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The Sound 94.1 now in top 10 6+ per March Ratings
- Thread starter discjockeyj1964
- Start date
As worthless as the 6+ figures are, what is true is that the highest rated stations in the desirable dayparts and age groups are the top 6+ stations with only a couple of exceptions like a key male demo for the Sports Talker, perhaps. For a station to reach the top 10 in the pack in 6+ you're getting listeners, perhaps not enough in key demos to warrant the buy sheet for the key advertisers in the market, but significant. So, where does The Sound chime in for it's top 10 status? Seattle is a pretty young market. Is it all 50+ or has The Sound cornered the 6-12 year old demo in alarming numbers? Such stations usually don't do that well, finding a spot nearer the bottom of the barrel rather than the top.
If you look at what used to be "Winter" and do an average of Jan-Feb-Mar, The Sound is 13th in 25-54. In 35-64 it rises to 9th, with a 5th place showing in women.
Per the ACS, metro area median age is now 37 while in 2000 it was 35.3; Portland, for comparison, is 37.3 years.
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AQH
Guest
The Sound has gotten where it is without a PD so far, an impressive run out of the gate.
That's a hell of a compliment to Kenny Jay. His lingering vibes keep that station going long after he physically left.
The top end of the demos looked like a giant hole after KBSG gave up the ghost and "Warm" started getting hotter. Sooner or later, some station was going to fill that vacuum. WHICH station was the real shocker.
I'd imagine that being 13th in 25-54 is not what the owners want. This is likely just a first step, although it is certainly a good proof of concept. Now comes the building to make the station get well inside the top 10 in the sales demo.
If they want to do a good job over time with the music, there will have to be a PD to implement research and do the daily log; a good log editing to get the best flow can take several hours.
Beyond that, there are promotions, refreshing the imaging constantly, and whatever talent work (training, airchecking) needs to be done depending on how many live shifts there are. And there is a lot of related work if the station wants good online and social media presence.
In today's radio, clusters are fond of having one PD for more than one station, which is an idea that bites big time. There is usually no way of creating stationality with divided loyalty, although a few have managed to do this.
If it's taking several hours to get the music log right then get a consultant in there who can set up their music scheduler to work properly. In this format you should be able to go through a day's log in about 30 minutes tops.
I'm no expert on music scheduling for a recently-introduced station, but seems to me with the potential care and tweaking involved, its going to take more than 30 minutes.
So we're talking about outsourcing the programming and staffing of a major market radio station...isn't this the kind of thing people attack iHeart for doing?
On a format that is texture based, there is going to be considerable "feel" editing. No amount of rules in Selector or MusicMaster can do "matched flow" perfectly, while at the same time managing horizontal and vertical rotations, artist protections and the like.
The first thing I do when working with less experienced programmers in texture based formats is to guide them to first looking at each hour and trying to "hear" it in their head. Then there will be song swaps, changes in sequence and even substitutions.
When Jhani Kaye was PD of KOST in LA, he had the tips and tails of each song on cassettes on a wall in his office. If there was doubt in his mind, he'd play the segue on a two deck cassette player. KOST was #1 at the time, Jahni did not need a scheduling consultant, and it took several hours to do each day's log. I've emulated the system using hard disk playback on tips and tails and generally have a low-bitrate copy of every song embedded in the scheduler.
Editing a log well is more than just fixing unscheduled songs or otherwise flagged ones. It's the human touch that combines the art of music with the art of radio.
Of course, in contemporary formats with playlists of 125 or less, it's almost pure mechanics but even then properly placing the recurrents and gold is very critical and sometimes is done in full manual mode.
And Rob's statement is even more ironic, considering where he works...
Well, the PD's in place. https://radioinsight.com/headlines/...amed-94-1-the-sound-seattle-program-director/
While Rob's post came off as extremely sinical, I am genuinely curious about the same thing. David, I am curious what you'd think about a system that could automate playlist updates, especially in what seems to be a fairly simple format like CHR. In the most manual way of running the system, the PD would manually program the system in a way probably not unlike what is already done, while running a plugin that tracks chart performance in relation to when a song is added to a station. After some period of time, the system would learn and would automatically update the playlist. In the most automated way of running the system, the PD would simply set up rules based on chart performance and what sounds good at the time, and then just let it run. The difference between the first and second methods would for sure be the amount of time spent. If the thing was thrown together at the last minute, it's probably not going to sound good, but if the PD studies long-term music trends and sets up the rules accordingly, that might work, even with fairly little work on the actual automation.
Wasn't being "sinical" (sic) at all, Bob. Just realistic. The format isn't one that requires weekly music calls, a constantly-changing playlist or most of the management functions other formats need. In a way it's a soft-rock "Jack". But the point is moot now that Smokey Rivers was hired as PD.
Oh, and the "new" KUBE 93 is being programmed from San Francisco.
Where's that?
It's a little more "intellectual" than that.
While we are getting more geographically specific on-demand data, we don't have the information on station preference, TSL, etc. So each CHR station has to do some kind of evaluation of each song they play to know from week to week whether to increase or decrease the play, and so on.
New songs have no data behind them. The station has to decide whether the song fits the format, whether it needs to be added immediately and whether they have space on the new song category to add a song. Much of that is gut feel, supported by initial demand data coming from online.
And if a station waits for data on new music, they will be tagged as "old sounding" by the listeners as they will not respond to songs that require near-instant adds.
Many CHRs do some form of callout (although it may no longer be via phone) to test the current list. That is the most important item, if the station can afford it, in determining play. And there are a lot of subsets that are evaluated, such as younger vs. older listeners, male vs female, and so on. It often involves balancing the playlist so there are not too many ballads, for example.
None of this can be automated, as much of the data that could be used for an automated system is not local and comes from charts that are influenced by a number of factors that require some form of "mental weighting" in the selection process.
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But also where it's legal.
And thanks to this revolutionary process, we get pop music that sounds like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKKI21IFuv8&t
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