When I started covering the radio business for Radio & Records in 1983, I wanted to prove that I spoke the radio-programming language. R&R’s mantra was “by radio programmers for radio programmers,” and because I didn’t actually program a radio station until a decade later, it made me that much more determined to prove that I understood radio concepts.
“By radio for radio” was again the mission statement when I became radio editor of Billboard, where there were relatively few other advocates for the medium. When Ross on Radio became a stand-alone newsletter, I wanted it to be seen as the industry journal, in part because R&R was gone and nobody else was discussing radio programming theory that way. I was no longer trying to lay on the radio jargon, but it was a natural part of talking about radio by that point.
But I also liked to demystify radio for people outside the business. That included a column I wrote for Tower Pulse, the now-defunct voice of the now-defunct retail giant. I also tried to make myself a resource to the consumer press. Often, I was trying to engage with anybody who might malign radio just because they weren’t hearing their particular favorites. For better or worse, the advent of satellite radio and the diminishment of radio’s gatekeeping power meant I no longer had to do that as often.
Two years ago, the columns I wrote about how songs endured or faded — their “Lost Factor” — brought the Ross on Radio newsletter to a wider audience. Some were music writers, led by Slate’s Chris Molanphy, who was also a champion of my more industry-focused writing. There were also a number of radio stations that featured Lost Factor, most notably non-comm Triple-A WXPN Philadelphia and Soft Oldies WRME (Me-TV FM) Chicago, which brought music fans with no inside industry connection to the newsletter in a larger way.
There was also writing about the group BTS, which brought their Army of fans to both my articles and my Twitter feed. In one Twitter exchange, a fan said that an article I had written (advocating for radio to play BTS in 2019) was like an SAT reading prompt. (Another reader had to assure fans that what I was saying about the group was positive.) I felt both chastened and validated.
Even before Lost Factor, I’ve always tried to rotate topics for the newsletter’s multiple constituencies. But this week, I got a request from Roger Schwarz, an XPN listener who has already helped inspire one recent article, saying, “I stumble over radio programming jargon (e.g., voice-tracking) … Have you ever written or can you point me to a glossary of terms?”
Publisher Lance Venta has also had numerous requests for a similar article at my content partner Radioinsight, even though that site’s audience would seem more naturally attuned to programming concepts. So this week, I’m starting a radio glossary. A truly comprehensive list is more than an afternoon’s work. So look for this to unfold in several parts — some of my most-used terminology this week, format definitions and more in weeks to come.
When I talk about a programming concept, I’m explaining it in terms of what it usually means in the column. Some have multiple layers and usages. These are also mostly North American terms. As James Cridland points out, many of them vary throughout the English-speaking world. Here are a dozen or so definitions, starting with the way that songs are heard on the radio.
Currents: The moment’s hit songs played by a radio station. Currents roughly parallel what’s on the charts now. For years, one could safely assume that currents were songs a few months old that had not yet moved to radio’s “recurrent” rotation. When a hitmaking artist issued a “follow-up” single and the previous one had peaked on the charts, the first hit was generally ready for recurrent.
These days, the funhouse mirror of radio and pop culture has made “current” more complicated. “As It Was” has long peaked, but it is still No. 3, even after the release of two other Harry Styles singles. “Blinding Lights” was famously played as much as any newer song during most of 2020 and the first half of 2021. The 37-year-old “Running Up That Hill” by Kate Bush is actually easier for me. Top 40 radio is “rotating” it as often as a new song, and it hasn’t played in any other capacity recently.
Recurrent: Those songs on a radio station that have recently been moved out of a current rotation, but are continuing to receive significant airplay. Sometimes there are two tiers at a radio station, with a “power recurrent” that gets even more airplay. Radio’s program directors have had their own colorful terms for those songs over the years, including “stash” and “stay-current.” Recurrents usually imply songs fewer than 15 months old, although that has again been complicated by songs such as “Blinding Lights” that spend 15 months in heavy rotation, as well as the evolution of the Adult Contemporary format, whose “currents” are often 18-month-old songs that would be recurrent at Top 40. Songs go from current rotation to recurrent to a station’s “gold” library, often expressed just as “going to library.”
Power Rotation: The most-played rotation on a radio station. On a Top 40 station, “power” can be more than 100x a week. On Classic Hits, it’s usually around 10-14 spins, although a few big stations will play an “Every Breath You Take” level smash up to 30x a week. I’ll also use it as a verb when a station decides to “power a song.” I also sometimes talk about “consensus powers,” meaning those songs that reached power rotation for most of a format, and the industry now agrees were real hits. These days, only songs that make the top 5 are generally considered to be consensus hits. If a song has a high “Lost Factor,” my calculation of its trajectory from chart hit to obscurity, it often wasn’t really a consensus hit at the time.
Format: When I began reading Radio & Records, it was impressive to industry people to know both “format” and “playlist.” The latter has become common currency, to the point where radio stations now use it on a regular basis. Format means not only a station’s choice of musical styles (or lack thereof in the case of News/Talk), but also every decision about the station’s “presentation” of its content— each one of those choices is part of a station’s “formatics.” “Deep Cuts Classic Rock” may be the musical format; the choice to never talk over song intros is a formatic decision.
Current-Based Format: In the industry, it differentiates those radio formats that play enough new music to drive an industry chart (e.g., Top 40, Country, Hip-Hop/R&B, Alternative, Christian AC) from those that are mostly “gold-based” (Classic Hits/Oldies, Classic Rock). There are a few formats that are mostly based in gold/library titles, but still have charts (Adult R&B, Adult Contemporary), and I’ll usually still classify them as current-based because the new music they play is still of interest to the industry.
