#1's And Recurrents

As Kenny Chesney's monster single remains camped at the top of the charts for another week. Keith Urban and the Capitol Records/Nashville promo team will have to settle for a #2 peak.

One label exec last week pointed out that the Urban will probably end the week with somewhere around 35,000,000 audience and that would be enough for #1 on about 95% of the charts during the year, but not when you're parked behind 'a Sherman Tank of a song like "Somewhere With You".'

Luke Bryan appears to be lined up next for a two-week run at #1 and should he get it, it would be Luke's third consecutive chart topper.

Meanwhile, I just happened to be a part of a conversation between WAXX/Eau Claire MD/morning cohost Alex Edwards and CJJR/Vancouver Assistant PD and A&O associate Mark Patric on how meaningless that all is to radio, since all of those songs are already certain to live for many, many weeks more in recurrent categories.

Edwards pointed out that as his station celebrates another #1 in ARB as the Fall 2010 ratings came out - the #1 we all care about - he is considering moving Lady Antebellum, Eric Church and perhaps also Luke Bryan, in spite of the impending label run for number one, to recurrent given his local research on them.

All are extremely strong songs for the station, but he wonders aloud but what he needs be looking at in order to decide which to move at least temporarily from Power & Regular Recurrent?

• Final Call out?
• Total Pos?
• Spins?
• Weeks?

Patric and I agreed that simply looking at "weeks on" in a competitive situation can be a simplistic solution, since you might move out a stronger tune and leave a weaker one in.

Here's what we all agreed were three things that usually serve to be the best compromise in what has to be quite often a very subjective judgment call.

1. Highest spins in the category...or total library spins.
2. Lowest testing score in category (Patric says he gives each song moving to recurrent a seven week total favorite average score from it's last seven tests before it moves to recurrent)
3. Duplicate artists. If power recurrent or regular recurrent has more than two songs from one artist I'll USUALLY always move out that duplicate artist. When you have one artist with more than one song in recurrent it affects scheduling.

That's how I do it. And, even better, Alex and Mark agree.

What do you do? Would you ever move a recurrent back up to power current?

Hit "comment" below and join the discussion!

R Is For Repetition .. And, For Recurrents

The pioneers of Top 40 and country radio back in the 1950's and 1960's felt that after very heavy airplay as currents, recurrents deserved a rest.  For example, Bill Drake dropped all power currents after they completed their run on his radio stations for as long as a year before carefully reintroducing them.

By the early 1970's as research pioneers like Bob Pittman, Todd Wallace, Steve Casey and the country format's Larry Daniels and Ed Salamon, among others, started testing them and learned that this potential category of music was the most familiar and popular, though also often highly burned.

Most of them played two per hour in tiered categories.  Now, many stations play a third (or more!) of their hourly mix from the stay current and recurrent rotations.

If our goal is to keep the song by song hit potential high and competitive while also addressing things that could be driving core country fan's complaints of repetition, I submit that it's crucial to research every song you plan to play more than two times a day so that you know that each tune being exposed 7-8 times a day is more powerful and familiar with lower polarity and negatives than any song being played 3-5 times and those are measurably stronger than the ones you play once or twice a day.

Ideally, that would mean that you should be testing some 70 titles every single week for burn, demo appeal and impact.  But, of course, that would be prohibitively expensive.  So, most of us test the currents and cycle perhaps 25-30% of the recurrents each week, meaning that it can take four to five weeks to track listener responses to all recurrents on the air.

That's the best thing about MScore tracking in my opinion.  You can watch every single song played each week in terms of its ability to drive usage for your PPM panel.

Of course, the minuscule sample size of the PPM panel, let alone just the "switchers" (about half of your total panel) causes tremendous wobbles so it's important to use every other research tool at your disposal so that you can make an educated guess on each play every day - is it a wobble or a real move?

1. Every recurrent should have burn in single digits, positive passion of at least 35% favorite and 70%+ total positives and combined negatives under 15-20%.
2. Don't mix recurrents in current or power gold categories.  Keep a tight rein on each category and make sure your balance is precisely what you plan in your coalition-building music strategy.
3. Make "same hour/next day" rules your new religion.  Spread out categories, artists, song types, genres, et al as widely as possible so every three songs you play proves variety is your goal following only "song power" in importance.

