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Philadelphia Radio PPM Ratings: November 2018

AbrahamJSimpson said:
Your love has lifted me higher?

Oh dear lord.

Where is Muskrat Love?

I get the “relaxing” thing being beat into our brains, and ok, I get it works overall so you do it here. But the positioning, personally, just isn’t resonating with me, and it turns my significant other, squarely in the demo, off even more. I don’t have anything better to offer, but it, anecdotally, makes me think “old fart.”

I love me some relaxation, but reminding me some of the music I enjoy is, in fact, old fart music isn’t endearing me to them. Exactly the way “oldies” turned folks off, I suspect.

I suppose it’s better than “EZ favorites.”
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I think this approach is maximized to its full potential but limiting the really cheesy 70s and 80s stuff, I mean there is so much material for them to work with, they don't need to play "looks like we made it". I also think that they have a good amount of stuff from the 90s and 2k that will fit just fine as well....thinking like Norah Jones 'Don't know why'.

Another thing of note is the phrasing, it sounds less old fart to go with "relaxing and refreshing". Relaxing alone is a negative imo.
 
DOB said:
I think this approach is maximized to its full potential but limiting the really cheesy 70s and 80s stuff, I mean there is so much material for them to work with, they don't need to play "looks like we made it". I also think that they have a good amount of stuff from the 90s and 2k that will fit just fine as well....thinking like Norah Jones 'Don't know why'.

Another thing of note is the phrasing, it sounds less old fart to go with "relaxing and refreshing". Relaxing alone is a negative imo.
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There really is so much! They don't have to do cookie-cutter Soft AC. There are a ton of songs that Mainstream AC has abandoned in an attempt to go younger but which certainly still test well. (I guess I'll mention Bonnie Raitt again.) Someone could probably build a station out of those alone. Melissa Etheridge, Paula Cole, Donna Lewis, you get the idea. Go back to like maybe--MAYBE--Michael Bolton. Throw in some high-testing '80s. I'd certainly listen to that .
 
I listened for a stretch while driving, and heard a Philly-specific jingle, so a plus for that. And they played my super secret second wife, Faith Hill, so a plus for that, too. But that darned imaging voice...the more I hear him the more I cringe.

But what struck me is that this is B101 circa 1995, simply applied 23 years later. Sure there are some outliers in the playlist, but I'm talking at its core, this is basically what the B sounded like back then stylistically.

Does Donna Lewis test well? Melissa Ethridge? Beats me. Maybe there's a big Rita Coolidge contingent feeling left out in the cold and she tests through the roof.
 
Median household age here at the pot-belly stove and the candles is 63.
On two trips to and from Scranton for a funeral a few days ago (300 miles total mileage) the only WB/S station we both liked for a few exits was some thing called WWRR on 104.9.
ZZ Top .... Mellencamp ... etc. Standards issue Classic Rock.
It wasn't a bad listen for maybe 1/2 hour. I promised Linda, though, that on the way back home we'd hear the same songs.
Just call me a prophet, Dad.
'Alice 104.5' from Philly used to do the same tease. Same songs (good ones) on the way *to* Philly ; same songs on the return trip. I thought their imaging and voicer stuff was pretty cool, in an original, coarse way. And their signal reaches up in these parts pretty well. But how many times did a person have to sit through 'Midnight Blue' by Lou Gramm without getting not just an ear-bug but permanent inner ear infection?

The music director wife of my closest radio buddy was once instructed by her PD to find, for their format, 'fifteen hundred songs that sound like Daniel by Elton John'. Really. That was the focus.
So imho: if 106.1 wants to succeed at going easy and mellow, they should open the library more, instead of thinking that we AARPers will instantly take a fire axe to the radio when something 'different' comes out of 106.1.
We folks can put up with anything deeper. Or even rockier. Heck -- if we couldn't, we wouldn't be posting here and helping to do The Breeze's job for them.
 
Steve Green NEPA said:
So imho: if 106.1 wants to succeed at going easy and mellow, they should open the library more, instead of thinking that we AARPers will instantly take a fire axe to the radio when something 'different' comes out of 106.1.
We folks can put up with anything deeper. Or even rockier. Heck -- if we couldn't, we wouldn't be posting here and helping to do The Breeze's job for them.
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The boomer approach to radio always is "deep playlists." Yet when that's offered, it doesn't yield the results necessary.

