a world without commutes, and by a stated desire to provide comforting, familiar voices when listeners need them.

But the changes have likely been driven by other factors as well. As broadcasters have scrambled both logistically and with budget issues, it’s natural to want to move the morning show until 11 a.m. or Noon. Finding them a place is probably going to take precedent over a midday show that may have already been voice-tracked anyway.

A few weeks into the pandemic, I heard a well-known CHR that was suddenly jockless in middays and it sounded wrong, just one more eerie disruption of normalcy. But I heard another CHR where the morning team was on at 11 a.m., and trying to fill time with boilerplate topics of the “does pineapple belong on pizza?” variety. When April and May ratings came out, neither station did well.

Two weeks ago, the “morning show until Noon” strategy got a further boost after the widely reported Edison Research finding that the average day of audio use that had begun at 7:15 a.m. pre-COVID was now starting at 8:30 a.m. Some broadcasters are interpreting this as “morning drive starts later. Stand by for the 10:30 phony phone call.” I’m thinking it means “morning drive is on hold for now.”

Part of that is the relative stability of midday listening for adult-leaning formats. In the course of trying to parse what listeners wanted from middays on my AC station, and others, I asked Nielsen’s audience insights director Jon Miller to analyze the usage of 20 stations in a variety of adult formats—Country, Classic Hits, Adult Contemporary, Soft AC, Adult R&B, Classic Rock.

M-F 6a-7p P12+

Avg Daily Occasions

Avg Daily P1 Occasions

Avg Daily Time Spent per Occasion (mins)

Avg Daily P1 Time Spent per Occasion (mins)

Mar 2020

4.2

5.9

13

14

June 2020

4.3

6.0

13

14

P25-54

Mar 2020

4.0

5.9

13

14

June 2020

3.9

5.4

13

13

M-F 10a-3p P12+

 

 

 

 

Mar 2020

3.4

4.3

13

14

June 2020

3.5

4.4

13

14

P25-54

Mar 2020

3.3

4.3

13

14

June 2020

3.2

4.0

13

14

While those formats had been affected by lower cumes, like all others, Miller found that the number and duration of occasions for these formats had remained mostly unchanged since the pandemic for those listeners that remained. In addition, the spike in listening levels around 7-9 a.m. and 3-5 p.m. were gone, leaving daytime listening as more of a bell curve, peaking around Noon. 

Some broadcasters have interpreted the Edison data as suggesting that daily routines, including wanting to hear your favourite morning team, are just being shifted later. But with morning radio having been so dependent on in-car listening, and so fragmented elsewhere by everything from phone alarms to greater competition with TV, I wonder if listeners are just skipping ahead to the second phase of their audio usage, the at-work piece. And if that’s so, do they want that content to change?

That brings me back to the scheduling questions. In North America, consultants and programmers tell me that they’re not making a lot of changes in their rules or overall scheduling philosophy. They’re trying to provide continuity. As one consultant noted, continuity is the thing that radio can offer listeners now. To be fair, I’ve spoken to analysts and programmers I respect who think the all-morning morning show makes sense. But others see it as disrupting the one usage people are happy with.

It is also worth noting here that European radio is seeing sharper climbs in TSL. Powergold’s Steve Silby notes that programmers are indeed scheduling for longer listening stretches, not necessarily by slowing down powers, but by better managing the level of variety below them. Red-FM Athens PD Christos Papadas hasn’t made any major changes, but he was already scheduling for long listening spans. It’s also significant that European workday listeners are more used to hearing news during the day—even when we’re not in a time of crisis—and more personality, just not a breakfast show.

Given the number of unhosted shifts on radio at a time when listeners need companionship, one option might be to reassign morning team members for now to make sure as many shifts are hosted as possible. If we want to reach listeners when they’re available, without disrupting midday usage, one option might be having one member host mornings, one host middays, and having them do an hour of crossover together at, say, 8:30-9:30 a.m.

As for at-work radio, maybe it needs to remain at-work radio, regardless of where at-work is. Maybe morning shows, rather than diffusing that usage for two hours, need to create new morning listening habits because in-car usage may never be the same, even post pandemic. The challenges in doing so are well documented, particularly at a time when marketing is difficult. But morning teams have advantages in being established, comforting presences, and radio has an advantage in local information. It is possible that listeners don’t want those things before 8:30, I suppose. But maybe they just haven’t been asked lately.

Sean Ross is a veteran programmer, researcher, and the author of the Ross On Radio newsletter. Find him or subscribe free @RossOnRadio on Twitter. Contact him at rossonradio@comcast.net

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Music Scheduling & Song Libraries: How To Apply ‘Less = More’

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by Thomas Giger of www.radioiloveit.com

Playing fewer songs means playing more hits, but can you use your focused library of best-testing songs even more effectively?

