Why is it that so many radio stations, rather than playing the wide variety of music that they have available to them, choose to play only a very small collection of songs that they cycle through over and over again? One would think that most people enjoy some variety, and that the radio stations who met this demand would achieve the highest ratings and earn the most money.
Do the program managers of these stations actually have meetings where they discuss what they’re going to play that day?
“Let’s see…should we play Bohemian Rhapsody, Hotel California , followed by Freebird? No, let’s play Bohemian Rhapsody, Stairway to Heaven, then Freebird. Wait, I’ve got it… Blinded by the Light, Stairway to Heaven, and we’ll finish off with Freebird!”
Exactly. Even a lot of people who complain about hearing the same songs all the time often stick with a fairly limited songlist for their own enjoyment.
If you play popular songs, you get more listeners. Most classic rock stations do cycle songs – every once in awhile I’ll hear something I hadn’t heard for a long time, and then keep hearing it for a few weeks. But the number of people who get tired of hearing the same songs over and over is much smaller than the number of people who love them and want to hear them again and again.
In addition, a lot of people only listen to the station for short periods, so they don’t realize its repeating.
And all I can add is, yes, they do have meetings (and focus groups and telephone surveys and other stuff) about what they’re going to play.
When I was in radio, I used to watch the hopeful new dj’s react in shock when it finally sank into them that – no, it wasn’t just a probation period because they were new, they didn’t get to choose their own music. Period.
Playlists. The main purpose of a radio station is not to play music, but to sell advertising (play commercials), and they want to attract a large audience to hear the commercials. They attract the audience by playing a limited selection of popular songs. If they played a wider, more eclectic variety, the “popular” songs would play less frequently, and the audience would go elsewhere. No audience means no one to listen to the ads. No ads means no revenue for the station. And so forth…
On a related note, many online radio services have much larger play lists. For example, you can listen to something like Spinner all day long and rarely, if ever hear a repeat song.
The revenue model is different, no DJ’s, and the advertising is all done with small banners.
Disclaimer: I do not work for Spinner, and derive no income from any source relaed to Spinner. I just got hooked on the number of channels and lack of repeats. YMMV.
I seriously doubt that the majority of listeners like such restricted playlists. Maybe they have a 100-200 favs, but certainly not 15.
Focus groups, consultants, etc. are treated like gods by radio stations even though everyone knows they are worse than useless. It really is a Dilbert world in radio.
Example: a local radio station recently switched format due to declining audience. The number one complaint that everyone had about the old format was its restricted playlist. Listeners, DJs, etc. kept trying to get management to expand the play list. No deal.
Another (2nd tier) station decided to adopt the others format. Same short playlist. The pointy hair guys always win.
Internet Radio is a good suggestion, as is, in my opinion, WFUV’s (Fordham University) Stream. If it’s pledge time, forgo the live stream in favor of the Mixed Bag or Idiot’s Delight Archived shows.
I guess they’re the same people Jello Biafra affectionately calls the “corporate assholes in the satin baseball jackets”
I’ve read and heard (on radio) discussions about this and the truth is that a station that doesn’t limit its playlist will not last.
Years ago nobody ever thought about “Golden Oldies”. Back in the 40’s, 50’s and possibly in the 60’s there just wasn’t a big list of songs that anyone wanted to hear again. My folks wanted to listen to Bing Crosby and I wanted to listen to Little Richard. There was no sense in combining those genres to get a playlist. A new song came out and we wanted to hear it over and over, then we got tired of it and it disappeared, to be replaced by the hot new song. If I had to guess I’d say it wasn’t until in the 70’s that “Golden Oldies” became popular. However, if you hear something from years ago, the reaction still is “Hey, I haven’t heard that in years, I’d like to hear it again.” I personally listen to several stations around here and then several whenever I’m in Memphis. That’s a way to vary the playlist.
[sup]Even if a playlist is restricted to 15 songs (which I question) I’ll bet it evolves over time so that this months 15 are different from those a month from now.[/sup]
Because they are all owned by Clear Channel and we are all secretly being brainwashed into buying their crappy products (Body solutions, Satellite TV, etc…) I say we boycott them all and listen to CDs.
It’s because for the most part, corporate recording companies detirmine what corporate radio stations play. Public opinion rarely has anything to do with it. The only exceptions to this rule seems to be alternative rock, which has always been more friendly to artists geographically local to the station.