What other ideas do you employ to cut your core listener complaints of repetition at least in half, with the goal of improving your station's average time spent listening at a time when the majority of radio's TSL is trending down in the wake of increased fragmentation and new media competition?

I'd love to hear from you.

"Research IQ"

The best time of year to field perceptual studies, callout, focus groups, music tests? In the constant change that is today's radio universe, the answer is usually "yesterday."

And, as a result, most research companies are working non-stop, year round where once upon a time they centered their activities in the first and third quarters - when many stations get set for fall and spring surveys.

Consolidation cut back on the amount of marketing research done by radio at first back in the late 90's and early 2000's, but now thanks to internet survey and social networking tools there's no reason why any radio manager can't do as much, or even more, listener research and data crunching as was done forty years ago -- when only a few very innovative companies began to recognize that it was possible to learn more about a competitor than even they knew about themselves.

Ultimately, perceptual studies, focus groups and music testing became ubiquitous, until it became obvious that if three stations in the same format all targeted the same demographic, they'd all end up positioning themselves as "less talk, more music" and playing the same 250-300 songs.

Today, it takes a much more sophisticated approach to digging deeper into tastes and lifestyles to fully understand what coalitions drive loyalty and usage, understanding when you can "do-it-yourself" and when the findings you get from online tactics require greater expertise from one of the excellent radio research companies, who - given the complexity of our multi-platform world - are busier than ever.

Stay in close touch with your consultant as you execute research strategies.

We work with all of the vendors and can help you decide what to trend and track in-house and when it's more cost and time-efficient (today's margin for error is smaller than ever and the price of errors is larger than ever!!) to bring in a pro.

To start with, if you have the choice and your market is stable enough to permit you the luxury of not having to panic-schedule research in reaction to competitive surprises, A&O likes:

1. Full market strategic or (if you only own one station and do not plan a format switch under ANY circumstances) competitive face off perceptual study. Field this when the weather is as its worst and respondents will be home - January or February are NOT the months to do focus groups or an auditorium music test unless you live in Florida, Hawaii or a place with residents are so hardy (can you spell Alaska? Wisconsin? Minnesota?) that bad weather won't stop them from going out. Insist on having the responses to this 15-20 minute questionnaire six to eight weeks prior to the start of the spring book. Get all major decision-makers together, including your consultant, for a day away from the station to create an immediate action plan based upon it. A&O does an annual "Roadmap" online study for all of our clients, so that we can track key metrics nationally and benchmark locally. For many of our clients, this is enough to stay competitive as judged by your core, but when you see something you don't understand or know what to do about, that's a great time to talk to a researcher you trust to target a random sample, replicating the ratings methodology. It's not cheap, but it's a lot cheaper than taking action on bad data.

2. Music testing. Ideal: four 400-700 song tests annually, in the month prior to the start of each survey so that you freshen your entire library each book. And, if that is what your competition does, you better as well. Many stations do one annually and, in that case, I'd schedule it exactly six months away from the perceptual study (July-August), include written mini-perceptual questions during the breaks and invite participants to stay after for an informal focus group discussion on promotion and programming issues. A&O tracks a total of almost a thousand gold and recurrent titles annually in four quarterly online music tests which clients are encouraged to participate in. However, as helpful as this info is to trend evolving tastes of core listeners, there's only one way to find out about the music preferences of non-core listeners and that involves more than just using your loyal listener database to test music.

3. Focus groups/listener advisory panels can be used to probe issues that you may want to test more formally in the perceptual study. Or, as a qualitative followup when the data tells you that listeners are behaving in a way you do not fully understand. The key point with focus groups: know three to five action-based questions that you want answered. I would plan them in October-November and/or April-May to learn if listeners are aware of your marketing efforts and how your product is being perceived. Best: Tue-Wed-Thu (be done by 10 pm). Or, Saturday midday. Again, with today's online tools, there's no excuse for not doing this modern day equivalent of hanging out in a bar where your listeners go and asking questions, listening critically. However, again, it's crucial to understand the limitations of this and to know when to ask for a second opinion from someone who does this for a living and can take a more objective view on your behalf.