Listeners’ increasingly busy lives and multiplying choices have led to multi-tasking and shorter attention spans. Every time you’re playing something that’s less than a favorite, you do so at the risk of having your listener switch to something else — a format competitor, a different medium, or another activity. One way to engage your audience is by optimizing your content and tightening your library, but how do you do that and avoid the perception of ‘repetition’ when scheduling a limited playlist?

‘Your commuting audience will thank you for it’

Consider implementing a non-repetition rule for (secondary) songs in drive time hours (image: 123RF / Khongkit Wiriyachan)

Consider implementing a non-repetition rule for (secondary) songs in drive time hours (image: 123RF / Khongkit Wiriyachan)

Highlight your target’s favorites
Repetition isn’t always ‘repetition.’ When people crave a certain track, hearing it again never feels ‘too often.’ Browsing YouTube or Spotify, have you ever played the same song several times (in a row) in one session, just because you loved it so much? Chances are you have.

You’ll naturally play more top songs when you tighten your music list. If your competitor is playing the 100 greatest hits for your format, and you’re featuring the 99 greatest ones, then theoretically, every 99 songs, you’ll play a bigger hit and have an overall stronger music mix. Of course, favorites are often subject to change, so regular, reliable research can help ensure your success.

Improve your category ratio
It’s key to play only the best-testing songs very frequently (and to keep monitoring their popularity, as higher exposure may lead to a quicker burn compared to songs in lower rotation). But it’s also important to, at the same time, play less-than-best-testing songs less frequently. When people hear those secondaries too often, the repetition will become more of an issue than when it happens to songs they love.

You can increase the benefit of best-testing titles by increasing the frequency with which they appear compared to other songs in your format clock, in other words: improve your power vs. secondary song exposure. I’d aim for a minimum of 1:1 (one power song for every secondary title), but in a crowded market with several competitors, you may go as far as 2:1 (two power tracks for every secondary work) to reward your audience for staying tuned.

Tweak your song rotations
‘Repetition’ complaints could also be caused by repetitive patterns in song positioning. A natural turnover of 18 hours (3 x 6 hours, while a day includes 4 x 6 = 24 hours) with two slots an hour for 54 songs would soon make the pattern very predictable. Improve that with an odd category turnover of 17 or 19 hours, combined with an even category load, like those same 54 songs. Purely looking at mathematical rotations, it takes some time before a certain song will reappear in the same hour.

To optimize the number of songs per category, you want to analyze your category rotation patterns, making sure they’re out of sync with others. It stops the same songs from appearing next (or too close) to one another. Separation rules can help as well, like forbidding a (secondary) song playing in (8-9 a.m.) mornings to repeat in (5-6 p.m.) afternoons on the same day and/or (8-9 a.m.) in the next morning. Your commuting audience will thank you for it.

‘Any time of the day, the overall quality of music goes up’ 

Gold & recurrent song recycling offers day timers & nigh shifters a great experience (image: Thomas Giger)

Gold & recurrent song recycling offers day timers & nigh shifters a great experience (image: Thomas Giger)

“Future Move” your recurrents & golds
Remember how it feels when you rediscover a cool song you haven’t heard in awhile? You can create a constant “wow” factor for your audience using Powergold’s Future Moves feature; the manual or automated moving of songs (usually of, mainly secondary, recurrents and gold) in and out of rotation after a certain time. Doing this on a regular basis, like every few weeks or months, helps you achieve a constant image of playlist freshness and library depth, without actually adding songs!

There are multiple ways of Future Moving titles, frequently based on exposure. Songs of a certain category that have been active the longest are moved out and rested (inside an inactive ‘hold’ category), while songs of the same category that have been inactive the longest are moved back and activated. And there can be different sizes of Future Moves batches, like from a few fresh sprinkles a week to a big category chunk a month. It all depends on your programming goals.

Packet your border songs
Another scheduling technique is packeting; Future Moving songs without switching them inactive. Grouping two or more songs into one set allows your scheduling software to play, for example, the most rested song within that packet of songs. You can use packeting to limit the exposure of risky tracks on the outer edge for your format in terms of sound/texture (e.g. very slow, soft songs within up-tempo, energetic format, or non-core artists on a star-powered station).

Just keep in mind that packeted songs will play less often. If you have 4 songs in a packet, each of those, theoretically, will only receive 25% of their normal airplay — so it’s better to use packeting for secondary categories only, making sure your best-testing songs in your power categories receive the full airplay they deserve. Packeting can be used to increase the appeal of any category by grouping together the lowest-scoring songs, thus allowing higher-scoring songs to rotate faster.

