One More Surprise (Thanks To RateTheMusic.com)

And, it's a good thing (I think).

It its screener, RateTheMusic.com asks respondents how much they listen to country music radio every day.  The folks who say they listen two or more hours daily are 79% of this particular week's sample and the ones who report listening less than two hours are the remaining 21% (talk about a perfect example of the Pareto principle!).

This is important because high performing stations have a higher proportion of “P1” listeners than other stations (P1 is defined as the station that earns the most time from a listener).

• Lighter users like the very best testing songs a bit more than the core listeners do.  This tells me at least one reason why the format is growing now. 
• The two groups appear to agree on five potential "power" songs, but disagree on others.
• The non-core "likes" the Darius and Band Perry but doesn't seem to "love" them like the heaviest users do.  
• Meanwhile, they "love" Kip, Brad, Easton and Brantley more than the two-hour-a-day users.
• Among what might be "medium rotation" testers in the 60's, Keith Urban and Billy Currington perform better with the lighter users vs the core.
• Those in the bottom third of the test ranker by core positives that rank higher with the lighter users:  Lee Brice and Kacey Musgraves.

The decisions being made each week by smart programmers on factors like these show why programming music is both an "art" and a "science."

It starts with understanding the differences in the many subsets within your audience and then making intelligent decisions based on them.

For more on programming to P-1 tastes, click on Coleman Research, ARB's Bill Rose, Gary Marince, Mark Ramsey, Roger Wimmer, Arbitron Training Handbook (pdf)

Are You Dating Yourself?

What you play and choose not to expose sends a message to your target about how old you are and how old you think they are.

A few generalizations just to get the conversation started:

• The top-rated song with 25-39 scores higher than the highest one with 40-54.
• 25-39 rates nine currents high enough to be powers.  40-54 rates 4-6 that highly.
• If you call 60% positive or higher strong enough to be a secondary or power, both age groups give 20 tunes that level of acceptance. 
• Artists doing better on this test with younger listeners:  Luke Bryan, Randy Houser, Tim & Taylor, Easton, Hunter, Brett Eldredge, Justin Moore, LA and Tyler Farr.
• Stronger with the older end of the target this time:  Blake, Darius, Carrie, Gary Allan, Keith Urban, Sheryl Crow, Henningsens and Lee Brice

Music testing is as much about proper targeting for maximum impact as it is to check familiarity, burn, negatives and positives.

- thanks to RateTheMusic.com for sharing this data from last week's national test, 25-54

Mars vs Venus In Country Music Tastes

When listeners take five minutes to express their views on music hooks (thanks to RateTheMusic.com for sharing this data from last week's national test, 25-54), they're not thinking that we're going to parse every percentile, so it's smart not to read too much into one week's test scores.

However, I find it hard not to at least try to draw some possible conclusions.

1. The biggest hits are the biggest hits regardless of gender.  The best songs win.
2. Women like more songs and feel more strongly about the ones they do like.
3. Men are more critical of the songs, loving fewer of them and showing lower levels of positive acceptance on the majority of the songs tested.
4. Tempo may have a stronger impact on male positives (i.e. Zac Brown Band/Jump, Justin Moore/Point)).
5. Ballads seemingly work better with women than for the men.  (is that why Eric Church/Jesus, Lady Antebellum/Goodbye and Brantley Gilbert/Miles appears to do better with the females, for example?  Or, is it that women understand the lyrical message better than the guys?)
6. Six female singers make the male 55% pos+ ranker and five make the female listing, so you can't conclude that men don't like to hear women singers or that women prefer them).
7. Sheryl Crow/Easy fails to make the top 25 with the women, but does rank better with the men.  Carrie/Again scores more with women than the males, while Gloriana/Shake seems stronger with guys.  Is it their personal image/vocal familiarity or the song driving these differences?
8. Men don't like songs that flirt with women (Brent Eldredge)?  Yet, if that's true, why does Luke do so well?