4. Weekly/biweekly online/callout/listener advisory panels. I also like a monthly 400 person in-house 'mini-rating' that trends station preference and cume, as well as tracking key strategic issues defined in the perceptual study and testing current/recurrent music two to four times per month. Don't waste your time doing it, however, if you are going to ignore the results or call for help when your results don't track with ratings. Draw your music test sample from a mix of core and cumers to your station, balanced based on the needs of your strategy.

5. Marketing/management by wandering around. Monthly or at least quarterly, invite two groups of 15 people chosen at random from the callout/online testing panel to meet at 6 and 8 pm with a member of station management who isn't known publicly - or your consultant - to discuss what they're hearing and reacting to. Mail out/email/place on your website weekly current music rating sheets that encourages at least 100 request line callers/contest players/at work database members to 'listen and rate the music." The larger this sample, the better. Balance it to be sure that males and younger demos are represented proportionally. It's not statistically valid, of course, and there's always a response bias to groups like this to beware of. However, it's amazing how candid even the folks who love your station the most can be.

6. Diary reviews/mechanical diary analysis. Every radio station should have a postal code map in the promotions office with: color-coded ARB/BBM returns by zip plus four and when available even QR code for both your station and meaningful competition. Collect zip code data in callout and database marketing as well. Correlate your loyalty marketing efforts on the geographical areas where you gain the highest AQH contributions and your conversion tactics in your competition's strongest locales.

Note: ARB mailed the 2011 Spring Diary Review brochures to all subscribers in early June and the first choices dates were allocated on June 23. A&O advises you to return the form, requesting a diary review EACH book. You can always cancel the request if you decide when the results come out that you won't need to do a diary review. BBM returns ballots to their regional offices a few weeks after each diary survey is published and now both ARB and BBM have terrific online and desktop software tools that enable you to see much of what you once could only get from a diary review from your own office.

As with everything else mentioned above, A&O will be happy to share our perspective as the next book comes out, show you how much you can still learn from a diary review you can't get anywhere else and can refer you to reasonably-priced experts who tab the data and create strategies from it every day.

There are too many low-cost/no-cost ways to stay in touch with your listeners today, there's simply no excuse for not knowing what your heaviest users think about your programming efforts and also your competition's as well.

A&O Moves Tim McGraw/If You're Reading This From Recurrent Back To Current

Here's a reason why: Tim McGraw has created another special opportunity with his song “If You’re Reading This” with a new promotion on his website, www.timmcgraw.com, which will begin October 4. Friends and families of soldiers can upload photos, post stories or make comments about their loved ones in the military. This page will serve as a living memorial to the US military’s fallen soldiers and a place to honor troops. The website will also include a live performance of “If You’re Reading This.”

Growing Your Target Audience in 2010

If celebrities are brands, and brands aspire to be celebrated by consumers, having the wrong celebrity endorse the wrong brand can be pretty detrimental.

The MBS programming staff at CHFX/Halifax does a fun, helpful exercise for the entire staff of their cluster each year at this time. They get everyone together to vote for each person's five nominations of the five to seven major country artists which they think will be driving cume growth and target demo appeal in the coming year, tab all the votes and announce the 'faces' and 'voices' from a marketing standpoint.

Of course, they also give the listener a big vote too, by ranking the number of artists with songs in recurrent and power gold, according to their local research. (pictured - outdoor for Three Eagles' KXKX/Lincoln)

Then, the magic begins when you look and listen to everything you use to promote yourself both on and off the air, realigning the visual and audio to conform to your goals!

How Long Should We Give 'Em?

Country Aircheck's chart doesn't list the number of weeks songs have been on their airplay ranker, but Billboard does, and I suspect that number may be very instructive.

Luke Bryan's "Do I" took 37 weeks to peak at #5 right after the New Year and remained in the top ten, trending from #5 to #7 last week, it's 38th chart week.

Country Aircheck no longer counts it as a current and instead makes it their second-ranking "Top Recurrent."

How many weeks does it take for a song to get to the point that it's no longer "current?"

Aside from Bryan, there are only three additional songs that have been charting for close to 30 weeks, Gary Allan/Today (alive for 29 weeks last week), Sarah Buxton/Outside My Window and Jason Michael Carroll/Hurry Home (28).

