The mScore On The Year's Top Songs

Tom Taylor "Now" passes along a gem from Nielsen Client Conference/Jacobs Media Summit in Baltimore, Media Monitors President/CEO Philippe Generali's analysis of the mScores of 2013’s biggest songs. 

The measurement visually indicates whether a particular tune, gauged against PPM reports, is keeping listeners or not.

"The Anatomy of the Year’s Top Songs" studied the airplay and listener radio usage for  776 songs of all current-based radio format.  Generali terms the averages over the year:

Compared to the other formats country competes with new songs appear to have a slower adoption curve and they seem to burn out faster.

The averages of all country format tunes mScore followed in 2013 peaked in appeal after 31 weeks of play but then seem to rebound as they moved to recurrent categories and ultimately decline as usage-drivers.

Among the country hits tracked in 2013, Darius Rucker’s “Wagon Wheel” is what Generali calls "a record company’s dream."

  
*  Listeners to Christian contemporary stations were the most interested in new songs in the first weeks after they were introduced on their local stations. After that, the songs’ mScores get much less “sticky.”

*  For rhythmic CHR, the real hit songs tend not to burn for quite a long time. But Generali’s advice was for mainstream (not rhythmic) CHR was “use caution.” That fits other recent research about the desire of top 40 listeners to stay current and seek the “new.” 

*  In the regional Mexican format, the mScore line is steady – if they like it at the beginning, they continue to like it.

That IS What I Said, But It Wasn't What I Meant

With programmers looking for benchmarks or norms to compare their station to, Arbitron, Media Monitors and Inside Radio are working on a study that looks at the musical characteristics of top performing stations under PPM measurement which will be revealed next week at Arbitron's annual Fly-In in a presentation by Arbitron's Jenny Tsao and Heine.

It examines key music metrics, like library size, current playlist and turnover rate, at top performing stations and compares them to the average in that format.

Since one of the formats they’re looking at is country, Inside Radio's Paul Heine conferenced with Mike O'Malley and me the other day and then printed a few bullet points from that lengthy conversation.

In reading it, I felt a bit like Herman Cain or Newt Gingrich, wishing one of us had done a better job explaining what I meant to communicate in a clearer, more quickly-quotable manner.

The data shows top performers share remarkably similar musical characteristics with average stations in the same format. The study both reinforces the importance of playing the hits to build a ratings foundation while demonstrating how non-music programming components separate ratings winners from also-rans.

As Heine previewed yesterday in Inside Radio, the percentage of airplay devoted to the most played songs in individual formats is largely the same – whether a station is ranked first in its target demo or not. For example, nearly one in three spins (30%) on CHR stations are from the format’s ten most played songs and nearly seven in ten are from songs in the top 50 — regardless of the station’s 18-34 rank.

While slower current music rotations mean country devotes a lower percentage of spins to songs in the top 10, the percentages hardly vary whether the station is No. 1 in 25-54 (18% of spins) ranked No. 2 - No. 5 (17%) or ranked No. 6 - No. 10 (16%).

The findings of the study were largely consistent across six major contemporary music formats.

Arbitron and Mediabase — in conjunction with Inside Radio — tracked stations in PPM markets from April-June for the study: "Country — radio’s most programmed format — exhibits few variances in selecting top songs. No matter whether ranked first or tenth in 25-54, country stations appear to be spinning and rotating the same current songs at the same levels across PPM markets."

In viewing the stats, Mike O'Malley told Heine there are only minor differences in the way number one stations spin the top 20 (or even the top 50) vs. #6-10. What is outside the Top 50 creates the majority of what country plays regardless of rank. 6-10 play slightly more songs outside the top 50 than #1s (2%) or #2-5 (1%), but really that difference is insignificant. Because there’s little different in the way ‘currents’ are spun, ranks are a function of something else.

My perspective on what that might be: no matter whether a specific market is highly Hispanic, black or primarily non-ethnic, the leading country stations still do best when they overachieve among non-ethnic listeners with an almost even balance of 25-34, 35-44 and 45-54 listeners. Thus, "common thread/low polarity" songs which work to help hit that goal tend to be the same ones regardless of whether the city is Miami, San Diego, Philadelphia, Houston or Boston.

