[I warn you now, this one is going to be long. But for some of us, I hope it will be worth it.]
Sic Transit Scott Muni
Some of the listeners in Philadelphia are still shocked and in mourning this week, as after forty years (almost to the day) WYSP left our radio dials. After six years of fumbling, stumbling, and bumbling through format change after format change following the departure of Howard Stern to the wilds of Sirius, CBS radio finally gave up on “your station in Philadelphia” (as the call sign originally stood for) and moved its profitable sports format to the FM dial. With the flick of a switch (after a few seconds of dead air because of a disc jockey who wasn’t used to backtiming to an exact top of hour), 94.1 FM in Philadelphia became WIP-FM.
To say that no one saw it coming would be unfair. After all, WYSP had faced the brunt of a lot of unwise experimentation on the part of CBS. It spent some time as “hot talk” “Free 94.1″ after programming wizards failed to realize that it wasn’t talk that listeners wanted, it was Howard Stern talking. Then they tried “the rock is back,” but the rock wasn’t quite really back. They moved their hosts around and fiddled with playlists. They even experimented with letting listeners vote online for which song the automation system would throw in next. It was a mess and probably should have been put out of its misery long ago.
The death of the former top-rated music station in the market has pushed some folks into writing obituaries for music radio. Usually including such woefully misguided phrases as “the iPod generation” and “the age of Pandora,” these doomsayers are making the same mistakes that programmers all along the FM dial have been making for over a decade (if not longer). Music radio not only isn’t dead, but it could thrive once again. And I’m going to tell you exactly how it can do that, if you’re only willing to listen.
Know Thy Enemy, and it isn’t MP3.
First off, if you’re a GM, OM, or PD at a music radio station, I want you to get a can of spray paint. Then I want you to spray these words where your jocks (and if you don’t have jocks then you’d better go get some — don’t worry, I’ll wait) will see them every time they look up. Then spray them on the wall of your office so you have to look at them constantly too:
The iPod Is Not My Competition.
People haven’t been switching from radio to MP3 players because they prefer their own music to radio, they’ve switched because they prefer their music to bad radio! And let’s face it, for over a decade most of music radio has been pretty darn bad. If radio can provide a real alternative to portable music boxes, then listeners will come back.
Unfortunately too many programmers and consultants have been trying to outdo the iPod on its own territory in an attempt to get their listeners back. It doesn’t work that way. Instead, ignore the iPod and concentrate on the things that radio can do that iPods can’t or don’t do well.
Broaden Your Playlists
One reason that people prefer MP3 players to radio right now is the sheer amount of and variety of music that they can play. For example, my iPod (I know, I’m a heretic) has 6,180 “songs” at the moment. When you take out podcasts, spoken word, and comedy that probably leaves about 5,000 (give or take) different songs.
At the same time that people have been expanding their playlists programmers, consultants, and other people who should know better have pared down their playlists to a degree that’s almost criminal. When I was music director at WVLT back in 1999 (running a format that Bill Gravino and I pioneered which we called “Fred,” and a lot of other stations would execute poorly as “Jack”) I expanded our music library to over 1,200 songs and our currents rotation to 35. I was an outlier then, and even more so now when most stations seem to be limiting themselves to about 300 songs if we’re lucky. This leads to stale playlists and a feeling that the same songs are playing over and over again (often because they are; one classic rock program director I knew never noticed that Selector was playing John Mellencamp’s “Cherry Bomb” every day in the 3 PM hour, but his listeners certainly did).
And the worst of it all? It doesn’t need to be that way.
Let’s take one easy to define format: a “decade” format. Whether it’s 70′s, 80′s, 90′s, or even 40′s doesn’t matter, with a decade format you’re looking at a ten year window. If you take the top 100 songs of every year of that decade (all of which should be at least somewhat familiar to your listeners) then you’ve got 1,000 songs you should be playing. Naturally some are going to be weighted heavier than others; you’ll want to play the top 20 of each year more often than the bottom 20 to say the least. But no matter how you weight them that’s still 1,000 songs. More than enough to play 12 songs an hour for three days straight without repeating a song at all let alone in the same daypart. When you add in what I like to call the “oh shit” category (one hit wonders and other stuff that made a splash but didn’t make the top 10) in light rotation not playing more frequently than once every 10 days or so, you’d have plenty of variety to keep listeners with you.
