Passions, Positives, Or?

Billboard and Bullseye Callout perform a valuable service each week for the many radio stations with no access to any other means of getting listener feedback on music.

One of the first things I check out each week is the national callout data:

And, later in the week, it's an email-driven survey to radio station database members:

It would be wonderful if every radio station could do this themselves each week and A&O&B clients know that we do a lot to try to help make that happen for them, knowing that fewer and fewer stations are given budgets for it which is why the national ones are so helpful as a way to compare spin ranks to audience popularity, essential to know before maintaining local music categories.

A little trick on myself which I like to play once I have the latest stats in hand is to cover up the titles and artist names and evaluate each song just using the numbers.

In this example, ranked by positive, the strength of #2 is understated looking only at that one number.  After all 16% more people LOVE it with roughly equal "it's OK" percentages and total negatives of 9.6% vs 5.6% when compared to the high-ranked tune when you fail to consider all of the cross tabs.  For A&O&B, passion is a more important data point than merely positives.  Strong dislike and negative burn ("I'd change stations if it came on the radio") are also very powerful deciders.  If you don't have access to a "a favorite, I'd turn on the radio if it came on" number, I'd want to rank, at the very least, on net positives so as to look at polarity in one number.

Even more crucial and not available in these national averages is targeting information for your station. 

• What is your narrow demo?  
• What is your primary and secondary age target? 
• What percentage of men and women in each one?  

Those are the most important things to know of them all.

Just because something is beloved by record buyers or music down loaders, doesn't mean that your precise target listeners feel the same way about it.

There's only one way to be certain:  ask them. 

Then, "slice, dice and crunch" away, until you do know for sure.