MLK Day Must Have Been A Slow News Day For Radio's Trades

• Radio Ink's top story:  musicFIRST Slams NAB, Radio on Playlist Repetition
• Radio World: MusicFirst: Radio Song Repetition 'Shocking'
• RAIN:  Bill O’Reilly recommends Pandora
• Legendary programmer Bill Hennes wants us to factor in music sales data:  Programmers Take The Easy Way Out

NAB's Dennis Wharton, fortunately, was quick to add some facts to the fury:  “If the charge is that local radio plays popular music that listeners enjoy, we plead guilty."

In about three weeks each and every A&O&B client will know precisely how many of their listeners use Pandora and all other media choices at their fingertips and how satisfied their average listener is with their favorite radio station, thanks to Roadmap 2014.  If you're an A&O&B client, don't miss this free opportunity to get facts and stats to guide you in the coming year!

Weekly callout, online testing, other innovative music tests and mScore tracking are among the many tools that take the guesswork out of programming decision-making you should be using if you have concerns about your potential audience's music preferences.

You can literally ask a large number of your listeners whether they are tired of hearing a song on the radio, whether they'd like to hear it more, less or about the same.   Track this over many weeks, follow their guidance and watch repetition complaints go down and time spent with your radio station increase.

This isn't a new idea.  Radio has proven its effectiveness for more than 30 years.

Music sales numbers mean a lot to you if you're an artist, a publisher or a record company, but I hope my radio competition uses them determine their music rotations.  I'll test them with my target audience and beat them every time!
  
Finally, the only reason I'd be concerned about what Bill O'Reilly makes use of to get his music when he wants it would be if you know that he had previously cumed your radio station.

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.

"Just OK," Huh?

A&O sees plenty of callout, auditorium testing and online music research every week, and if I have a bias that drives "record" promoters crazy it's that I pay a lot of attention to it all, trying to read between the lines of it, understand what the audience is trying to tell us.

A new song comes in, I like it at first impression and review it favorably. Then, five or six weeks later, the listener feedback starts to arrive and reminds me quite often how little I know about the typical country radio listener.

As a result, I look at every bit of research I can get my hands on, so I have to say that I am addicted to Bullseye "Callout America" and love that Billboard's Country Update includes it weekly. The more different surveys that replicate similar results, the more confident you can be that you're seeing "truth," not just random estimates. I also check out the national tracking of RateTheMusic.com too, don't you?

In spite of all that, every once in awhile, I wish I could call all the listeners and ask what the heck they meant when they rated a song.

"Love/Hate" and "Passion/Dislike/Tired Of/Play Less" I usually get. The stat that drives me crazy is "neutral."

(It's a little like having your date for the evening tell you as you bid goodnight at their front door that they had an "OK" time, not exactly a glowing review.)

Three songs this week were "neutral" for more than four in ten listeners sampled, Danny Gokey, James Otto and one which really confuses me - "I Pray for You" by Jaron and The Long Road to Love - which was rated "neutral" by 40.7% of the national sample.

Love it, hate it, tired of it, I'd never guess that more than a third of country listeners would simply say that it's "just OK." Are they really familiar with the song? Or, are they just rating the hook?

That's what addiction is all about. I can't wait to see how it - and each of the others - does next week!