"Jake Brodsky" wrote in message
...
David Eduardo wrote:
"Steve Stone" wrote in message
...
I'm a database analyst by day and I know statistics can be made to say
anything you want them to say, especially if you ask the wrong questions
that reflect what the reviewer wants to hear and not what the public
wants to tell them.

In most radio station testing, you do not even use questions. You have
people score songs and program content, using a dial.

In his book, Get Back In The Box (http://www.rushkoff.com/box.html),
Douglas Rushkoff describes what happens when marketing gets too obsessed
with drawing people in to buy. It becomes dreary and painful.

This is one person's opinion, vs. the empirical evidence of ratings
improvements after testing music.

Rushkoff also debunks the value of focus groups by showing that the
choices of who listens aren't really as random as those nice folks at
those research firms would have you believe.

Radio hardly ever uses focus groups.

Music testing is done by gathering information just as Arbitron does on
potential recruits, and then selecting those that either use your staitons
enough or use comparable stations enough to be of value in evaluating music
selections one by one.

What you are hearing from this crowd is that many are sick and tired of
the efforts to market stations so tightly. Owners have to loosen up or
people will pretty much ignore the marketing.

Sorry, but stations have used music research since the 50's, none of it
based on your supposition that they are conducting focus groups, and there
are very few cases of stations improving ratings by not doing research vs.
many that do by doing it. I have many times competed with unresearched "gut
feel" staitons and the whupping they have received has been as big as a 10
to 1 margin (it is more usual for it to be in the 1.5 to 1 to 2.5 to 1
range, though)

It's like stores which are calculated and studied to provide the maximum
number of cues to get people to want to buy Buy BUY! The stress of such
environments from keeping your guard up all the time against subliminal
marketing is not small.

You are confusing getting people into the strore with the merchandise
assortment. Retal first seeks to get people in, but they use merchandise
"hooks" such as selection, price, sales, etc., to get folks there. Radio
uses marketing, separately conceived, to get folks to "cume" a station and
then they use "merchandise assortment" which means the number and selection
of songs (or topics on talsk) to get them to stay (like buying in retail).

You have confused cume driven marketing with the actual programming. Your
error is fatal to your argument, showing you do not understand the dynamic
of cume and TSL, the only tow things ratings measure. Cume is considered a
"usage" of a station in the survey period, while TSL is how much listening
to the station was given. Cume is getting to the store, and Time Spent
Listening is how much they consumer "buys." You need a range of both to win.

People are tired of the mentality of those who would play the sound of
roaring chainsaws if there was a buck in it. You're in the business of
engaging and attracting listeners. If you think that is best done by
statistics, then you must have one of those pictures of Elvis on black
velvet in your office. It's been selected by a focus group...

We are in the business of keeping listeners, much more than attracting them.
Each format will have a potential partisan base. A country listener will
seldom use an R&B or Spanish station, so we can, with fairly simple
procedures, know in each market the potential of one genre of programming
based on demographics and prior experinece in other markets. So the big job
is to tell people they have the option, and then do as good a job in playing
the right songs in the right atmosphere that we can.

In any case, why, for gosh sakes, would a radio station do testing or
perceptual research which yields wrong results? I have never heard of a
staiton or statrion staff that wanted ratings to go down. So weeks and
weeks are spent working with professional researchers and statisticians
to make sure that there is no question wording bias, no interviewer bias
and that the qustions are clear. Further time is spent in setting a
recruit specification that reflects the core audience or an audience
segment that you wish to bring into the project.

Why would a radio station do this? Because of a herd mentality which says
this works. And as such it does work --sort of. If you only have a
choice of bland, drab, same, and similar in highly formatted stations,
guess what happens? People lose their taste for the unusual.

There never was a taste for the unusuall. When AM radio was first supposed
to die, right after the TV freeze was lifted, we had only two formats in the
US... MOR (Gogi Grant to Perry Como and the bands) and the emerging Top 40
(first one in August 1952). Top 40 beame mostly rock 'n' roll, and MOR was
older adult oriented. Then, in some markets, we had country (only limited
viability in the 50's) and Spanish (just a handful of markets). And a few
"race" stations in deep south Black markets Nothing else.

