A Correction And An Apology

I owe a big apology to Bruce Shindler and the Promotion Team at Mercury.

In my haste to look for an example for programmers which may be contributing to the core listener complaints of too much repetition in today's blog, I was sloppy in my wording and too flip when I wrote:  “Of course, we all wish the very talented Scotty well, but the fact that it took 48 weeks to find out that a tune isn't going to be a hit simply has to contribute to repetition complaints from listeners.  Pity the poor station which added it early, convinced that it was a hit and now their listeners are left wondering why it's not being played anymore.”

The fact is that Scotty was A&O&B's AccuTest ranked #7, having been in our recommended power rotation for seven weeks.  I knew that out clients are aware of that, but I neglected to mention it on the offending blog post which led a reader to believe that I don't think it's a hit.

CJJR.Vancouver PD Mark Patric emailed to correct me on my overstatements:  "I say country radio programmers are the reason why it took 48 weeks to chart.  And I'm one of those programmers.  I came on board very late and I wish now I came on board much sooner.  This is a super strong song.  I think country fans (radio listeners) love Scotty more than Program Directors and Music Directors do.  'See You Tonight' will be a power gold for many years I believe."

I wish I had said that.  And, I wish I had run my thoughts in advance by Shindler and my partners at A&O&B.

My sole goal was to point to how chart competition can contribute to repetition issues. 

I was not trying to say anything negative about Scotty, Billy Currington as artists, their latest tunes or the promotion team behind them.

For failing to make that crystal clear in my blog yesterday, I am sorry and I apologize.

Is The Chart Playing You?

I received this email last week from one of my reliable old pals at Mercury Nashville:   

"Thank you all for the great support of Scotty McCreery’s current single See You Tonight. 48 weeks old!  We will ship Scotty’s Feelin it on 3/31 and go for adds on 4/14 a month from now.  Great tune for the upcoming summer!! Those who took so long to add See You Tonight PLEASE don’t wait so long this time!  Scotty’s the real deal and has a ton of fans listening to your radio station. He’s on his way!"

Of course, we all wish the very talented Scotty well, but the fact that it took 48 weeks to find out that a tune isn't going to be a hit simply has to contribute to repetition complaints from listeners.  

Pity the poor station which added it early, convinced that it was a hit and now their listeners are left wondering why it's not being played anymore.

Yet, I appreciate a savvy promotion exec who can be honest like that.  

Few are, and it builds a lot of trust, which of course they will need now as they turn toward a project which they have to hope will have more success:

Currington finally made it to the top 30 last week, which means it now stands to gain from weekend countdown spins as it now enters an increasingly competitive part of the charts as Stone Door Media Lab's Jeff Green explained in his CRS 2014 session along with Musicmetric's Mark Tindle (click to read a recap of it in last week's Country Aircheck - pdf)

To give you an idea of what the promotion team behind "We Are Tonight" faces in the coming weeks and provide some stats to see how well they do, I dug into some of the metrics Green explained at CRS (note the interpretations of the benchmarks are mine only based on the statistical norms used at the CRS panel):
  

1.  MOST ADDED TREND
The song has been among the top 3 most added once (Nov. 18), but no better than that. Statistically, that indicates no better than a 31% chance of going No. 1.

2.  CHART TEMPO TRENDS
A. The single did not have any "backmoves" before breaking Top 40, which is good, and only one backmove on its road to Top 30, which is also good. So there's nothing in terms of "wobbles" to cause alarm on its current week-to-week pacing.

B. However, it's taken Billy 12 weeks from chart debut to No. 30. While there have been a few No. 1 singles in recent history that took longer, they were mostly protracted battles: L&T's "Angel Eyes," "Randy Houser's "How Country Feels," Brett Eldredge's "Don't Ya," Parmalee's "Carolina" and Eric Paslay's "Friday Night." Note that these were mostly newer artists, as well, so for an established act like Billy to take this long suggests a struggle, especially since "Hey Girl" (also a No. 1) broke the top 30 in just seven weeks.  Stone Door Media Lab data indicates the average No. 1 is already between chart positions 9-10 by chart week 12. Since the average Country single only has a chart life of 16 weeks, this one needs to catch fire soon.

C. Historical data indicates that a single typically ranking Top 30 should be averaging between 14-15 spins per week. Billy's averaging around 11, which indicates PD confidence in this single is below average.

3.  SALES TREND
Established artists such as Billy recently have been averaging 2.3 weeks on the chart before top 100 sales materialize. Specifically, 86% of established artists break into the top 100 sales within three weeks of reaching the CA/Mediabase top 50. It took "We Are Tonight" more than twice as long -- five weeks -- to reach Top 100 sales. Another lagging indicator, sadly.

4.  SALES PER SPIN TREND
Sales-per-spin (click the link to see Nielsen's SXSW presentation on deemphasizing sales with streaming growing so quickly now) on "We Are Tonight" are modest. "Hey Girl" averaged 10+ per spin its first 10 weeks.