The oldest current ranking between #31 and 40 has been on the chart for 21 weeks (Lee Brice/Love Like Crazy) still had a bullet last week and between #41 and #50, 23 weeks (Mallory Hope/Love Lives On) had no bullet.

Is it that when your NAME is "Hope" you don't need a bullet to keep a few stations spinning your music for coming up on six months?

Charting The Country Format's 2012 Musical Relevance

Almost everyone in the radio and records industries decries the need for trade charts as a means of determining the difference between "hit" and "STIFF."

If you have local research, you've no doubt become accustomed to finding that there are a surprising number of tunes which "lost their bullet and stiffed" that continue to TEST very well in research.

The listeners who love these songs simply don't know about trade charts. However, since it's difficult to test things that people are unfamiliar with, at some point we need to make educated guesses as to which of the many songs that come in each week will be hits. Good charts can be helpful in deciding which songs and artists have the highest consensus probability of becoming a hit nationally.

Personally, I define a "hit" as a song that gets sufficient play on a national basis to chart at least top 15 and achieves a minimum of 65% positive and less than 20% negative research scores in auditorium testing and callout. Even releases which end up at the lower end of those metrics may not make it to my recurrent or gold categories, even after fairly substantial "current" spins.

I think of that airplay as a risky investment that went badly.

When charts accurately reflect what selective, local market-oriented stations who listen to the new music are playing, most of the time, those charts indicate songs which may test well many weeks before research scores become available .

What if a trade publication picked which stations report to their chart - NOT based on accurate reporting of real airplay - BUT on which songs a station did or did not report? Would you consider that chart helpful or harmful on your station's efforts to determine what REAL hits are going to be?

With stories circulating now that Clear Channel's identical Premium Choice and Cumulus' Atlanta-recommended 13-20 approved currents playlists are being mandated at more and more major stations, it seems sensible for trade chart editors to adjust their reporting panels.

Hopefully, any changes will still reflect what has become "syndicated/network" spins of course but also open the prospect of being a reporter and monitored by many more radio stations.

Today, nine "networks" and 236 stations for Mediabase and 132 monitored by BDS have become one of the primary sources of chart information for the nearly 3,000 country stations in North America.

Though errors and glitches do occur, monitored airplay is generally acknowledged as unimpeachable in its accurate reporting of what those country radio stations in 125 markets actually play.

As A&O sees it, if you want to know what a hit WAS last week, check Billboard's chart. Review Country Aircheck each week for a good determination of which of the many current hits being promoted to most of those same radio stations THIS week are ranked highest. Watch it occur in real time, day to day on BDS and Mediabase.

Looking at both can be an excellent guide to what radio is doing in the largest U.S. and Canadian markets with music.

Since, today, most new music breaks from the largest markets DOWN to the smaller ones because all label promotion and artist visits to radio only occur in those places, one might ask: do I really need any other charts?

Music Row hopes that you do. By only selecting as its reporters stations which agree to expose more new music than the typical monitored station in a competitive situation does they hope to create a definable difference. Problem is, of course, is that many songs and artists chart in the 30's and 40's of that chart and never go anywhere else.

This time of smaller reporting panels for BDS and Mediabase charts should be a major opportunity for a reliable and larger sample of stations that could be looked on by the industry as THE chart.

In the following post, I'll ruminate more about this and remind you of some painful lessons from the past.

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.

What Happens To ARB In December?

Q: Why is it that AC does so well each December, and why did it do especially well in Fall of 2007?

A: The key to doing well in ratings 11 months a year is listening at work. In diaries, on average, almost 75% of all average quarter hours (and in the PPM in spite of cumes literally doubling, it’s still 50%) come from P-1 heavy users, the people who listen for 100 quarter hours a week or even more. Thus, under normal circumstances, the secret to doing well for country radio is targeting 25-54 non-ethnic individuals who work full time, at least 35 hours a week. Fulltime employed men are the heaviest users of radio. Women who are not employed full time tend to watch TV during the daytime hours and as a result listen to a lot less radio than the average radio user. Given these realities, a successful AC station must get at least 60% of its average quarter hours from ‘at work’ listening. A country station’s ideal profile is 33% of its AQH from at work, 33% from in car and 33% at home and other places. Then, comes the three weeks before Christmas and many listeners take time off work. So, the place where the majority of AQH comes from changes radically. Meanwhile, AC stations become the at home listening choice - especially for adult women - due to their solid Christmas music marketing and images.

