Exactly. The facts are very consistent. The formats that are consistently near or at the top of all 6+ ratings lists are the classic hits and classic rock stations. Nobody is complaining. In a world where choices abound, and personal music systems are cheap, people still choose to listen to the radio in very large numbers.
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radio was great when there was one owner per station
- Thread starter Gunsmoke
- Start date
Exactly. The facts are very consistent. The formats that are consistently near or at the top of all 6+ ratings lists are the classic hits and classic rock stations. Nobody is complaining. In a world where choices abound, and personal music systems are cheap, people still choose to listen to the radio in very large numbers.
Yeah....um, no. I understand there will be examples of “retro”businesses here and there, but by and large, modern wins. Times change, tastes change, people change.
This reminds me of when I was a kid, at that age when you first discover a radio station that's "your radio station." All my classmates did this around the same time of course and, also of course, our station was WCAU-FM. I can't remember which tagline we used to mock but there was a very generic liner that said something along the lines of "Playing All The Hits" and we super-cool kids would roll our eyes and follow up with "Over and Over and Over!" But you know what? It never occurred to us to change the station.
People like to complain. We all want more variety until we get it. And then it's like "No, no, no. That's not what I meant!"
Isn't that the truth Miguelito! That song you hadn't heard in years and that song that I hadn't heard in years that we both would love to hear on the radio are likely songs that would make us change the station if mine played who you listened or yours played while I was listening. Once you reach beyond the the proverbial same old songs, that group of listeners scatter in to hundreds of groups that tend not to like what the other groups like. The deeper the playlist goes, the smaller the audience gets.
Well yeah, the people you survey from and approve all these songs in auditoriums most likely will not complain. It's the other 99% that will. In other words, average listeners wanting more and music fans craving for different ideas.
What are you talking about? The testing people are not the same people who provide data for ratings. Two very different groups.
However, if you have actual documented and authoritative studies that support your views, I'd love to see it. As I've said many times, if people crave different songs, all they have to do is change the station. Perhaps sample the music from a different format, or maybe listen to some current hits. That would satisfy their craving. At the same time, if they like rare or unusual songs, there are lots of other places they can go. None of those other places attract the size of audiences the typical classic hits FM station is getting.
I got it Oldies76: the successful business model is to do radio for only 1% because 1% will surely produce the results to warrant businesses to lay down big bucks for commercials over and over. Just think, I've been doing it all wrong for decades. I was trying for the biggest audience I could. Please share the study that shows this.
The people who participate in Auditorium Music Tests (which are actually hardly ever done in auditoriums anymore... they often are done online) are a subset of the full 6+ universe that Nielsen samples for the radio ratings.
A music test sample is made up of people who listen to a particular station, format or segment of the musical spectrum. They are recruited in a very, very similar manner to the recruiting for the ratings, but only the people who listen or might listen are invited to participate. And they are well paid for taking part.
People with very niche tastes are excluded, as are those who are partisans of other types of music or other stations. There are lots of the latter, but very few who might like a certain genre but not use stations in that format. In any case, only those who listen and who listen quite a bit are asked to participate.
Radio is not interested in those "outliers"... for example, people who might like classic hits but who don't like the songs "everybody agrees on"... but there really are nearly none of those. We know this because in the recruiting for a music tests, records are kept of both the recruits and the rejects as understanding why certain people don't qualify may be good strategic information. Were there a large opportunity, stations all over would find it. They don't.
Your idea that there is a huge group of unsatisfied listeners is undocumented because there are no facts to support your idea.
That’s beyond absurd.
Maybe he meant to say "the other .99%"
That still sounds a bit high.
But seriously, in a small percentage of music tests a person who "looked good" on the recruiting sheets turns out to be a reject. Either they score all the songs alike, or they hate most of the high scoring songs. So when we spot one of those, the data is excluded from the report as their input is not going to help find a consensus.
That's not a very common happening because participants have been pre-screened to be partisans of a particular station or format.
I'd say that one of those happened once in every two or three tests... making the incidence rate about 0.3%.
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Absurd to you, but you do realize there are numerous music fan forums, threads, ideas, facebook pages, etc... that have similar views and thoughts. Many people and members wanting change in radio, wanting more music, wanting their selections and styles and programming methods...the list goes on Abraham. So call it absurd, call it what you want, there are many that will highly disagree. People do complain.
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Fan forums, across nearly any topic, are largely echo chambers that do nothing more than convince statistical outliers (and I am one in many areas) that they are greater in number than they really are relative to the population at large. No rational business decision is made because of message threads, Facebook groups, etc. Complainers may have a tendency to be more vocal, but that does not make them statistically significant.
We live in a world where people can make their own radio stations. They don't need someone else to do it for them. The small group who want their own selections and styles can program their own personal channel on Pandora. They can listen to it themselves and share it with their friends. Do you need instructions on how to do this? Because I'd be glad to give them to you. I'm not in that business, so there's no conflict of interest.
The business I'm in is programming mass appeal music programming, not catering to individual personal preferences.
You would think that if 99% of the population wanted to hear the Whitburn book beginning to end on the radio, and that was the answer to radio's revenue problems, one of those greedy corporations would be doing just that. They could do away with research because "everybody" wants to hear every song ever recorded since the beginning of time in one giant rotation. Geesh, I just don't know how everybody who programs radio for a living apparently just totally misses the overwhelming demand for that song that went to #39 in 1977 and hasn't been heard since.
Nobody goes to work in the 80s hair or clothes. Liking music of your youth does not equal totally living in the past.
Those fan groups and Facebook pages have small numbers of participants worldwide. On the other hand, the top classic hits station in New York reaches about 3,500,000 persons weekly (across several markets). That is just CBS-FM. Start adding the numbers for the format in the top 10 markets alone and you have over 10,000,000 persons... just in 10 cities.
A few outliers complain. "People", meaning the larger majority, do not complain.
You are missing the point. And that's not what I said. #39, come on. Top TEN singles!
Funny and true!
I am an outlier myself, but I know it and I do not apply my personal likes to stations.
Were it my choice, I'd have big hits from the 60's to today including vallenato, cumbia, reggaetón, pasillo, rock, folk, jazz, country, Top 40 from the 50's to today, disco, Motown, 80's, hip hop, highlife, bomba, plena, classical, salsa, dancehall, merengue, ranchera, bluegrass, afrobeat, cajun, Arab Pop, Bollywood, Celtic, Italian Top 40 of the 60's and 70's, French Top 40 of the same era, montunito, guaracha, and a few others.
I'm also perceptive enough to know that I'd be the only person in my metro that would like that.
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