What am I missing?  What do you see in your current music tests that's worth pondering?

They Always Say They Want Less Repetition

During the CRS 2013 session "PPM: 5 Strategies for Recall Markets" (an idea and data-packed session well worth buying the CD for if you missed it) both Jeff Garrison and Scott Huskey agreed it's almost impossible to overplay the biggest hits.

This isn't the first time I've written about this, but it's worth revisiting since "too much repetition" remains a consistent complaint from country radio listeners.

Using Pinnacle Media's "Online Tracker" here's how a typical station's ultra core heavy users responded this week as they were asked after hearing a song hook whether they wanted to hear every current the station was playing "more" or "less," when ranked by the highest "play less" scores in the test:

If you hear "too much repetition" from the folks who listen to your station an hour a day or more, I think that what they are really saying is that the don't like some of the songs you play.

High passion + low dislike = songs they want to hear more!

As "Loyal" As Jerry

All good radio sales people have two common characteristics:  One, they want to make as much money for themselves as possible.  Two:  They want to help you program the radio station.

If you're tired of trying to explain why you can't play a sales-staffer's favorite new song, suggest they watch the Tom Cruise movie "Jerry Maguire". 

Cruise is driving down the road after closing a big deal.  While he's driving, he hits the scan button repeatedly, looking for a song he's passionate about.  He finds a few tunes that he likes, but it's not until he finds one that he knows every word of that he finally takes his hand off the radio.  He's found a song he's passionate about.  And because he has, he' sticking with that station.

As Thor Kolner, who did marketing for us 15 years ago preached, you want your listeners to respond to your radio station the same way Cruise does to that station in the movie.  To do that, you need to play songs that listeners are passionate about.  Finding those songs isn't always easy.  It takes a lot of work and experience.  The stations that don't play the right music, are the ones listeners like Jerry Maguire pass over.

But if the music experts in your sales department still insist on telling you what songs to add, just remind them:  It's passionate listeners who respond best to the advertising messages they're selling.

And besides, "Jerry McGuire" may be listening.

Real Life Replicates Research

Mike O'Malley told Inside Radio this week that social media experienced double-digit growth during the past 12 months for the average A&O&B client station.  Half of the more than six thousand country radio partisans report owning a smartphone. 

"Nearly eight in ten country listeners report daily Facebook usage, up from almost seven in ten in early 2012.  Although dwarfed by Facebook, Twitter usage is also on the rise.  The overall number of respondents saying they use Twitter to any degree in the past 30 days increased from 8% to 13%."

The survey also shows an increase in the percent of listeners who are either fans of a station on Facebook or who follow a station on Twitter.   

Full national results will be presented at an A&O&B client seminar session February 26 in Nashville.

Meanwhile in response to the press reports, Doug Burton of Radio Traks says he just noticed an interesting metric this week.

Traffic to surveys from Windows desktop/laptop platforms just fell below 60% for the very first time.  The number 2 & 3 OS’s have been really intriguing the last couple months.  Android is our number 2 platform followed by iOS.  Both OS’s represent 34% of all traffic the last 30 days.  Mac’s fill out the balance.

Burton adds:  "None of this is surprising, but it just fascinates me watching the trend every month.  Mobile only cracked 30% back in September!"

Whether you're streaming, engaging listeners socially or collecting their opinions, your approach must be OS agnostic and include mobile devices.

Bounce

A&O&B's Winter 2013 gold recommendations for first quarter of the New Year have just been tabbed and distributed to all our clients.

As we crunched numbers of all the local client online and auditorium tests which went into it I came across several tactics various researchers use to check the reliability and consistency of the sample.

Some folks throw in an out-of-format song that "should" not test well, just to calibrate things.

This time it so happened that the same song hook was tested twice for the same sample, once in the middle of the test and a second time at the end.

Here's how it did the first time the sample of 738 persons heard and rated it.