That’s why, in PPM data, Arbitron has created a “13th month” which they call the Christmas book. AQH shares (which are of course a percentage of the available AQH audience) literally double for the solid Christmas music stations (B-101 in Philadelpha, for example, had a 25.2% share of adult listening the week before Christmas in the Philadelphia PPM data and then went right back to to 10 share the week after the Holiday).

As Arbitron's Gary Marince told the attendees at A&O's Pre-CRS client seminar, ".. the listening the Christmas stations pick up from the Country statiosn is in the form of 'occassions' and not a loss in cume or average time per occasion of listening."

No doubt, this is also the case in diaries as well, but due to monthly averaging, AC radio carries that December bump into the first two monthlies of the next quarter. It’s not because AC gets more listening in January and February as a result of the December at home AQH, it’s due to the monthly averages. In the face of this reality, to have a good fall book knowing that many of your listeners won’t be at work for a week or two of the survey period which makes it very hard if not impossible to keep your percentage of AQH from at work up to the levels you maintain the rest of the year, a country station needs to have an aggressive strategy to do as well as possible in the workplace during the first and second phases of the fall Arbitron survey and then play enough of your listeners’ favorite Christmas songs they can’t hear anywhere else while also balancing that with their favorite current, recurrent and power gold hits and encouraging the core to listen to you at home more than normal during those weeks away from their normal workplace. It’s a tricky balancing act because as research has shown for the last few years, about half of country’s heaviest users would love it if we played all Christmas music while the other half wouldn’t like that at all.

Next fall: get as many average quarter hours from at work as you can in the first nine weeks of the ARB survey period and then work to keep your partisans listening to you while they prepare for Christmas at home. Meanwhile, tell advertisers the Christmas book story and make sure they know that the distortions in the January and February rolling averages that make AC look stronger than it is are purely statistical and not real. The time to buy AC radio is the two or three weeks before Christmas, not in first quarter of the New Year.

News And Comment

News: A bit of poetic justice and extreme irony as CBS Radio resigns from the Country Music Association just as the organization started Country Music Month, after CMA signs a ten year deal for TV broadcast rights with ABC. They told CBS Radio/Phoenix OM and KMLE PD Jeff Garrison to resign his longtime position on the CMA Board Of Directors. Now, he gets a new assignment, as he explained to Country Aircheck “helping our Country stations and our digital platforms to work more closely with artists to extend the brands of our stations while promoting new artists, album releases, concerts and other projects" as VP/Country Artist Relations, in addition to his role in Phoenix.

Comment: Every country radio station in the world needs to join the CMA. Now, more than ever. As a board member, I promise to work with the other radio representatives on the board to make it more worth your while than ever in the coming year!

CBS may have a lot of reporting and monitored station muscle, but no one in the industry is as well positioned to aggressively assist “Country radio stations and our digital platforms to work more closely with artists to extend the brands of our stations while promoting new artists, album releases, concerts and other projects." Join. Then, let's join hands with CMA to do what CBS hopes to do without CMA within it and even better for all radio stations in every market size and ownership affiliation. That's what CMA was founded to do.

News: Cumulus/Atlanta has decided that the future for their new acquisition WKHX is to offer a choice rather than battle head-on anymore with Clear Channel's WUBL KIX has just gone from 220 tunes in its Gold catalog the week prior to 381 last week. If every song is a marketing message, KIX is saying "hellooo, 45-54." They now play only 37% current and recurrents and have added early Garth Brooks, Brooks & Dunn, Alan Jackson, Clint Black, the Judds, Patty Loveless, Diamond Rio and many others from the 80's and 90's. CC's The Bull is 68% current/recurrent. It's "best country hits" vs "today's new country."

