Add MY Vote For This Great Idea

Billboard reports:
  
Record Industry Considering a Standard, Global Album Release Day
The music industry is on the verge of adopting a global street date that could see all countries issuing new releases on a Friday, probably beginning a year from now, in July 2015, according to industry sources.

A&O&B works with many international clients and all we can say is "what took so long?"  It's an increasingly global society and economy.

Fortunately, thanks to digital secure delivery the majority of Nashville music firms have been delighted to provide promotional copies of new music at the same time it gets released in the U.S. to our clients just for the asking, but of course that has always meant that country radio outside America very often is playing songs their listeners have no way to buy yet.

Just one more example of how our business may be among the slowest to adapt to change, often shooting itself in the foot. 

Hopefully, positive change is in the air.

Researching Music: Ages And Stages

This week's Billboard Top 40 Midweek Update had a fascinating Rich Appel overview of SoundOut, HitPredictor, RateTheMusic and Mscore, spotlighting the many research tools available to programmers these days.

• CBS Radio VP of research and audience measurement Gary Heller: “It wasn’t long ago when all radio had was callout, requests, sales and gut to help determine a song’s potential.”
   
• Mediabase/Clear Channel executive VP of integrated music marketing worldwide Alyssa Pollack, who oversees the service used by 200 stations, “Rate TheMusic is usually four to six weeks ahead of the curve. If PDs want to know what songs work with women 25-34 listening in afternoon drive, we can get that deep.”

Thanks to Bullseye Research and Billboard, the country format gets a weekly look at both callout and listener database online test data and, due to the format's high proportion of heavy users compared to the pop formats, the differences between the two doesn't seem to be driven by the age of tunes.

The newest titles on the database online test were eight (Florida Georgia Line) and nine (Lady Antebellum and Chris Young) weeks.  The callout test's newest song was only four weeks old (Taylor).  Swift didn't make the top 20 with the database members.

The #1 song in the callout is 15 weeks old (Carrie Underwood), whereas the top one in the online poll was 27 weeks (Jake Owen).

Average age of the top 5:  callout = 24 weeks, email databases = 25 weeks
# 6-10:  26 vs 22 weeks
# 11-15:  10 (driven by Taylor) vs 20 weeks of airplay
# 16-20:  17 vs 12

The average number of weeks of national airplay of both top 20 rankers is practically identical.  Callout = 19.25 weeks vs database = 19.75 weeks.

There are differences between the two music test methodologies, but I think they reflect more the nature of country station loyal listener club members compared to the more random characteristics of country radio users reached by phone and their preferences than merely how long a typical song has been exposed.

Conclusion:  there are more research tools available today and a programmer would be getting only a part of the picture if she or he didn't look at all of them.

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.

So Much Great Data Your Head May Hurt

If you subscribe to Billboard Magazine, go to your June 1, 2013 edition and open it to the double truck full page of infographics ("Two Screens, One Broadcast") integrating stats from Nielsen minute by minute TV ratings and Attensity Media social media numbers created by social/streaming charts manager William Gruger after TV broadcast of the Billboard Music Awards.

Here's just a piece of it:

The red line is the estimated number of viewers in each minute in millions.  The dips are commercial breaks.  Right in the middle of the chart is 8:58 when Taylor Swift performed "22" and the next peak after that is Kacey Musgraves doing "Merry Go Round."

The black dots above the blue chart are the high points of the number of Tweets in thousands.

Ponder these questions:

• Does the content drive the social activity?  
• Does the social activity drive usage?

Both.

Does this have anything to do with your radio show?

Yes.