If you take a look at The Sound in Seattle, which is the most successful station in this format, their library is about 500 songs. That's more than most gold-based stations, but not 1500. The thing I keep saying is a radio station is more than a song list. If a station is nothing more than a song list, people will never be satisfied. What has helped make The Sound popular in Seattle is augmenting the song list with familiar heritage personalities. The ENVIRONMENT in which those songs are presented is what will keep the audience coming back. Not just the songs. Because no matter how many songs a station has in its playlist, it will never be as big as what's available on Pandora or even in your own personal collection.
 
TheBigA said:
The boomer approach to radio always is "deep playlists." Yet when that's offered, it doesn't yield the results necessary.
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Back in 2007, someone leaked Arbitron figures on listenership to XM's channels. To date, I believe they are the only complete numbers ever seen by the public for any length of time without corporate slamming the door. If baby boomers really wanted a huge playlist, you'd think that of the three classic rock channels offered, Deep Tracks would be most popular. In fact, it trailed the two tight-playlist channels (the ones that today are known as Classic Vinyl and Classic Rewind; I forget their pre-Sirius-takeover names) by a wide margin. Even among people who had decided to pay for radio, "Layla" and "Stairway to Heaven" attracted more listeners than the fourth tracks on B sides of Quicksilver Messenger Service albums. Deep Tracks now plays the occasional familiar track but still has a huge playlist, and I'd imagine that the numbers are still pretty much the same. The added familiarity probably was necessary to keep the channel from relegation to online-only with other low-audience channels like Folk Village and The Loft, a very deep, eclectic AAA.
 
CTListener said:
Back in 2007, someone leaked Arbitron figures on listenership to XM's channels. To date, I believe they are the only complete numbers ever seen by the public for any length of time without corporate slamming the door.
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That's because XM only bought the special survey for a short period of time.
 
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For a company that loves "testing" and "studies" as much as iHeart, I don't get some of these song choices. And this is coming from a guy who loves super soft, cheesy AC. But I'm also trying to think of helping this station last. And I don't see "Neil Sedaka - Laughter in the Rain" making anyone younger than 70 get excited. I'm 42 but I'm a weird guy. Also, there are some very weird rotations. "Atlantic Starr - Secret Lovers" spins two or three times a day while "Always" spins once every couple days even though "Always" was a much bigger hit for Atlantic Starr. Then there's "Luther Vandross - Love Won't Let Me Wait" (cover of the Major Harris song). Luther's version is super nice and I love it, but the thing never even charted. Ironically WJJZ used to play it. Did they raid WJJZ's old hard drive for some of these tunes? hahaha Then the other elephant in the room ... the repetition. Can't say I can identify more than 200 songs in this playlist. Typical for iHeart, yeah. But when you're doing 10,000 songs in a row with no commercials, that 200 songs wears thin very fast. When Hall Communications put on a short-lived but well done classic rock format on 92.7 FM some years back, the first month or so had a VERY DEEP playlist of what sounded like over 1,000 songs. Then they tightened it. Good method which should have been done here. Go very deep during these 10,000 songs "a la" Sirius/XM "Love" (which by the way is in Holiday mode upsetting some fans ... so that would have been a good time to copy their playlist) and then after Christmas, tighten to your normal 200 to 400 songs which with iHearts seven-minute stopsets, will sound much more spread out and better than it does now. Just my thoughts.
 
Route 222 said:
For a company that loves "testing" and "studies" as much as iHeart, I don't get some of these song choices. And this is coming from a guy who loves super soft, cheesy AC. But I'm also trying to think of helping this station last. And I don't see "Neil Sedaka - Laughter in the Rain" making anyone younger than 70 get excited. I'm 42 but I'm a weird guy. Also, there are some very weird rotations. "Atlantic Starr - Secret Lovers" spins two or three times a day while "Always" spins once every couple days even though "Always" was a much bigger hit for Atlantic Starr. Then there's "Luther Vandross - Love Won't Let Me Wait" (cover of the Major Harris song). Luther's version is super nice and I love it, but the thing never even charted. Ironically WJJZ used to play it. Did they raid WJJZ's old hard drive for some of these tunes? hahaha Then the other elephant in the room ... the repetition. Can't say I can identify more than 200 songs in this playlist. Typical for iHeart, yeah. But when you're doing 10,000 songs in a row with no commercials, that 200 songs wears thin very fast. When Hall Communications put on a short-lived but well done classic rock format on 92.7 FM some years back, the first month or so had a VERY DEEP playlist of what sounded like over 1,000 songs. Then they tightened it. Good method which should have been done here. Go very deep during these 10,000 songs "a la" Sirius/XM "Love" (which by the way is in Holiday mode upsetting some fans ... so that would have been a good time to copy their playlist) and then after Christmas, tighten to your normal 200 to 400 songs which with iHearts seven-minute stopsets, will sound much more spread out and better than it does now. Just my thoughts.
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As a broad answer to your comments:

