Rob Mack is Operations Manager of Bryan Broadcasting and Program Director of CHR “Candy 95” KNDE and Adult R&B “Magic 97.3” KAGC College Station TX. On Friday when news broke of Taylor Swift’s purchase of the rights to her first six albums, he quickly turned around to launch a “Taylor Takeback” weekend to spotlight the return of the original versions to their creator along with other ancillary content. I reached out to him to provide background into how it came together. – Lance Venta

I had quite the full plate on Friday, May 30. Don’t most programmers on a Friday? It was late morning when my mid-day jock, Ryan Star, came out of the studio to let me know the big news…Taylor Swift had announced on her Instagram and her website that she had bought back the rights to all of her original work. Her original singles, albums, music videos, artwork, all of it.

My first immediate comment was “do we go back to playing the original versions now?” I continued about my day and the things that I had been working on and didn’t give it another thought. Around 1pm, I turned and glanced out the window. “Wow, Taylor took back her music? That’s a pretty big deal”, I thought to myself…followed by, “we could do a Taylor takeback weekend”. I sat on it for a moment. I had a good name out of nowhere, a fleeting thought. What’s the payoff? My morning host, Ted, walks in to ask me a question, and I have no idea what it was. My response was “I think we should do a Taylor Takeback Weekend. Taylor’s taken back her music, so we are taking you back with all her hits.”

Naturally, being 1pm on a Friday, the immediate thought is…can we pull this off in such short order? It’s easy to put the music on, of course. But this is radio. We want to do it right, with some cool-sounding production to get the emotional tie-in. With a graphic that captures the moment.

I had passed our graphics person a few minutes earlier on her way to lunch. I’d have to find her as soon as she returned. Meanwhile, I quickly typed out a few sweepers. Composed a “High Importance” email to both of my voice talents with the subject “URGENT…aka Candy 95 has an idea”. I asked if either or both of them were available to cut something quickly. One was out, but Gary McClenaghan responded just a few minutes later with VO attached. A-ha! We’re going to do this!

I made sure we still had all the original versions in the system, which we did. Next up, by some stroke of luck, I happened to have an old hard drive sitting on my desk from probably 12 to 15 years ago which was full of old imaging elements and shells. Listener drops talking about Taylor Swift. Young-sounding Taylor artist ID’s. Even Taylor interview clips talking about her latest album and the songs she wrote for it. Promos for concerts featuring her hits from back in the day. Does it get anymore perfect?

I grabbed some of those elements and went to work producing sweepers. In the meantime, our graphics designer returned and I said I wanted to go for a look similar to Taylor’s announcement on her website…gold, glittery background with some blank pages over-top and a ‘note’ written on them. I felt that would really tie the authenticity of it together and leave no doubt what we were doing.

She nailed the graphic and I got the sweepers completed around 4. We could go on the air with it for the 5pm hour. I manually added the songs in for the remainder of the day, and then Friday evening, I went thru our Saturday and Sunday logs to manually place all of the songs and elements there.

Something radio stations should excel at is capturing the moment. We’ve lost a bit of that over the years, and it’s understandable why. Jocks aren’t always live in the studio. Programmers often oversee multiple brands or markets. It would have been easy for me to go “oh, that’s a cool idea…we’ll do that next weekend”. But next weekend, that moment is gone. Radio is late and looks outdated. This was news that was happening right now. We have transmitters and apps and we ‘broadcast live’. More than ever, we live in a ‘right now’ world. There’s no reason we should lose that ‘in the moment’ element when it’s such an important part of our medium.

At 5:07pm, I played the first sweeper into the original version of “You Belong With Me”, which felt like the Taylor title that was most-fitting for her news that she had shared. A listener named Michelle sent us a text. It read, “So the way you just threw You Belong With Me in with that intro…I got teary-eyed and sang my heart out on the way home today! #corememory”

Made it all worth it. That’s why we do what we do, right there.