Comment: A&O's 2011 "Roadmap" national perceptual study certainly has shown that there's a large upper demo appetite for more variety and less repetition and Coleman's CRS 2011 research project replicates that it's also quite possible to build a very viable and unique music coalition centered on the highly familiar music of the class of '89 boom.

However, are there enough meters in the Atlanta country sample for two stations to create a "difference" that only half the audience will love?

Both Cumulus and Clear Channel managements are savy and smart, so you can be sure they looked hard at it before making this decision.

It's a first for PPM measured markets, though Cox's classic country KTHT/Houston, has proven that an even older narrow country target can perform consistently in a PPM market with a large enough country cume.

Keep an eye on Atlanta and be prepared to learn something about country's narrow demos and metered sampling.

The pressure is on ARB to deliver consistent samples in 18-44, men, women, and 40-54, men and women.

If they don't, the ratings for 'KHX and 'UBL will be more of an indication of ongoing panel sample issues than with the differentiation strategy Cumulus unveiled last Friday.

(How Country Wins Or Loses At) The Radio Game

Reid Morgan, Pattison Radio Group/Lethbridge Director of Programming for CHLB-FM and CJBZ-FM, writes: "Driving back from lunch I punched through the five major stations we compete with. (CKVN excluded) Country 95 was playing a new Can Con song, Roadhammers/Homegrown and B 93 was playing a recurrent song Jordin Sparks/One Step at a Time.

Here's the game: the other three stations, Rock 106, The River and The Lounge were playing..

Abba / Dancing Queen
John Melencamp / Hurt So Good
Pat Benetar / Hit Me With Your Best Shot

Try to match the song to the station! (Of course, depending on when you happen to listen, you might hear any of those songs on any of them.)

The point is, country and CHR are the only ones doing anything unique, the other three can be completely interchangeable and IMHO the musical identities have become blurred. I also think this opens great opportunities for us, but, of course, in the battle for the strongest song at this moment C95, admittedly, would not come out on top. While country needs to work on our song power and familiarity to keep cumes up, the formats around us seem to be creating loyalty, music differentiation and TSL problems for themselves."

Thanks, Reid. Great points. And, as if to underscore your perspective, I drove into another client market last evening and heard Joni Mitchell/Big Yellow Taxi on a station which calls itself "classic rock."

OES ("optimum effective schedule") or OTS ("over-the-top spins)

Optimum Efficient Scheduling was never intended to be a guide to music scheduling, but just as with commercial "ROS" schedules of 12 and 18 times a week back when power rotations contained 9 or even 11 hits and a heavy rotation of 4 1/2 or 5 1/2 hours that math provided assurance to conservative programmers who improved their competition situation by upping the frequency on the most popular songs so that they play more often than they do on the folks across the dial.

With PPM's new math of doubled cume and "time spent exposed" (TSL/TSE) cut in half compared to diary measures, we all applied that old formula and upped the spins at some stations as high as once an hour and more widely two hours.

It seems to work and thanks to MScore tracking, it's no longer necessary to use an abstract formula. 

Now, you can literally watch and see if a higher spin count helps or hurts your usage.  In the chart to the left, one station's panel loves a song while another station in the same market's panel seems to hate it in the same period of time.

As repetition complaints from the small percentage of core listeners who say they have become dissatisfied with their favorite country station have become louder (though still only 15% of all listeners in A&O&B's 2014 survey), I think it's time to admit that there may be a perceptual toll to these tactics.

Yes, it seems that listeners have always said that they prefer variety and want less repetition and those beliefs can be tempered with online, callout and auditorium research, demonstrating that the right songs can be played heavily with "burn" and "dislike" tracked along the way.  Some folks now include "play less, play about the same, play more" in their online testing and listeners continue to say "play more" to the most popular tunes even as they get 75 spins in a week.

So, is it intelligent to simply ignore the repetition complaints and keep adding spins to the strongest titles as OES formulas seem to indicate?  As TSL and TSE drop and cume continues to trend upward, there is a siren song calling for just that.

Unless we're certain that we can keep increasing our cume hyper-spinning a small number of very popular songs - and I don't think we can - it seems to me that it's time to step back and look at the entire MScore, online testing, callout and auditorium data universe and recognize for the country format at least our listeners are extremely accepting of hundred and hundreds of songs which have little negative or burn.  Even with teens and 18-34, country isn't CHR.  We aren't limited to a very small library of common thread songs.