Secondly, music promotion to country is driven by the reality that many country music fans continue to purchase music on physical CDs as opposed to digital downloads and so record labels strive to keep stations in synch on the number of consensus current hit songs that retailers like Wal-Mart and Target have on their shelves at any given time, which keeps the number of currents we're all exposing to fewer than 20-25.

O'Malley made the point that, given that, smart country stations tend to differentiate themselves musically by the gold library material a station either plays or doesn't, rather than currents or recurrents.

Heine's report included the factoid that top-ranked 25-54 country stations are playing, on average, 200 more titles than lower ranked country stations: 681 active titles for top-ranked stations, 484 for stations ranked No. 2 - No. 5 and 480 for stations ranked No.6 - No.10.

Then, he added his own observation that bigger libraries and slower current rotations are one of the hallmarks of a format long on Time Spent Exposed and light on cume followed by a quote from me, “If a country station increases its rotations too high, TSE generally declines. That’s the steel sword country has: a very loyal, passionate core that listens for a long time...” which had me seeming to say that big libraries are what makes winning stations in ARB PPM when, actually, just the opposite is true.

The repetition I was talking about was spinning currents too often which can harm heavy user time spent listening, based on audience turnover that is about half for country what the contemporary hit formats have.

They need to play currents twice as fast as country radio does to be sure that their average listener hears them about the same amount.

Country has a weapon in its arsenal that CHR generally doesn't have access to, given our wider target age: high appeal gold songs as well as currents and recurrents.

However, I sure don't want anyone to get the impression that when it comes to country bigger gold categories beat tighter ones in PPM. They do not.

The main reason a country station ranks higher in a Minneapolis or Cincinnati than in a Miami or Los Angeles has everything to do with the size of the non-ethnic 25-34, 35-44 and 45-54 population in those places and how accurately the PPM panel reflects those demographics in the correct male/female balance, NOT the number of songs in their library.

Don't Focus Too Much On Switching

As my previous post demonstrates quite graphically, it's possible to improve your competitive position, depending on the time of day and day of the week somewhere between four and perhaps even more than 15% by understanding why your audience switches to other stations and when/why they switch from shared-cume competition to you.

It's also important to remember that PPM has helped us to see that there are four kinds of listeners which can impact your success:

1. Those who turn their radio on to you first.
2. Those who only leave you when they turn off their radio.
3. Those who switch to you.
4. Those who switch away from you.

Those first three are driven by brand expectations. Only the last one is driven by your formatics and execution.

The first two are your most loyal fans. Focusing too much on #3 and #4 means you're spending too much time catering to the least loyal listeners to you.

Since being top five in daily cume and also top five in daily time spent exposed is the primary success factor as demonstrated by PPM, you can't ignore any of those four audiences. Figure out and achieve the optimum balance between satisfying your core to get the most daily occasions/days per week regularity possible while constantly bringing new cume in as well.

MScore and PPM data are the science of that.

Achieving that proper proportion - as it always has been - is the "ART" of being a great talent or programmer.

Keeping (M)Score

Media Monitors’ ability to cross-reference what PPM panelists do with what radio does - on a minute by minute basis - is providing new ways to see and understand how the average person uses radio throughout the day.

For example, this chart displays the minute by minute “normal” switching average of all stations in the top 40 US metros across a statistically-typical weekday.

This chart shows a sliding four minute window (similar to the opportunities to switch during any song). Media Monitors then tallied all the switchers to another radio station (switch off is not counted) as a proportion of the average audience during these four minutes. The process was done and aggregated for all music stations in all these markets.

That is the black graph on the chart with its scale on the left axis.

Next to that, you will see the percentage of stations in these 40 markets that are in a commercial break at each minute, as one of the obvious correlation factors and for reference only.

This is plotted as a green shade on the chart with its scale on the right.

It's noteworthy that not as many people switch stations for commercials during the workday as do during the drivetime periods.

Since this 1% to 8% of the audience is leaving one station for another, when considered broadly, the well-programmed station often gains as much as it loses if not even more by careful placement of programming based on the behavior of their shared-cume competition and listeners, but the average is about 4% in and 4% out in the majority of minutes calculated.

The highest points in this switching, 7-8 am and 4-5 pm, likely occur because of these audience members changed listening location.

If you discovered your listeners doing that, what could you do to change that behavior?

Eggs & Baskets

Do country stations have too many eggs in one basket?