Recycle your daytime logs
Unless your market is a 24/7 major metropolitan area, you can easily replay some daytime music (golds and recurrents; not your currents) at late night and overnight hours. People working a 9-to-5 job often sleep between midnight and 6 a.m., while night workers sleep during daytime, so hardly anyone will notice the repeat. Furthermore, gold & recurrent recycling offers both daytime workers and night owls a great experience as any time of the day, the overall quality of music goes up.

You can spread your catalog over more days; using your database more effectively. Your power golds and power recurrents will rotate less frequently over the course of several weekdays – something you can easily solve by tightening your playlist accordingly and leaving out ‘low testers,’ strengthening your overall output. As nighttime hours require more music, recycle more songs into overnights than you would need during the day. You can repeat your classics from 9 a.m.- 5 p.m. / 10 a.m.-4 p.m., and in between 10 p.m. 6 a.m. / 12 a.m. – 6 a.m.

31a8ca497da06282eb497b8005c82431 (1)Thomas Giger is a European radio broadcasting specialist and publisher of Radio))) ILOVEIT, based in the Netherlands, and serving the radio industry worldwide.

 

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Music Scheduling & Commercial Breaks: From Bow Tie To Hourglass

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by Thomas Giger of www.radioiloveit.com
Music stations can enhance their strategy for stop sets with thoughtful scheduling. Ideas for PPM markets as well as diary markets.
No matter how your station’s ratings are measured, you can let your music scheduling support your programming strategy regarding commercial break placement to boost your Time Spent Listening and Average Quarter Hour. We’ll first cover ideas & insights that you can use in a PPM world, and then some for a diary environment. After looking at the ground rules for programming for each, we’ll dive into the music scheduling part of it.

‘Improving your odds of getting full credit’

This PPM market format clock for Modern AC radio stations could increase your 15-minute scores in essential quarter-hour segments (format & image: Thomas Giger)

This PPM market format clock for Modern AC radio stations could increase your 15-minute scores in essential quarter-hour segments (format & image: Thomas Giger)


Maximise your content flow
Looking at the example format clock above, you’ll notice two stop sets, placed at 25’ and 50’ past the hour, which we’ve done with Portable People Meter in mind. Most music stations in American PPM markets stop the music only twice an hour; often around 15’ and 45’ (known as ‘bow tie’), a programming strategy based on Nielsen Audio’s methodology. A Guide to Understanding and Using PPM Data, published by Arbitron in 2010, defines a quarter-hour as:
‘The basic unit and smallest time period for which listening is credited (the use of the quarter-hour as a standard in broadcast advertising research dates back to early days of radio when programs were typically 15 minutes long). Stations receive credit for a quarter-hour of listening when a station receives at least five minutes of exposure within one of the four 15-minute periods in the clock hour (:00-:15, :15-:30, :30-:45 or :45-:00). The five minutes of exposure do not have to be contiguous, but they do have to occur in the same quarter-hour.’
Protect your best quarter-hours
One could spend time arguing why a meter signal from 6:06 to 6:11 gives you 15 minutes of credit while 6:11 to 6:19 results in 0 minutes of credit, or one could focus on respecting the rules — and winning the game — by making the best of the current status; our goal with this article. The idea is to place commercials strategically, using different break sizes, thus maintaining music sweeps in essential quarter-hours and improving your odds of getting full credit there.
Offering a modern variant of a classic 15’/45’ bow tie, we’ve placed a short, floating break before 30’ (example: it starts at 25’ if five minutes long, or at 26’ if four minutes long), and a longer, also floating break before 00’, creating a structure that’s a homage to another famous programming structure for commercial breaks; the so-called ‘hourglass’. It may increase your chance to get very easy credit for quarter-hours I & III and relatively easy credit for II & IV. In addition, floating stop sets could become an appointment-listening USP once people learn that your station always is back in music from your top & bottom of the hour.
Power your music format
Maximising your potential in quarter-hours I & III, as well as II & IV, is connected to great content; audience-engaging bits (effectively teased with a time stamp) and great music. Your ratio of power vs. secondary songs obviously depends on your competitive situation. You probably want at least 50% of your log to be powers, or even 66.6% like in the above example clock, which I’ve created for a Modern AC playing an equal mix of current, recurrent, and gold titles. (Note: one Secondary Current position per hour could be replaced by New Music; one Power Recurrent position per hour could be replaced by Stay Current; they’re not included for the sake of a basic example.)
The above clock example is based on a recognisable, ongoing ‘Current-Recurrent-Gold’ category flow, and a ‘Power-Secondary’ popularity flow (kicking off every top and bottom of the hour with a great song to reward appointment listening). We want to get listeners as deep as possible into a quarter-hour full of commercials (and play those at the very end). Hence the 3 power songs back to back in quarter-hours II and IV. (If there’s no time for the pre-break ‘Power Gold’, you can manually swap it with the ‘Secondary Gold’, so then that one can be dropped.)

