Does WEZW do any music testing?

This station has always been an anomaly to me...so I sometimes tune in and I'm never not amazed. It's a pretty small station and tied for dead-last among the in-market stations (12-plus, but still) so I always wonder if they bother to do music testing. I enjoy Soft AC (I still mourn Sunny 104.5 out of Philly) but this station's playlist is all over the place. I can't imagine "Fool (If You Think It's Over)" testing well anywhere ...but Easy plays it frequently.

Stevie Wonder into Backstreet Boys into Christopher Cross is maybe not so crazy. But "This Love" by Maroon 5 into "Lean on Me" by Bill Withers? "Don't Speak" by No Doubt into "Here and Now" by Luther Vandross? And that's all in just the past hour or so!

Is the station even profitable? I mean, is this better for them than the previous simulcast of WTTH?

It's there to sell extra ads for Equity. They can sell ads for WAYV and for a little extra throw in spots on WEZW.
The demographics of the people at the shore towns skews older and wealthier. Hence, a soft AC could survive. Of course, it's a lot more profitable in the summer months. In the winter, they could play Christmas music for 3 months without commercials.
They have built quite an online following because they were usually the first station to go all Christmas. People from all over the country listen online. And they also have many online listeners from the Miami area who confuse it with WFEZ, also called Easy 93.1 with the same format.

nkd said:

It's there to sell extra ads for Equity. They can sell ads for WAYV and for a little extra throw in spots on WEZW.
The demographics of the people at the shore towns skews older and wealthier. Hence, a soft AC could survive. Of course, it's a lot more profitable in the summer months. In the winter, they could play Christmas music for 3 months without commercials.
They have built quite an online following because they were usually the first station to go all Christmas. People from all over the country listen online. And they also have many online listeners from the Miami area who confuse it with WFEZ, also called Easy 93.1 with the same format.

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I do like most of their Christmas library! I was listening to them for a couple hours yesterday while I worked and I'm miles and miles away in Philadelphia!

Miguelito said:

This station has always been an anomaly to me...so I sometimes tune in and I'm never not amazed. It's a pretty small station and tied for dead-last among the in-market stations (12-plus, but still) so I always wonder if they bother to do music testing. I enjoy Soft AC (I still mourn Sunny 104.5 out of Philly) but this station's playlist is all over the place. I can't imagine "Fool (If You Think It's Over)" testing well anywhere ...but Easy plays it frequently.

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Soft AC is a TSL (Time Spent Listening) format, so a song doesn't necessarily need to test well -- it just needs to not test so poorly as to be a tune-out.

kevtronics said:

Soft AC is a TSL (Time Spent Listening) format, so a song doesn't necessarily need to test well -- it just needs to not test so poorly as to be a tune-out.

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Makes sense except for one thing: Why play it at all?

"Fool (If You Think It's Over)" was a nice, safe choice for many a "lite" FM for years, so it must have a history of testing well. It's a pleasant tune with catchy hook, about as jarring to hear on the radio as "How Much I Feel" or "Baby Come Back," which is to say, not jarring at all. Why wouldn't it fit into a soft AC format today, especially one that has no problem playing '70s tracks? It most certainly would test well with the upper range of the Demo Advertisers Don't Wish Would Just Curl Up And Die Already -- I mean 25-54

DavidEduardo said:

Not quite so simple. Stations know that the average PPM listening span is around 15 minutes, and they’d better be playing a strong song every time a listener comes into the audience. That means that all songs have to be positive scoring... generally a score equivalent of 70 to 75 on average, and no scores in any key subset below, perhaps 65 to70. If 50 is neutral, no song with that low an average score would ever be played as those songs don’t fulfill the “good song” promise for most people.

The PPM pretty much leveled the TSL field, with the differences between major format being minimal compared to the Diary based survey. The PPM is much more of a cume based game, with TSL being dependent on holding and growing cume

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David, what is the percentage of listeners to any given radio station who switch the station immediately upon hearing the first few notes of a song they hate? Or is the fear of "bad songs" predicated more on the thinking that teh occasional listener punching the preset or finding the station on a scan, will never listen to that station again if a "bad song" is playing when he/she tunes in?