And when you get into broader formats you have even more stuff to pick from. A Classic Rock station could take the top 100 rock album tracks of each year from 1968 through 1989 and have a library of 2,200 songs (six days no repeats). A Modern County station could take (in addition to its currents and recurrents) the top 100 country singles from 1990 (the dawn of Garth) through 2009 for a classsics pool of 2,000 songs.
There really is no excuse to only be playing 300 songs nowadays, if there ever was. In the case of music radio, familiarity breeds contempt. Mix up the stuff they know by heart with the stuff they all but forgot about and you’ll have a winning format.
Don’t Kill the DJ
The one thing that radio has that makes it stand out is the disc jockey. And it’s the one area where radio has been shooting itself in the foot the most.
The biggest, most successful, and best music radio stations of all time, from the dawn of rock until the departure of teh Howard, have been personality driven. This is one area that talk radio has been kicking music radio’s ass for ages and the bosses have never thought that what makes talk radio successful is not the talk, it’s the hosts. People like listening to their little friend inside their radio. “That bright good morning voice who’s heard but never seen” as Harry Chapin put it, who keeps you company throughout the day.
Not only should you make sure you have DJ’s (because jockless radio is boring, and if people want jockless music they will listen to their iPods or streaming music) but set them free. Throw out the liner cards, except for your calls and slogan, and let them make their personality shine through. Let them be themselves. You might even consider letting them have some degree of free rein in the music they play, picking their own songs (even if it’s only from your 2,000 song library) so that their show is an extension of their personality. Listeners will find it interesting and will thank you.
#^@# it! We’ll do it live!
The one advantage that live music radio will always have over MP3′s, podcasts, and their ilk is in that “l” word that broadcasters keep forgetting about. “Live.” Live radio is timely. You can interact with live radio. There are things that live radio can do that internet “broadcasting” can’t and you should take advantage of them.
Local, up to the minute information is one example. Believe it or not, music listeners won’t tune out of a 60-second newsbreak once an hour in drive time (or even out of drive time) if it’s well presented and relevant to your audience. Traffic and weather should be a must (or at least weather if you live far away from highways and traffic jams), as should some sports scores or even light discussion by your jocks. Let them talk about the big game that night or the night before during a talkset.
With live radio you can open the phones, too. Let listeners talk back to disc jockeys, and consider playing better calls on the air over an intro if the disc jockey has gotten listeners talking. And don’t forget to take requests!
You can’t do any of these things jockless, and you can’t do them well voicetracked. Your signal is live, so your jocks should be too.
We’ve only just begun….
These tips are just that: tips of a much larger iceberg. It’s not a magic wand, but the vaguest outline of a blueprint for rebuilding music radio. Not everything I’ve said here will work with every format, but the basic concepts behind what I’ve said will, and can do so with just a little work on your end. Please consider what I’ve said and take my words to heart; it’s not too late to save music radio but we need to act quickly.
And if you’re a GM or OM who wants to save your station, and agrees with what I’ve said, feel free to contact me. I’d love to come work for you and put my theories into practice.
“There goes the last DJ
Who plays what he wants to play …”
FPK has a rotation of course, but the DJs are allowed to go outside it as long as they stay “in format”. Sunday is Jazz until 5PM then it’s “Roots and Boots” – They were playing “Americana Music” before anyone had given it a name. From 8-11 is Sunday Bluegrass with Berk Bryant, who plays “Bluegrass, Traditional Country and Old-Time Country Music” because he loves it. He’s 80 years old and he’s been a DJ since Alley Oop had acne. He contacted the PD of WFPL 22 years ago and he offered to play his personal music collection. He started with one hour and now he has three.
He gets a paycheck every two weeks. He signs it and hands it back. And he has, for twenty two years.
He loves the music and he knows everybody who was anybody in the field. Ralph Stanley calls his personal friend Berk Bryant every pledge drive to donate $500.
There was some station politics years ago and FPL took over the two classical music stations. One of them stayed classical and the other, FPK, is now mostly Americana.
Granted I don’t know much about running a radio station, and I wouldn’t doubt for a second that the things you mention would help a station, but the future for a traditional radio station is bleak at best. I think you may perhaps change the spray paint to “The IPOD is not our ONLY competition.” But add to that, internet radio and Satellite radio. Personally, the IPOD is not really competition, its an evolution. Those listeners who have transitioned to IPOD/MP3 will likely never be back. I believe that same can be said for Internet radio listeners and a large majority of the 21 million satellite listeners.
