Over the last 15 years, I’ve usually balanced my dual roles as music lover and music researcher by defaulting to “play the hits.” Playing the hits is the basis of all “radio law.” Espousing “play the hits” proves that one understands the difference between themself and the listeners (and thus the difference between a station’s air staff and listeners, when it comes to being tired of a song).
When PPM measurement took hold, programmers became almost existential about playing the hits. Rotations on powers went up, even as the number of songs deemed power-worthy slowed down. More stations played the same songs and the difference between major formats blurred further. We found that average listening occasions were nine minutes, and our strategy was not to program for longer listening occasions, but to increase TSL with more nine-minute visits.
For years, I have felt that the nine-minute listening occasion might be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Over the last two years, as radio usage has continued to decline and COVID has affected listening patterns, I have asked:
- What listeners want during the workday now;
- Are format that are more traditionally programmed for TSL gaining traction?
- How to best balance strength and freshness;
- What is the relationship between CHR stations’ rotations and ratings? Playing songs 130x a week was not, as it turned out, an automatic route to PPM success, especially as those songs turned over less. Since then, WHTZ (Z100) New York has cut its powers back to 85x a week, among other changes, and has mostly flourished in PPM.
- Have programmers destroyed the value of the recurrent through overuse?
That last article led to an interesting Twitter exchange with Hall Communications VP of programming Bob Walker. Recurrents have been the glue of Country radio for many years and Walker was one of their proponents. But last week he tweeted, “Yes @RossonRadio. The once powerful recurrent position in your radio format clock is now the most dangerous—especially in Hot AC and Country. It’s populated with fried and/or weak songs not worthy of that tactical clock position.”
And now I’d like to add a few personal experiences of recent months to the discussion:
One of the stations that I personally schedule music for is an AC station that was taking longer to get traction than expected. We were all happy with the feel of the music and the radio station. There are a lot of reasons for PPM success, but it came to this station after we became more diligent about how songs played (or didn’t) on consecutive workdays, even with the knowledge that workdays were no longer traditionally structured.
I don’t schedule them, but I work with another Mainstream AC that was plotting its current songs the way a Hot AC might. While there are some very successful ACs that will allow a current at 11 a.m. Tuesday and 10 a.m. Wednesday, this station saw sharp increases in TSL and share after loosening up.
I do schedule a Classic Hits station that has been successful in a very crowded PPM market. At a time when some stations are playing powers 3-4x a day, they have done very well without aggressive rotations (They also diverge from the current Classic Hits model in a number of other ways.)
As somebody who first scheduled Classic Hits (before going on to Adult Hits, Hot AC, Adult R&B and other formats), I had been entirely comfortable with “day-and-a-daypart” or even twenty-hour separation on the hits. In recent years, some successful stations obviously have gone far beyond that. But I’ve come to feel that avoiding the “Groundhog Day” experience is important, even if the song you’re likely to hear every day is “Eye of the Tiger” and not “I Got You Babe.”
At Country Radio Seminar in February, NuVoodoo’s “Ratings Prospects Study” asked Country radio users about their reasons for tuning out. The “songs repeated at the same time from one day to another issue” issue turned out to be a significant offender—comparable to complaints about songs turning over too quickly. In the past, broadcasters have dismissed concerns about repetition with “well, of course they’re going to say that.” Now, Country radio feels musically claustrophobic and listeners seem to agree.
It’s hard to isolate any one issue for radio’s travails (or even come to a full consensus that such travails exist). But there’s still a balancing act between reliability and predictability that demands further attention. After working with radio research for 19 years, I believe more than ever that playing-the-hits-just-aggressively-enough gives you the “hit insurance” to play intelligently chosen variety in between, which, in turn, creates enough freshness that you can “play the hits” without the Groundhog Day effect.
This is one of the very best things you have written.
Long ago… about 12 years back… Arbitron had a traveling show in which they demonstrated how stations might get shorter listening incidents in the PPM world, a well programmed station got multiple visits during the day and week.
The explanation was that people still loved their favorite station, but their PPM showed what the diary did not: people left their desk or their loading dock or their workshop or kitchen to do other things. Phone calls, coffee and bathroom breaks, meetings and joint projects with other workers, unloading the truck and going for more inventory were examples of things that broke continuous listening into “kibbles and bits”.
I had concluded early on in the Philadelphia and Houston PPM tests that faster rotations were poisonous. Unpredictable listening periods required that we even protect against repeats in to-work and back-home hours should be protected.
And that was implemented in the horizontal and vertical rotations of the example station Arbitron used in its “PPM Tour”: KBRG in San Francisco. A typical P1 listener might have more than a dozen workday incidents each day but they always came back.
When PPM kicked in, rotations were already unbearable in the Philly CHR war between Q102 and Wired 96.5. In the first demonstration of MScore, Timbaland’s “The Way I Are” had finally gone to recurrent and retention had gone up. The interpretation of the speaker was that radio was bailing on the hits too soon. Mine was that people just wanted the hits not to be destroyed.