‘Optimised for diary & CATI markets’

This diary market format clock for Modern AC radio stations could entice your stations’ listenership to bridge your quarter-hour segments (format & image: Thomas Giger)

This diary market format clock for Modern AC radio stations could entice your stations’ listenership to bridge your quarter-hour segments (format & image: Thomas Giger)


Keep your audience hooked
The funny fact that 8 minutes of listening may result in 0 minutes of credit, when bridging two quarter-hours, is a way smaller issue if you’re programming in a diary or CATI world, where ‘recall is all’. Panelists using a diary or receiving a call are less precise than meters, especially regarding TSL. Hardly anyone will remember they’ve actually listened from (to use our previous example) 6:11 to 6:19, and instead think they’ve listened from 6:10 to 6:20, or even from 6:00 to 6:30!
In a diary or CATI environment, we want to increase listening occasions and Time Spent Listening, and promote our radio brand. It’s rewarding to get people from one quarter-hour into the next (and next), hoping they’ll give us credit for a lot of perceived listening time. On the content side, appointments (“listen today at 6:10 for your chance to win…”) certainly help, just as contests or bits bridging quarter-hours (e.g. a question of the day at 6:10, and a contestant/winner at 6:20).
Optimise your music flow
When you’re a music station, your audience predominantly tunes in for your format’s playlist. How to use music scheduling to make listeners (believe that they) stay tuned from at least 5 minutes before until at least 5 minutes after a new quarter-hour? You want to play only strong songs during quarter-hour transitions — and ideally play those back to back without interruption, meaning no jock talk and only brief station imaging anytime you pass a quarter-hour mark.
Adjusting our previous PPM format clock to this strategy, we can reposition our previous ‘triple play’ of power songs to incentivise diary or CATI panelists to stick around the 15’ and 45’ mark — placing them like a ‘bow tie’ (but in this case for great songs; not commercial ads). We still kick off the top & bottom of the hour with a best-testing title, from the previous USP-idea of being reliably back in music at 30’ and 00’. With a slightly different ‘Current-Recurrent-Gold’ category flow and ‘Power-Secondary’ popularity flow, we’ve got our music clock optimised for diary & CATI markets. I hope these ideas have inspired you to create your own strategy for your market and your brand!

31a8ca497da06282eb497b8005c82431 (1)Thomas Giger is a European radio broadcasting specialist and publisher of Radio))) ILOVEIT, based in the Netherlands, and serving the radio industry worldwide.

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How To Make Your Station (Jingle Bell) Rock This Xmas

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by Thomas Giger of www.radioiloveit.com

There are many Christmas songs, sometimes in many different versions. Which holiday titles will fit your strategy?

In an earlier article, we’ve shared holiday scheduling tips and Christmas format clocks, but how do you play the right songs for your brand and demographic? We’ll feature a complete Top 40 chart for a ‘Christmas station’, which could also serve as the musical ornament on your playlist tree. And if you’re not flipping to ‘100% seasonal’, or hardly play any Christmas songs, you’ll see how you can still reflect the holiday spirit with your unique Xmas profile.

‘Don’t go broad; rather go deep’

If your market already has a ‘Christmas station’, you can make a musical difference by focusing on a particular segment, reflecting the expectations of your radio brand, e.g. if you play a lot of Jammin’ Oldies, ‘Motown Christmas’ may fit your format (image: Thomas Giger)

If your market already has a ‘Christmas station’, you can make a musical difference by focusing on a particular segment, reflecting the expectations of your radio brand, e.g. if you play a lot of Jammin’ Oldies, ‘Motown Christmas’ may fit your format (image: Thomas Giger)

Build your playlist meticulously

Jingle Bell Rock is one of most popular Christmas songs of all time, but can you still play Bobby Helms on the radio today? If you’re programming an American station, the answer seems to be yes! According to P1 Media Group’s annual Christmas music test (in collaboration with Nielsen) among listeners in the 50 biggest radio markets of the United States, this 1957 classic is actually the best-testing holiday song of 2019 — and not just in 18-54 (82%), but also in 18-24 (80%).

In general, you want to be very careful with ‘spectrum border songs’ as I like to call them, such as a familiar yet old-sounding standard (when you run a contemporary brand), a modern-sounding yet unfamiliar track (when you program a classics-based format), or a familiar yet polarizing song. An example of the latter is Madonna’s Santa Baby, which has a relatively high irritation factor according to last year’s edition of the same study (11% of 25-54 year-olds disliked it).