So many businesses I do work for, instead of having a traditional radio on, have a computer playing AOL Radio, Pandora or something similar. As a Sirius subscriber myself for the past 6 years, I can tell you there is no chance of me ever going back to regular radio.
Satellite and Internet radio are only going to increase in use. I would expect in the near future that car radios will be equipped with radios capable of getting internet. This will only further spell the impending doom for traditional radio. Will there be radio in 10 years, sure, but it will never be what it once was. It’s a medium on an unstoppable downswing. The smart local radio station will see the writing on the wall and take advantage of it! Get on internet radio and satellite. Make the station something appealing to not only local listeners but EVERYONE. The successful station could market to an MUCH larger audience, the Internet, the world.
Very well said. As someone who was once in radio, I can say that you have hit the nail on the head.
Pab, you have described the perfect radio station. Maybe you should get together with some other like minded people and see if you could Kickstarter some thing. I used to DJ at the college station when I attended Auburn. Unfortunately I let my R-T license lapse.
A simple answer that corporate radio refuses to consider. It’s cheaper in the short term to fire the jocks and jukebox the station. But what happens after the current fiscal quarter? And they wonder why their multi million dollar investments are failing. It’s “bankers” mentality. The only real innovation and originality anymore is with the mom and pop shops, going back to the basics of what made radio fresh and fun all those years ago.
I have argued your premise of larger playlists for decades. The consultants always won the day, however, arguing that strangling the list to 450, playing 300 and resting 150, built bigger cume. The reason for the liner cards and the tight playlists with no room for requests was a lack of discipline excercised by the talent. They would tend to ramble on about nothing or paint themselves into a corner on a subject with no exit strategy. Breaks must be planned and written, at least in bullet points. F.I.L.O. And if freedom to add/delete tunes to the music log is given, they must be disciplined not to play favorite stiffs from home, and to look ahead to the next hour to delete similar artists/songs to prevent repeats. I hear this mistake being made by lazy jocks at shift changes. That’s why that privilege was lost. Most of all, HAVE FUN and be NICE to the listeners on the phone…never lie to them: “I’ll see what I can do”.
Great article – discovered totally by accident by me in the UK, where we have the exact same issue. I have spent many years presenting radio shows on small cable stations etc.but stopped about 10 years ago, when I found myself in a station where there was no flexibility about what I played – I wasn’t even allowed to change the order of the music in the playlist.
As a man with a library of (conservatively) 40,000 tracks, this was a bit of a limitation – there was a single CD player in the studio, with one CD next to it, that was only to be used in the event that the DAD system went down. I was used to playing music spanning essentially 50 or 60 years – you would genuinely get anything coming along, right up to the full 18 minutes of Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant”, on my programmes!
My aim was to be unexpected but not too weird, so people weren’t put off – I’d try and play lesser-known tracks by famous artists, for example, which are often as good or better than the big hits, but you never hear them because they never made the top 100 sigles of the year, or whatever.
The final straw came when I had to open a show at 10:00pm on a Saturday night with a Santana instrumental – nothing wrong with the music, but hardly a show-opener! I gave up shortly after that, only putting finger to fader again recently when I covered for a friend who works on a station where (shock!) I can choose my own music!
I totally agree that most radio stations today are no different to your ipod – automated jockless output which just makes you feel that nobody can be bothered to put any effort into trying to inform or entertain you, basically because they can’t! Personality radio has all but died, and the world is the poorer for it, in my view. Hopefully, someone will see the light and do something about it before it is really too late and a whole generation miss out on the magic of radio.
You’re right about 95% of the stuff you’ve written.
Now only three small little problems -
1. Find an ownership group who will take (what they believe to be) a risk.
2. Find someone who won’t program to PPM. That’s how we got in this shape with the original diary. Short playlists, sweep the quarter hours, call letter mentions xx million times per hour.
3. Find an ownership group who will spend the money for live jocks – with fewer liner cards.
While it’s sad – don’t think any of the above will happen – in music radio.
But there seems to be a willingness to take a chance with new spoken word formats.
Could that be the future?
Good stuff. Keep it coming!