For example, the vast majority - hundreds - of gold, current and recurrent songs monitored by MScore at the average station track from between +4% to -4% which means they are all statistically virtually tied in terms of usage.  Only a very small number - often fewer than ten - float to the bottom having negative usage double the averages.

We are fortunate that our values and lifestyle appeal are pan-demographic, spanning at least five decades.

Let's look beyond one simple formula, use all of the tools to test music in our toolkit and think beyond just heavy play of one or two music categories.

It's time to start working as well on how long our heavy user/regulars listen in each occasion by offering more music new music discovery and impeccable song scheduling variety.

Has A Listener Ever Called You And Asked Why You Don't Play More Women Artists' Music?

I doubt it, since music testing has been an industry standard for at least 40 years and major market country radio's music selections have been based weekly current/recurrent callout and gold tests for all that time.

For example, A&O&B's quarterly research track of our clients' music testing includes national averages on almost 700 tunes.

When ranked by "total positive %" with all of the men who participated (screened for their heavy use of country radio), not one song by a female ranked in the top 100.  There were three in the top 150.

Distaff artists do better with the female listeners in the sample.  Eleven songs ranked in the top 100.  The highest ranking song by a woman is #29 (Lady Antebellum/I Need You Now) and then #33 (Miranda Lambert/The House That Built Me).

Wise programmers target their music 60% female/40% male, based on the two genders' contribution to average quarter hour.

Billboard's Tom Roland must have been talking to Nashville music promotion folks for his article this week, "Taylor, Carrie, Rosanne, Julie: So Many Women, So Little Airtime."

It's my experience, the only people asking programmers why they don't play more female acts are music promoters.

“I just want more girls to have more success,” Music City songwriter Hillary Lindsey told Roland. “It’s just been so hard to break them in this town, and I don’t know why. Why is it that guys succeed a lot more than women? Why is it that Tim McGraw can still be selling tons of records and having hits, but Faith Hill can’t? Or Martina McBride? Why is it that women age in this business and they go away, but men can keep getting old and do it?”

The Billboard writer points out that "Lindsey’s point has merit, though to be fair, most male acts don’t have shelf lives that are all that long either. Plenty of other men have appeared and disappeared during the nearly 20-year span since McGraw’s first hit, “Indian Outlaw,” debuted on Hot Country Songs on Jan. 22, 1994. And McGraw still has another decade to knock out before he can approach the 30-year span between Reba McEntire’s first top 10 single, 1980’s “(You Lift Me) Up to Heaven,” and her most recent No. 1, 2010’s “Turn On the Radio.” favorite."

That must have hit a nerve for Terra Lindsey, JRfm/Vancouver Promotions Director, lover of country music, cheerleader for female singers and a big part of the station's weekly music meeting.  Her passion on the subject is demonstrated not just by the length of her blog in response to it (click the link to read it), but also the depth of her argument, ranging from human evolution to female biology.

She also shares her Program Director Mark Patric's reasoning:

"Women see themselves in the songs. She may or may not see herself with the actual singer, but it certainly increases the taste for the song if the singer is yummy. If a woman is listening to a female singer, she wants to picture herself AS that woman. To do that, she’s got to relate to the lyrics (because it’s all about the story in Country music), as well as like the singer.  To “like the singer” means more to a woman than it does to a man.  For guys she just needs to be hot.  Women need to see themselves in another woman to be able to look at her in a positive light. This means she needs to know something about her, something that reminds her of herself."  

Another possibility:  women are very complicated.  Men are simple.  Or, young girls' first radio format of preference as they turn ten or eleven is Top 40, which can be very successful targeting only women, so when they turn on to country, that is their first experience of listening to a radio format which doesn't target only them.

Millions of them grow to love country music, they see themselves as potential stars just like Carrie and Taylor, come in droves to Nashville with their self-involved perspective and run head long into the fact that Top 40 music is about fantasy and escape from reality while country music deals with adult realities, must be relevant to a wide demographic of not just their demographic peers but also to a "family" that spans four to six generations.

Perhaps it's this simple?