Plan your holiday strategy

This is where science (identifying popular songs and rotating those frequently) and art (creating variety impression and achieving great flow) famously meet! You want to feature seasonal music in the right context, first on a macro level. Is there already a ‘Christmas station’ in your market? If so, how can you be different? Does ‘100% Christmas’ fit your programming strategy and brand perception? If not, which Christmas songs could you occasionally play?

On a micro level, you want to ask yourself questions as well. Do you have enough power titles and newer songs, so you can embed ‘riskier’ tracks in between ‘safer’ ones or package ‘old-sounding’ standards with ‘contemporary-sounding’ tracks? Are your Power & Secondary category rotations staying out of sync for sufficient time? That’s especially relevant when you schedule your powers and secondaries 1:1 and side-by-side, as our Christmas format clocks  are designed to do.

Define your Christmas cluster

You can use holidays to position your brand — even if you play 0% Christmas! If you’re an Active Rock station, you may use clips in format explainers (“Heard enough Jingle Bell Rock? 99X. Real rock… all year long”). In Top 40, you can play a few Xmas hits occasionally; just be selective. Even if 80% of 18-24 year-olds apparently like the Bobby Helms classic ‘Jingle Bell Rock’, do they expect (and want) to hear it on your station? Probably not — but may might like Ariana Grande’s ‘Santa Tell Me’.

‘100% Christmas’ sounds tempting for a short-term ratings win, but does it serve your long-time brand strategy, if you’re, let’s say, a Rhythmic AC? In such a case, my two cents would be: don’t go broad; rather go deep; choose a cluster to distinguish your sound. If you’re a ‘Jammin’ Oldies’ AC with a playlist including Motown songs, featuring Motown Christmas music can certainly serve your tactics and strategy. Just test enough titles to play more than Santa Claus Is Coming To Town.

‘Benefit from appointment listening’

Instead of simply playing Christmas songs like you usually do, you can feature your strongest songs in a different, original way to create additional excitement and drive appointment listening, like a Christmas Top 40 with the holiday season’s greatest hits (image: Thomas Giger, source material: Decca Records, RCA, Columbia)

Instead of simply playing Christmas songs like you usually do, you can feature your strongest songs in a different, original way to create additional excitement and drive appointment listening, like a Christmas Top 40 with the holiday season’s greatest hits (image: Thomas Giger, source material: Decca Records, RCA, Columbia)

Increase your tune-in occasions

If you are a broad family station with a 18-54 audience, then you can play a broader mix of music for that demo. Yes, also Jingle Bell Rock from 1957 (and even White Christmas from 1942) when carefully scheduled and dayparted. Depending, again, on your station image and format strategy, you might focus on modern & uptempo songs during drive time and work hours, and go slightly more nostalgic and downtempo during winter evenings when (Baby) It’s Cold Outside.

You can benefit from appointment listening when you play your top hits in a certain context. It can be as simple as a Christmas Top 40 where you take your 40 best-besting holiday songs, and re-organize them. Like a chronological chart from 1947 till today with cool facts about key songs (or lifetime memories of your audience, including well-produced listener audio), starting with Bing Crosby’s White Christmas and ending with Katy Perry’s Cozy Little Christmas (2018).

Optimize your music flow

Another way is to schedule songs in a meticulous order, serving a broad listenership by offering lots of music variety. Make a serious effort to separate similar sounds (and recurring artists & titles), as a well-scheduled log means a good listening experience — the human touch that makes us different from Spotify and other audio streaming services. Using 40 of 57 songs on P1 Media’s 2019 list of best-testing holiday songs, we’ve made a Christmas Top 40 for a Classic Hits format.

To stimulate TSL, we’ve assigned test rank 1-20 to Power, and 21-40 to Secondary, so we could place Powers (76-82% passion score in the entire 18-54 year-old research population) in order of increasing popularity to build excitement throughout the chart, and place secondaries (71-75% passion) around these Power slots as a balancing element to achieve good variety of things like era, texture, tempo and gender. This has led to the following Top 40, with Power songs in bold:

Download our Christmas Top 40 as an Excel or Numbers spreadsheet including song categories, test ranks, release dates, sound codes, and YouTube & Wikipedia links for every title and artist.