Eye-balling the latest ad-tracking data from both Mediaguide and Media Monitors concerns me that our format does, but we are not alone. As radio formats become more targeted and PPM's small sample sizes make rankers more compressed after you get beyond the top three or four high cume stations, advertisers naturally appear to seek out those formats most likely to reach their prospective customers making more decisions on listener qualitative.

The result: some format's advertisers are more consolidated among certain types of advertisers than others. For example, country stations get most of our total ad revenues from three categories -- entertainment and amusement, automotive and food/beverages. If you add department/discount stores plus travel in the station I just looked at, you're seeing more than three of four dollars being billed by country radio's monitored stations in the largest markets.

It's important to note that they don't reflect very much small and medium market radio, where (hopefully!) more local direct means that perhaps those stations are more wide-ranging in their account lists.

Tip to management: It might be worth looking at next year's account goals as you budget for 2011 with an extra bonus for diversification, just in case there's still another post-mid-term-election economic downturn that affects one or more of the "big five" categories of business for your format!

PS: while I was browsing the ad monitoring data, I tripped across these fast factoids:

1. Media Monitors found that with the latest week, they see increases in units for Radio and TV, but a slight decrease in Cable for BP oil company ads.

2. Mediaguide shows an uptick last week for auto ads, theme parks and beer. (Ya have to love the widget on their website which offers this constantly-updated and fascinating stat....)

In the last minute:

• 152 Ads played
• 398 Songs played

MScore: A Music Revolution

Thanks to Country Aircheck for the ink:

Looking for a reason to attend Albright & O'Malley's 2009 Pre-CRS Client Seminar on March 3? With a keynote by media research specialist Jeff Vidler, Mike O'Malley's "Roadmap '09" perceptual study and the instantly applicable work of talent coach Tommy Kramer – not to mention live performances from Josh Gracin and Jessica Andrews – its not like this platform was needing any more support. But that didn't stop Jaye Albright from adding a real kicker. This one's big.

The event's final session, prior to Andrews' musical closing, is titled, "The PPM Music Test 'MScore Switch' Is On." MScore is a number developed by Media Monitors to indicate whether a song is more or less likely to make a listener switch away from a station. And it's based on hard data.

As attendees at Country Aircheck's 2007 PPM Seminar may remember, the ability to marry the PPM's moment-by-moment listener data with Mediabase airplay data now gives us the ability to see exactly how the audience reacts to every song. But where Arbitron's Gary Marince whetted that 2007 crowd's appetite, Albright is preparing to serve a meal.

Remember, 14 markets are currently live with PPM, and 19 more will be online by year's end. Turn one of Country's deepest thinkers like Albright loose on this growing pool of data, and the results are, frankly, beyond compelling.

Here's a taste, with quotes straight from Albright's presentation:

• MScore Makes Research Look Good: "If you see callout, auditorium and online music testing, you'll see very few surprises."
• Superstars Don't Matter: "With rare exceptions, songs matter."
• First Impressions Can Mislead: "Some songs take a while to grow on the audience."
• Familiarity Has An Edge: "However, some songs grow audience with the very first week of airplay."

Of course, there are other issues with far-reaching implications for programmers, not to mention record labels. Once PPM has extended itself into the top 50 markets, how with the number of currents be affected? Albright has a prediction. The balance between programming for TSL or cume also gets close inspection.

And then there is the very real concern that a P1 PPM holder – who may be providing data for years, unlike the regularly rotating diary takers – could inadvertently become the hub around which all of the station's programming revolves. Or, as Albright asks, "Should I drop a song when it is obvious that one or two of my heavy-user panelists doesn’t like it?"

Overall, it's clear we've only yet scratched the surface of this well of data, which promises to only get deeper. "The more you see," Albright admits, "the more you'll want to see." There's also little doubt that MScore has the potential to become yet another flashpoint between labels and radio. Albright likens it to when Country started doing callout research 30 years. "But," she says, "in the long run I think it's going to be very good for all of us."

After spending 90 days drilling through data on 17 Country stations in Arbitron's 14 PPM markets, Albright has put together an eye-opening 45 minutes to cap the A&O event. Admission is free and all are welcome, save those in competitive situations with A&O clients. Email Mike (mike@albrightandomalley.com) or Jaye (jaye@albrightandomalley.com) for your invitation.