 

This is how it did when it played some one hundred hooks later in the same test.

On one hand, it's reassuring to see considerable consistency between the two.  Yet, on the other hand, it also shows that the judgements of a sample on something identical can change, based on fatigue with doing the test, the songs that played just before and after it.

That's why even the very best research is still called "estimates."

Radio Success Is Easy Compared To Social Media

ARB's Jacquelyn Bullerman on Social Media at Arbitron Client Conference:

Success is easy to measure.  Audience growth.

Figure out what's broken and fix it.

In social, it's not that easy.  No goal can mean random acts of digital.  There is no "experienced social media expert."  Everyone is learning.

Strategy = why are we posting?

Are connections and relationships developing as you post?

Success is the pieces becoming a "whole."

Data is not a report card on your actions.  It's a compass on what's valued by your community.

President Obama hugging Michele, biggest on social was use of social media at it's finest - Data + Content + Goal.

Look beyond Facebook insights categories go look at what types of pictures or videos you posted or status the type of pic matters

New hires aren't groomed in overnights anymore. Most radio hiring is in digital department.

If your content isn't strong, it won't matter.

A great spoken word pitch that sounds like a live read must be reframed to take advantage of the internet.  Trim "keep listening for your chance to call to call in an win" BS.

Repackage content provider syndicated content to create engagement and insert yourself into that content.  You're not an RSS feed.  You want a personal relationship with your listener via your social media which drives broadcast radio, streaming or your website usage.

Figure out a way to be smoother than just always doing ads in social tactics.

Post in a way that says I care about you.  Share this with everyone you know, because I care about your community.

Invest money in your goals.  Too few radio companies are doing this.

What Share Will Move You Up To The Next Tenth Of A Rating Point?

ROI Media's Mark O'Neill at Arbitron Client Conference in Annapolis:

How much is a tenth of a rating point worth?

Track "Persons Using Measured Media" (PUMM) vs Your Audience Flow

Example:  clean up a station's 11:45 quarter hour by eliminating a stop set and moving those units into other breaks resulted in rating point growth from a .5 to a .6.  Just doing this at a time when total radio audience (cume) is going up, got the station up to a .8 after several months of having done this.

Example #2:  5:15 pm.  Took commercials out of the 5:15 break and doubled the units in the 5:45 break.  Stopped only once that hour and within two months that quarter hour had almost doubled and the long stopset at 5:45 took down the rest of the daypart.  However, since the market's PUMM was also going down at that time as opposed to earlier in the 5 pm hour, they went from a .3 to a .6 in the daypart with just that one stopset change.

A little inside baseball from JA:  A&O&B "Post-survey Box Scores" reports routinely contain this info for both all our PPM and diary markets for this reason.  Clean out the highest/growing market audience quarter hours and place clutter into quarter hours with dwindling market audience to improve the entire daypart.
The goal:  even out the station's audience flow quarter hour by quarter hour and avoid extreme "up" and "down" quarter hours.

Revenue goes down almost immediately when PPM rating points drop, but can often take several months for the revenue to catch up with audience increases. 

Lesson:  it's worth money to do what it takes to stabilize and grow rating points. Look for opportunities within your cluster where a nominal increase in AQH would yield a move up to the next tenth of a  rating point to optimize rating point-driven revenue.  That's when the programmer and sales are on the same page.

Urban PD panel (Skip Dillard, WBLS; Jason Kidd, WPGC and Jay Stevens, Radio One) Music Insights:

More from today's Arbitron Client Conference in Annapolis:

• PPM = less "favors" for record promotion people.  There is no margin for error now.
• Songs last much longer than 12 weeks and off
• Fewer titles manage to cut through
• Some titles hold up and grow even with 2,000+ spins on them
• MScore, callout and online testing's larger samples can be apples and oranges.  As a result, sometimes MScore can offer opportunity for new things, but can also doom a song much more quickly than online testing methodology