40 — Jingle Bell Rock — Hall & Oates
39 — Ring Christmas Bells — Ray Conniff & The Ray Conniff Singers
38 — It’s Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas — Michael Bublé
37 — Santa Claus Is Comin’ To Town — The Jackson 5
36 — Christmas (Baby Please Come Home) — Darlene Love
35 — Sleigh Ride — Leroy Anderson
34 — Winter Wonderland — Amy Grant
33 — Last Christmas — Wham!
32 — Baby It’s Cold Outside — Dean Martin
31 — Feliz Navidad — José Feliciano
30 — Last Christmas — Taylor Swift
29 — Santa Claus Is Comin’ To Town — Frank Sinatra
28 — Happy Xmas (War Is Over) — John & Yoko / Plastic Ono Band
27 — You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch — Thurl Ravenscroft
26 — Santa Baby — Eartha Kitt
25 — The Christmas Song — Nat King Cole
24 — Do You Hear What I Hear? — Andy Williams
23 — Linus And Lucy — Vince Guaraldi
22 — Please Come Home For Christmas — The Eagles
21 — It’s Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas — Bing Crosby
20 — Underneath The Tree — Kelly Clarkson
19 — Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer — Gene Autry
18 — Silver Bells — Andy Williams
17 — Sleigh Ride — The Ronettes
16 — Run Rudolph Run — Chuck Berry
15 — A Holly Jolly Christmas — Burl Ives
14 — There’s No Place Like) Home For The Holidays — The Carpenters
13 — Jingle Bells — Frank Sinatra
12 — Frosty The Snowman — Jimmy Durante
11 — Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas — Michael Bublé
10 — Happy Holiday / The Holiday Season — Andy Williams
09 — All I Want For Christmas Is You — Mariah Carey
08 — Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow! — Dean Martin
07 — Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer — Burl Ives
06 — Here Comes Santa Claus (Right Down Santa Claus Lane) — Gene Autry
05 — Rockin’ Around The Christmas Tree — Brenda Lee
04 — Santa Claus Is Comin’ To Town — Bruce Springsteen
03 — It’s The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year — Andy Williams
02 — It’s Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas — Johnny Mathis
01 — Jingle Bell Rock — Bobby Helms
Create your own version

I’ve created this chart to give you a head start, as I’ve been a busy music director myself. In many English-speaking and European markets, you could play this list from 40 to 1. However, only you really know your market and its local greatest hits, being embedded in your musical culture. You also know, like no-one else, what listeners expect from your brand, based on experience and research. I would therefore suggest to use this as a base, but make it your own.

If you’re more ‘Modern AC’ than ‘Classic Hits’, then many 40’s, 50’s and 60’s standards are too far from your music core. Even though it’s a holiday context — an excuse to explore your format borders — always stay true to your brand and format. You could take out 10 or 20 songs; creating a Top 30 or 20 instead, and/or replace old-feeling titles by new-sounding ones (in bold) from the 17 other good-testing songs (71-61% passion among 18-54 year-olds), which are the following:

41 — Christmas Eve / Sarajevo 12/24 — Trans-Siberian Orchestra (instrumental)
42 — Winter Wonderland — Eurythmics
43 — Little Saint Nick — Beach Boys
44 — I’ll Be Home For Christmas — Bring Crosby
45 — Wonderful Christmastime — Paul McCartney
46 — Christmas Time Is Here — Vince Guaraldi (instrumental)
47 — Do They Know It’s Christmas? — Band Aid
48 — White Christmas — Bing Crosby
49 — Christmas Canon — Trans-Siberian Orchestra (instrumental)
50 — Hallelujah — Pentatonix
51 — Santa Tell Me — Ariana Grande
52 — What Christmas Means To Me — John Legend
53 — Blue Christmas — Elvis Presley
54 — Winter Wonderland — Darlene Love
55 — White Christmas — The Drifters
56 — Mistletoe — Justin Bieber
57 — Cozy Little Christmas — Katie Perry
Happy programming and happy holidays!

31a8ca497da06282eb497b8005c82431 (1)Thomas Giger is a European radio broadcasting specialist and publisher of Radio))) ILOVEIT, based in the Netherlands, and serving the radio industry worldwide.

 

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MAKE YOUR GOLD FORMAT SHINE, AND YOUR STATION RATINGS POP! (2)

/in /by

by Thomas Giger of www.radioiloveit.com

You can program Classic Hits (or similar music formats) using classic category setups based on music library decades — or do something different and distinguish your sound.

Playing power songs for your entire demo, yet focusing your efforts on your core target is what we covered in Part 1 of this series for Gold-oriented music stations. The example formats shown were audience-category based, instead of using plain decades or eras, but there are even more ways to build smart categories and rotate them effectively. In this article, we’ll discuss a different method to create a music format.

‘The smaller categories are, the broader you want them themed’

For a Classic Hits station playing a few hundred best-testing songs, Pop, Rock & Dance, split into Power & Secondary rotation where necessary, may be sufficient (image: Thomas Giger, source material: Sire / Warner Bros., Blue Sky Records, EMI / Scotti Brothers)

For a Classic Hits station playing a few hundred best-testing songs, Pop, Rock & Dance, split into Power & Secondary rotation where necessary, may be sufficient (image: Thomas Giger, source material: Sire / Warner Bros., Blue Sky Records, EMI / Scotti Brothers)

Define your library segments

“I don’t like using decades as categories. But what are the alternatives?”, a Classic Hits program director recently emailed me. As other music programmers may have the same relevant question, we’ll dedicate this post to it. While decade-based definitions can absolutely work, you could, for starters, consider using era-or demographic-based folders instead, as explained previously.