Keep in mind that radio tests to find out what the hits are today by asking the question "how much would you like to hear this song today?". Some songs age well, others do not and it has noting to do with chart position when the song was new.

Secret Lovers spins about every 16 hours, while Always spins ever 28 hours, roughly. Likely the former researched better than the other one.

In most markets, a mainstream classic hits station has about 500-600 songs in regular rotation, and perhaps a hundred or two that show up late at night or in overnights. There are exceptions, like 350 song KRTH, or like some very small market stations with 1,000 songs or more.

The Breeze in Philly has spun about 400 different titles in the last 7 days. They may have started with a "safe list" while they were getting local research; this is a horrible time of the year to do music testing.
 
Route 222 said:
For a company that loves "testing" and "studies" as much as iHeart, I don't get some of these song choices.
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Keep in mind we're in the early stages of this format. There's no real money on the line yet. They're just building. The Sound in Seattle played some pretty strange songs in their first weeks too. But they've settled into a pretty consistent playlist.
 
@ Big A : Points taken (especially the heritage personalities chipping in)

A side-point I neglected to add was that only-games-in-town should have, by nature, a little more breathing space with their selections than competing or even 50-50 overlapping stations in the market have. The OGsIT have, by default, less to lose or annoy that the stations climbing all over each other.

Now, admittedly, I'm a card-carrying Boomer (don't tell anyone, okay?). Worse: I've been in radio and I'm a DXer and I PDed and MDed and I collect music. There is no way I'm the average listener in any known demo.

For The Breeze, it's a -- uh -- fresh start. So if the average listener buys the idea and the premise, there can't as much harm giving them a nice meal with maybe a few new sides dished up. How can it be harmful? Where else is the listener to an only-game-on-town going to tune?

Sheesh -- I'm glad to be out the business. I don't envy the obstacles confronting today's purely nostalgia music stations.
 
Steve Green NEPA said:
For The Breeze, it's a -- uh -- fresh start. So if the average listener buys the idea and the premise, there can't as much harm giving them a nice meal with maybe a few new sides dished up. How can it be harmful? Where else is the listener to an only-game-on-town going to tune?
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Where they went before. Probably B101. The Breeze isn't really its own format, it's another subgenre. It's chopping the existing demo into smaller bits. That works for iHeart, since it doesn't have a dog in the fight. But it chops away at Entercom and Beasley. Maybe that way they can get WDAS to #1.
 
I guess I disagree about the format being called a sub-genre, Big A. Not nowadays. It was a full-fledged and freestanding format back in the Jack Wagner/Bread/Whitney Houston days. From the lists of songs I've seen, this sound is designed to skew mellower, older-demo'ed, and was a former big winner.
The venture certainly strikes me as a sort of return of the original and successful Beautiful Music stations. EZ-101's sister station WFIL tried the Paul Mauriat Of Your Life format for a while (I did some voicers for the place ; it was a p!$$er driving on Long Island tuned to 560 and hearing my wife say, seriously, 'That guy sounds familiar somehow', :)

Now, David E accurately maintains that listeners aren't monolithic ; that they don't choose one station and say 'the (heck) with those other losers.' I forget the number of stations he says the average listener tunes in each week. So I guess another question -- gosh, I'm brimming with those today -- would be 'Why would a feasible and potentially borderline lucrative audience have tried out a new station and situated a new car button for it in the first place? And if curiosity or ennui are some of the reasons, why should a station slam the vault to the music library at them right from the git-go?'

Well, I suppose we'll see in about 3 1/2 weeks what kind of effect the quest will take ... how other stations swerve .... *if* they swerve .... how the Breeze itself will maneuvre ....

Best of the Holdays to you and yours, Big A. Thanks for the great reading in 2018.
 
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