OVERALL
The average chart peak of an established act (looking at charting singles for the first half of 2013) is 8, and the average chart peak of all songs that chart is 20. There are always exceptions, of course, and we've seen many singles eventually peak well above what the data would project. It appears that Billy would do very well to crack the top 10-15 with this single, but, frankly, the data benchmarks at this point are not supporting it going further than that.  That may be why Universal is clearing the decks now to focus on it rather than dividing their efforts between it and Scotty.
 
As financial advisers say, "Past performance is not an indicator of future results," and I hope that digging into this kind of historical research would never hurt any record's chances of success.

Apart from some hits that are so obvious that they require no special insight, there are "taste-changing" artists such as Eric Church, who took a good while to break through. And there are songs that take many months to reach No. 1 and defy all statistical odds along the way, but prove to be critical career-launchers and pay tribute to the promotional perseverance of the labels, managers, publishers and early believers at radio.

What does it do for the format if we lose all songs that don't have momentum in the first eight weeks or so?

I asked Jeff Green this question, and we agree (as would many others): It would be a bad thing. 

Needless to say, breakthrough singles by Brett Eldredge, Parmalee, Lee Brice, David Nail, Eric Paslay, Craig Campbell, Charlie Worsham, etc., would not have become hits and would have adversely affected their futures. Everyone realizes that a new single has many "parents" with a lot of time, patience, commitment and money invested. No one wants to give up on a single (or artist) without a fight, nor should they. And to kill off a single simply because some statistics suggest a headwind could mean missing a big opportunity.

Green acknowledges that both Stone Door and Musicmetric are only beginning to identify correlations with newer and potentially powerful exposure forces such as Shazam tags, VEVO spins, BitTorrent activity, iTunes, Beats and Amazon, which furnish a broader range of information as part of the overall "hit evaluation" process.

However, the costs to develop an artist are astronomical, and, in general, there's no good reason why it should so frequently take eight or nine months to find out if a single has hit potential. Film studios, television executives and book publishers are usually able to get a reasonably accurate grip on the commercial value of their artistic releases very early on, typically within a matter of weeks. I also agree with Green that for smaller, independent labels in particular, the cost savings in being able to assess a single's potential early on could be enormous.

And, of course, that would mean less "needless" repetition (songs that don't go all the way) for radio as well.  Online music testing and MScore tracking are radio's additional very fast leading indicators, which I think we all need to follow more than just getting in line in response to music promotion that standardizes playlists around a national chart.

As we test new ways to do that, we'll reduce complaints of "too much needless repetition" as well which may start to rebuild our slipping time spent listening among "dissatisfied core listeners."

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.

Now, Maybe We Know Why

Arbitron VP of Programming Services Gary Marince told the Jacobs Media Summer School at the Conclave in Minneapolis that the average radio listening occasion lasts ten minutes and the most frequently occurring duration is only two minutes.

Which reminded me of a presentation more than 15 years ago to A&O’s annual client seminar just before CRS in Nashville by Pierre Bouvard on what was back then a revolutionary new concept he and sales trainer Steve Marx had innovated called OES. They even wrote a book about it.

Today, Pierre is Executive Vice President, Cross-Platform Services and he previously was ARB’s Executive Vice President, Sales.

In the early 90's, he was Vice President/General Manager, Coleman Research and told us:

"Generally, Optimum Efficient Schedules are 40 to 60 spots per week. The goal of OES is to hit half your cume three or more times with ONE piece of copy. OES gets results. The reason it works: it applies programming theory to scheduling advertising on your station. In effect, it is placing a commercial into a "power current" rotation for a week. OES doesn't mean running two spots per hour from 6:00 am to 6:00 pm. Instead, it requires separating that one piece of copy by approximately two to three hours and blitzing the radio station with it six times in the 18 hours between 6:00 am to midnight. When scheduled properly, with good vertical and horizontal protections, there is no burnout. OES gets results for advertisers by convincing them to collapse what might otherwise be a three week budget and running it ALL in one week. Yet, when properly scheduled, it has no negative impact on programming or time spent listening. I do research among country listeners. The ONLY time I've heard them complain about commercials is one specific client - Nutri Systems - and it wasn't that they were running it too much, it was the creative hurt the image of some of the air personalities who were associating themselves with it. We hear listeners say 'why is it that only fat people work in radio?' Nutri Systems appears to realize that they hit that creative too hard and they now are changing their creative direction to compensate. Believe it or not, there is NO BURNOUT on this type of 60 to 70 spot per week schedule unless you have irritating copy. As a researcher who talks to listeners all the time, I can tell you that OES doesn't impact TSL. What it DOES impact is RESULTS. If you can convince an advertiser to try it once, they will come back to it again and again. And, they will end up spending more of the budget in radio. Because OES proves that radio works better."

Finally, I’d postulate that PPM also now shows why that math worked (and still works) so well and also why running the same spot two or three times in one hour only irritates listeners without improving results.

It increases frequency without building reach, creating burnout among that half of the audience who listens ten minutes per occasion on average rather than hitting more and more two minute drive-by listeners.

.. at least that's how it calculates on my "back of an envelope research."