However, these are still time-oriented categories. So what’s a truly different way to schedule your songs? Indeed, music genres! But how you do it makes a real difference. The basics are as usual; you first analyze your playlist for common music genres. When you spin Classic Hits for 35-54 (hits from late 70s to mid 90s), your basic genres may be Pop, Rock and Dance.

Code your individual songs

To make that easy, define every genre using core genre songs. You can use those as reference tracks whenever you (re)code your songs. It helps to code every song based on ‘dominant genre feel’. The following classifications are obviously arbitrary, but that’s cool as long as 1 person codes all songs (ideally in 1 session), and does it consistently:

Pop: anything without a dance beat and without strong guitars (the safe middle of your playlist)

example: Madonna — Borderline

Rock: everything with a dominant guitar

example: Survivor — Eye Of The Tiger

Dance: everything with a powerful beat

example: Dan Hartman — Relight My Fire

Build your genre categories

In competitive markets, you may have a very focused playlist of a few hundred songs, and a small number of categories with each a broad theme — so rather have one ‘Dance’ category for all rhythmic genres (Soul, Disco, Funk, R&B, etc.) as opposed to sub categories for each. The smaller categories are in terms of number of songs, the broader you want them themed to avoid rotation problems (like extremely high turnovers compared to other, equal categories).

If you’re a broad Gold format (like Classic Hits), Pop, Rock & Dance categories – split into Power & Secondary rotation level where necessary – may be all you need. If you’re a segmented format (like Classic Rock), consider a limited amount of sub genres as music category themes. Foreigner’s I Want To Know What Love Is may go into Rock Ballads (or ‘Soft’), The Doobie Brothers’ Listen To The Music into Pop-Rock (or ‘Medium’), and AC/DC’s Thunderstruck into Pure Rock (or ‘Hard’).

‘Segueing from song to song, sometimes you’re lucky’

You could, for example, align the last note of Can’t Fight This Feeling with the first beat of Africa (image: Thomas Giger, source material: Epic, Columbia)

You could, for example, align the last note of Can’t Fight This Feeling with the first beat of Africa (image: Thomas Giger, source material: Epic, Columbia)

Determine your category exposure

Part 1 showed how to create a music flow with your desired category ratio, a concept we can expand to genre-based categories. If you’re a Classic Hits, and your mapping study shows a big fan base for mainstream Pop, and smaller ones for Pop-Rock and Pop-Dance, then you may play 2 Pop : 1 Pop-Rock : 1 Pop-Dance. You could work with Power & Secondary rotations for Pop, but may want to play only Power for the ‘riskier’ categories; Pop-Rock and Pop-Dance. The three genre categories we have here, combine very well, which matters a lot.

Playing popular music for your format target demo (and scheduling it well for a great on-air flow) is just one aspect. Having a clear proposition, delivered constantly for a consistent experience, is another. It’s important to have compatible genres in your music format. When you’re (known for) playing 80s & 90s Pop-Rock, and your music research indicates that your target demo also likes Daft Punk’s One More Time, does it fit in a format cluster based on David Bowie, Queen and The Red Hot Chili Peppers? Too much variety affects your audience expectations and brand image.

Create your jingle grid

Once you have your genre categories, you spread them out over each hour, and this is where an alternative method for scheduling comes in. You can use your station imaging as your format clock base, positioning your categories around a grid of jingles! Depending on how many jingles you have, you can put individual jingles on fixed positions, or (better) create categories for certain jingles and rotate those on fixed positions. If you’re a Classic Hits playing Pop, Rock & Dance, your imaging package should reflect those styles, so you can schedule jingles accordingly.

If you’re segueing from a Pop into a Rock song, 3 options for ‘jingling’ in between are (1) a classic, Pop-to-Rock transition jingle, which would be more complex to automatically schedule, (2) a Rock jingle, or (3) a Pop jingle! Option 3 is less common, but may actually create the best flow, because the jingle is in the style of the song that the listener has just heard, and therefore it feels like part of the song – or a ‘branded outro’. As long as that jingle has a relatively neutral ending (not too much of any genre, and with medium tempo vocals), you can start almost ‘any’ song after it.