…
And while we’re on the subject of corporate radio, I will postulate that corporate radio DJ’s suck cock too. They are placed at prime airtimes, but can’t ever do local stories or appearances for most of their listeners because they’re not anywhere near your town, they’re off in New York or LA or somewhere you aren’t. There used to be three different stations I skipped back and forth between, depending on what they were doing any particular day.
And then they were bought by Clear Channel…
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If you want to hear more variety listen to college radio stations if you have any in your area.
Radio was pretty bad before Clean Channel and the other big companies got involved but they have made it worse.
If you are willing to pay $10 a month and get a new radio for your car I hear that the satellite stations (XM and Sirius) are pretty good and some channels have no commercials. Of course they may go downhill fast.
Playlists are older than Clear Channel. I used to hang out at the WAZY studios in Lafayette, IN in the late 1980s (a friend of mine was a DJ at their AM station before the AM got sold and became WCFY). Both the FM and AM stations had playlists, although they called them “rotations”. The rotation had a short list that had to be cycled through very regularly. Then, to give the illusion of variety, there was a long list that programming picked from. A few DJs could do one “DJ pick” every hour or two, but they had to still “stick to format”.
Now, “Shine 99” (easy listening) in Frankfort was far more rigid. They had FRED. FRED was a mechanical cart spinner. FRED got loaded daily by the programming engineer. DJs read the weather and did station IDs. FRED was replaced by FRED Jr., which was an electronic cart spinner. It got loaded and programmed weekly.
These days, most stations adhere to a centrally-determined playlist delivered by their marketing/programming service.
This is why stations like Indianapolis’s Q95 can make a big event out of “no-repeat weekends” and their annual anniversary week, where they go a whole week without repeats. The latest was an alphabetic (by song title) week-long to-do.
However, the worst offenders seem to be “morning shows”, especially those that pretend to do requests. The Bob and Tom show will play a song beyond death. The number of times they played “Cameltoe” was enough for me to decide to never listen to them again.
Well, you have a top 40 radio show that plays billboard top 40 for that week. Next week, billboard releases a new list and the play list changes.
I was stationed in the Bahamas in 1978. The only US rock station we could receive was a top 10 station out of Miami. You know what shit flooded the top 10 in 1978? The soundtrack from Grease, the soundtrack from Saturday Night Fever, the Village People, and those horrid “Hits” collages where they adjusted the speed of clips of either Beatles songs or top 40 hits and added a disco drumbeat.
Radio stations cycle through the same 15 songs all day just to piss me off. I have evidence. They hate me. They are after me.
My only recourse is to hit the scan button at work every time I hear Crazy Train or Back in Black. Then I end up at a new station with an entirely new way to drive me nuts. So I beat on, a boat against the current, borne ceaselessly into the past.
Iv’e found a way to BEAT the bastards!! Now I listen to CBC Radio Two. Commercial-free classical music. And a great news package.
This from a guy who saw Hendrix both times he played Toronto.
Has anyone ever actually done a study regarding playlists and audience share? Focus groups don’t count, because the only people who show up for focus group meetings are those willing to spend 3 hours in a little room for $30, and they just parrot whatever they think the person conducting the focus group wants to hear.
Personally, I think playlists, especially limited playlists, are “accepted wisdom” in the radio industry, but something that’s never really been seriously analyzed. Especially when you consider that people working in radio tend to own multiple stations across a country, and try to save money by instituting the same format at those stations.
Much like in TV, with the assumption that 18-35 year olds are susceptible to advertising because they have no brand loyalty. If you talk to most 18 to 35 year olds you’ll know that’s a bunch of crap, because it’s their parents who spend money on frivolous stuff seen in commercials.
Back in the 60’s and 70’s playlists were longer - around 40 songs that’s why it was called top 40.
Before Clear Channel and the other big companies came in consultants told a lot of stations what to play.
Also now there is a lot of payola where record companies just pay radio stations to get songs on the air. Payola is supposed to be illegal but the FCC doesn’t seem to care anymore. The payments are sent through smaller companies to try to make it look legal but everyone knows it’s payola. When a new unknown artist suddenly has a hit it’s almost always related to payola.
What Barbarian said. For that matter, too, how can anyone be sure how successful present playlists are working? After all, there’s no equivalent of the Nielsen ratings for radio, and radio stations have to rely on “listener surveys” for their ratings, which are probably very inaccurate. I remember being roped into one of those when I was 14…I think I had to answer something like, “Uh, I listen to that station with…the two guys in the morning…” It could be the case that the most “popular” stations in the ratings are those that play their “bumper” most often, so that people remember that they are listening to it!