Callout Research: For more than 40 years, it has been the mechanism by which most current-based formats determine which songs are hits and, particularly, whether a song should be in power rotation. Often known as just “callout,” the research began with playing 7-10-second snippets over the phone for “passive” listeners who were unlikely to buy songs or call a radio station — an audience that was once radio’s chief determinant of whether a song was a hit. Callout research usually involves around 25-30 songs a week, but music research eventually expanded to include the in-person “Library Test” or “Auditorium Test” of a gold-based station’s entire library or potential adds, usually about 600 songs. Research may now be administered online as well.
One frequent misconception is that radio stations are hinging their music decisions on “Focus Groups.” Those are usually smaller discussion groups meant to influence something other than “this song or that song.” Artists or music critics are often wrong in their contempt for radio’s reliance on focus groups, even if are were right about the weight that music research has carried, so far. As other streaming-driven metrics proliferate, the value of callout is increasingly under scrutiny, particularly as it takes longer for radio to make a song familiar. But many still consider callout the final arbiter of whether a song is a hit.
Programmer: It refers most specifically to the “program director” of a radio station, but I often use “programmers” to encompass anybody in the radio business whose job influences the programming of a radio station: not just the “PD,” but also a consultant, a group program director, an operations manager (typically overseeing several PDs and/or stations), or even a station’s music director. In a radio station, working in the “programming” department (as opposed to sales) can include anybody who works in the department responsible for content. But a morning-show host might work in programming without being a programmer. You are most likely to encounter it in this column to mean people who make policy and creative decisions about radio programming. These days a PD’s actual title may be Content Manager or Brand Manager.
Imaging: Those elements of a station beyond the music or the jock content are typically “produced” –whether ad spots or the “imaging” that specifically promotes the radio station. Those can be long-form contest promos. They can be the briefer “sweepers” that go between songs to punctuate but not stop a long set of music. (In Canada, those are usually “splitters.”) A produced piece specifically intended to set up a certain element, such as a spotlighted new song, is a “stager.” A station whose production is sonically aggressive or which relies too much on production is said to be “overproduced,” although I don’t hear that one as much since “more imaging/fewer jock breaks” became the industry standard. Being overproduced is one of the things that can make a station “unlistenable” — probably one of the worst things you can say about a station.
Stationality: The persona of a radio station as determined by the various elements of its presentation: low-key or energetic; funny or straightforward. Stations like “Bob-FM” ushered in a new era where the stationality often came entirely from the imaging, in the absence of an airstaff.
Broadcast Radio: I use it to mean AM/FM radio stations and the “broadcasters” who own them. In the early ’00s, satellite radio dismissed these stations as “terrestrial radio,” and that pejorative gained traction not only among the daily-newspaper writers who loved Sirius and XM, but also throughout the industry. I regard “broadcast radio” as a good thing, even when it does not do the right thing.
Stopset: This was already the fancy word for “ad break” when I learned the business many years ago, because radio had just stopped playing 1-2 songs in a row and begun playing longer “music sets.” When I write about stopsets now, it’s usually because of their length. When I came up, anything more than eight minutes of commercials an hour was considered a heavy “spotload.” Now an individual stopset can sometimes be eight or 10 minutes. I’ve also written for 15 years about the problem of “streaming stopsets” — the online ad breaks that are even more difficult to endure because they clunkily insert other content for local spots.
PPM: Most specifically, it refers to the “Portable People Meter” with which ratings service Nielsen began measuring large-market radio listening in the late ’00s, but I often refer to it as shorthand for the era of radio programming that followed, specifically the changes in what sort of formats did well under PPM measurement, and a shift in radio programming theory (such as the dramatic increase in song rotations from about 80x a week to 110x a week or more at Top 40).
Cume: As a noun, everybody (or the cumulative audience) that listens to a station over a given period. It is also used as a verb meaning “to listen to,” but among programmers, it is often used to separate secondary listeners from a station’s most loyal “core” fans — especially when you talk about decisions that are made to cast a wider net. “Someone That I Used to Know” isn’t really considered Alternative anymore, but many Alternative programmers still play it because it’s a good “cume record.”
Time Spent Listening: The size of a station’s cume and the “TSL” that it gives to a radio station are the two determinants of a station’s share of radio listening. One of the mindset changes caused by PPM was a belief that TSL was more easily driven by having listeners come back for many brief “occasions” during the week rather than trying to get them to listen to a station in a long stretch. Yet, during COVID, with its changes in audience-behavior patterns, some formats that lend themselves to longer spans have prospered.
Voice-Tracking: The process of cutting a jock break for a radio station at some time other than when you hear it on the air. I’m aware of stations that were voice-tracked in the early ’80s, but the practice mushroomed after the ownership consolidation of the late ‘90s/early ’00s and has become more rule than exception in recent years.
Voice-tracking was championed as a way of letting large-market airstaffs provide the best possible talent to small markets, but with air talent covering more than one station or one shift at a given station, even a jock based in-house may voice-track. (It was the increasingly canned sound of radio that prompted a frustrated recent article, which in turn led Schwarz to reach out for further clarification.) A station that makes any attempt to feature personalities doing some sort of “break” over or between songs is considered “hosted.” Increasingly, some stations are happy to be “jockless” for large parts of the day. It’s rare that overnight radio is hosted now. It was once thought that stations that were jockless, even in overnights, were low-budget operations.
Next time: format distinctions.