Use your sweepers alternately

Segueing from song to song, sometimes you’re lucky to, for example, align the last note of REO Speedwagon’s Can’t Fight This Feeling with the first beat of Toto’s Africa, letting the first song’s musical ending run through the second one’s clean intro. When you make sure that song keys match or are compatible, and that song textures sound right together, you can even mix the musical outro of Can’t Fight This Feeling with a musical intro, like that of Reamonn’s Supergirl. To identify your station over such segues, you may use a sweeper or a jingle acapella in the right key. Apart from that, you may wish to alternate sung jingles and voice-over based sweepers in general.

Attaching jingle categories to fixed clock positions will help you control your flow of music genres precisely, as you can exactly choose sort of jingle should be adjacent to which sort of song. Code your jingles like you code your songs, so you can define rules, like that (in case of Option 3 above) a fast-tempo ‘Hard’ song should be followed by a jingle that (starts) in the same way. Make every hour sound slightly different by creating various clocks (by turning your ‘clock wheel’ one or more positions each time), and scheduling all clocks a smart ‘clock grid’, so that for at least 9 days (for which you need 9 clocks), for mathematical reasons, each day starts with a different format clock.

‘A music format for a Classic Hits station in a PPM radio market’

This format has a genre ratio of 2 Pop : 1 Pop-Rock : 1 Pop-Dance (image: Thomas Giger)

This format has a genre ratio of 2 Pop : 1 Pop-Rock : 1 Pop-Dance (image: Thomas Giger)

Optimise your station flow

Here’s a music format for a Classic Hits station in a PPM radio market, featuring 2 stopsets an hour, containing 15 minutes of spots. There’s a genre ratio of 2 Pop : 1 Pop-Rock : 1 Pop-Dance, and we can match music genre categories with jingle genre categories, according to Option 3 above. Apart from a main jingle category, there are Top of Hour (TOH) and Out of Break (OOB) jingle categories including 3 genre versions (Pop, Pop-Rock and Pop-Dance) in each, so every TOH / OOB can be matched with the following song (as, in this PPM format for daytime shows with full spot loads, all Top of Hours and Out of Breaks are preceded by ads; not by music).

Jingle TOH // Pop

  1. Pop Power

Sweeper

  1. Pop Secondary

JOCK TALK

  1. Rock Power

Jingle // Rock

  1. Pop Power

Sweeper

  1. Pop Secondary

JOCK TALK

COMMERCIAL BREAK xx.20 (5 minutes)

Jingle OOB // Dance

  1. Dance Power

Sweeper

  1. Pop Power

JOCK TALK

  1. Pop Secondary

Jingle // Pop

  1. Rock Power

Sweeper

  1. Pop Power

JOCK TALK

  1. Pop Secondary

Jingle // Pop

  1. Dance Power

Sweeper (may be dropped)

  1. Pop Power (may be dropped)

Jingle // Pop (may be dropped)

  1. Pop Secondary (may be dropped)

JOCK TALK

COMMERCIAL BREAK xx.50 (10 minutes)

Design your clock variants

An example of creating various alternative clocks based on this master clock, you may imagine turning your ‘clock wheel’ one or more positions to the left or right, so you will create variety while maintaining stationarity by consistent category ratios and format flow. Just slightly change song orders to continue your overall format. Moving our master clock two positions clockwise will give us the following clock variant:

Jingle TOH // Rock

  1. Rock Power

Sweeper

  1. Pop Power

JOCK TALK

  1. Pop Secondary

Jingle // Pop

  1. Dance Power

Sweeper

  1. Pop Power

JOCK TALK

COMMERCIAL BREAK xx.20 (5 minutes)

Jingle OOB // Pop

  1. Pop Secondary

Sweeper

  1. Rock Power

JOCK TALK

  1. Pop Power

Jingle // Pop

  1. Pop Secondary

Sweeper

  1. Dance Power

JOCK TALK

  1. Pop Power

Jingle // Pop

  1. Pop Secondary

Sweeper (may be dropped)

  1. Rock Power (may be dropped)

Jingle // Rock (may be dropped)

  1. Pop Power (may be dropped)

JOCK TALK

COMMERCIAL BREAK xx.50 (10 minutes)

Based on an average duration of 3.5 to 4 minutes per song, there’s a chance that #13 and #14 won’t play. If those are powers (like in the example above), it may feel a waste, and it might be tempting to always schedule two Secondary Pop songs at the very end. However, does your station sound consistently strong enough if they do play? In your music scheduling software, songs that didn’t play can be marked as ‘unplayed’, so they don’t end up at the ‘bottom of the stack’ but can be rescheduled again soon. It helps you to maximize your library and preserve rotation patterns. Happy programming!

31a8ca497da06282eb497b8005c82431 (1)Thomas Giger is a European radio broadcasting specialist and publisher of Radio))) ILOVEIT, based in the Netherlands, and serving the radio industry worldwide.

 

Please fill out this form and we’ll reach out right away to schedule your demo.