COUNTRY <--------------------> NOT COUNTRY

So, Seriously. Is Going To Do Anything About it?

Probably not.

Only the very courageous among us will want to take the risk of doing things differently in exchange for a potential payoff.  Old habits die hard.  BUT:  here's the payoff.

If we cut repetition complaints in half satisfaction could go even a few percentage points higher, driving better perceived TSL (diary measurement) and actual usage (PPM).

• The trade charts won’t do it.  The chart editors have been concerned about overnight and other “daypart” spins for many years and have certainly talked about ways to remove them from their charts, but there hasn’t been a subscription-supported trade magazine since the deaths of Bill and Janet Gavin.  Ads paid for by the very folks who also pay for the promotional tactics support them.
• Could they create two different charts, one for the higher level of spins that PPM appears to require and the other for diary markets where it's still possible to sustain 14 hours a week average TSL?  I wonder if PPM stations mixed in one monitored chart with diary markets hurts diary market stations that are drawn to increase their spins to dangerous levels given their longer TSL.  Most likely, even the stations wouldn't support this idea.  No one wants to be in the "smaller markets" group.
• Labels and publishers won’t do it. They all support the idea in principle, since it would save them promo expenditures which really don’t do very much to drive sales or familiarity, but they all fear that they’d be the only one to stop and would get beaten by competitors that continue.  This will be true as long as AM/FM radio spins are the #1 driver of music sales and, thank goodness for today’s radio, there appears to be no foreseeable end to that.
• Consolidated radio owners won’t do it.  Their debt drives everything they do and suggesting that giving up a few thousand dollars of their top line in order to fund marketing being paid for now for them by labels and indie promoters could get an exec fired.
• Your competition won’t do it.  They also fear that you’ll get the money they’d leave on the table if they did.
• Going back to “reporting” from a larger panel in place of monitored spins won’t do it.  Before monitored airplay, folks reported songs they didn’t actually play.

YOU will do it only when you’re convinced that carefully testing every recurrent spin to be sure it’s adding value for listeners.

YOU will do it only when you come up with better win/win ways to give value to your partners in the music business than burying songs you really know in your heart will never see the light of day on your playlist.  Commit to the songs and artists you believe in and give them meaningful spins when the majority of your audience is listening so that they you can build familiarity and solid test scores in fewer weeks.

YOU will do it when you see ratings growth by doing what listeners love and that is what I am confident will happen.

YOU will do it precisely because all of the others won't, and that's going to gain "someone" a power advantage.

After all, of the 8,874 folks who participated in A&O&B’s Roadmap 2014 listener survey the majority are very satisfied with the country radio they hear right now.  And, that number is trending up.  Of that total 1,336 say they are dissatisfied as a result of too much repetition.  15% of the total sample.

My proposition:  when your satisfaction levels and cume audience are at all time highs (more than double the level of any other negatives!) there is only one direction to go - down - unless you respond to the folks who aren’t happy in ways that don’t hurt you with current fans.

I think stations which take cutting "core dissatisfied" folks' repetition perception levels in half could see a 5-7% increase in usage.

Weekly Music Decisions: Moody's Bible

From the "what makes country different" department:

Bob Moody, VP/Programming of Regent Communications, has a hard and fast music rule which he feels helps his stations perform better with ultra-core diarykeepers. Back when he was VP/Programming for WPOC and Nationwide Radio Group he would drive record promoters nuts with his '12 weeks and off' rule. Just as their songs were starting to 'test,' and chart at the top, Moody would drop them. With today's more crowded media environment and lower average time spent listening he has modified it to be 26 weeks: "In general, I get concerned about songs that have been played for over six months, regardless of the rotation pattern."

Yes, Bob knows that many callout driven decision-makers like Cox Radio CEO Bob Neil would say that he's taking his best cards off the table too soon in a very competitive game. Cox country stations are legendary for keeping songs in power current and recurrent rotations for as long as a year or more.

Those folks might want to check Bob's ratings track record in markets of all sizes, from Chesapeake Bay to St. Cloud to Sacramento. Maybe his consistent success is due to his "XX weeks and off" rule or not, but it is true that Bob does many things to make his TSL above average and that rule is absolutely one of them.