As radio developed as a music medium, we found that Top 40 was 3 formats,
AC, CHR and Rock. And Rock became multiple formats. And old Top 40 became
oldies. And country became viable, as did R&B and Spanish and religion and
talk and other formats.

The "narrowness" you descibre always existed. Listeners settled for liking
every other song on Toop 40 because there was nothing else. Once the AC
songs were dropped and only rock was played, some were more happy with the
AC and others with the rock. They became superserved compared to being
settlers. Most folks do not want a variety on the same station. They want
predictability. If they are of a mood for something else, they go to a
different station.

As you say, it's been going on since the 1950s. How would you know what's
different from this?

By watching stations that DON'T do it I work a lot outside the US, and often
have the opportunity to kill competitors dead when they think that variety
is MORE songs and that asking the listener what they like and dislike is not
necessary. I also know by having tried the opposite and failed miserably.

All this is beyond Arbitron, which is a sales tool and excruciatingly
well audited by researchers and statisticions in a committee appointed by
advertisers, not radio, to make sure rating reflect the real size and
composition of audience that stations are charging for.

Let's do art by statistics. I'd like to see what the average painting
would look like after you have sent it through a few focus groups. Would
you hang it up on your wall? How about a picture of Elvis on black
velvet?

We are not creating a painting. we are providing a museum. The paintings are
the songs or the talk topics. They are pre-created and gallery attendees
know what they like or don't in art, and go based on whether our gallery
shows good stuff or not.

Your analogy fails terribly, again.

This proves you have broad and very eclectic tastes. That is nice. Most
people don't.

Yes, but is that because they choose to be that way, or because they've
been living in a bland environment since 1950?

It has been proven by analyzing successes and failures that stations with
cohesive playlists of researched songs do better than any of the
alternatives. Plenty of staitons have tried the other ways, and there is a
reason they have not survived.

How did most new formats get started? By listening to stuff THAT WASN'T
ON THE RADIO. Did Rap music get its start on radio or in clubs?

radio reflects taste, and does not usually create it. Radio picks up on
change and adopts it. Hip hop (which was a progression from rap) just eased
in on the Urban and CHR staitons. Rap broke into radio, as often happens,
when one artist has a big, crossover hit.

Did early Rock and Roll get it's start in the formatted, conformist radio
of the day?

Rock 'n' roll broke out of race stations, which was the name Black staitons
were called in the 50's. Then, several DJs in Cleveland, Alan Freed and Pete
"Mad Daddy" Myers and Bill Randall started playing the tunes on Top 40
stations, especially at night. It then spread.

Or did it get a big boost from people listening to Mexican Radio stations?

Nope. It got its bigest boost form Todd Storz and Gordon McLendon.

I could go on like this. Most new "formats" got their start from
somewhere else.

That is correct. If you take a new music form and build a staiton around it,
it is usually too much of a new thing One station about two years ago tried
an all Chill format. It died. Nobody liked chill enough to listen all the
time.

The latest contribution from formatted radio? The "Jack" format.
Nothing but a bunch of canned wisecracks in between a mashup of all the
Rock from 1970 to the present. Gee. That's supposed to be original?

It is a relief and a broad wampling of the biggest hits from multiple genres
all on one staiton, with no jocks. The biggest sell is the jocklessness, as
many listeners in the target group hate all jocks.

Anyway, most formats don't "happen" but, rather, they evolve from other
formats. Jack is an evolutionary format, mixing CHR and Rock and creating an
oldies format for boomers.

A few years ago, a station went on in San Antonio, playing 57 hip hop
songs. In 90 days, it was #1 in the market. It had only changed about 12
of the songs in the 90 days. Today, it is in its 5th year at #1 and
stronger now than before. It plays about 100 songs in total. It changes a
couple in and out each week. It beats the #2 station by about 30%. Its
listeners, when interviewed, love the station and think it has the
absolute best variety of music on the planet. that is because the 100
songs are what the listeners say they want to hear. that is how it works.

Yuck! Most people have more CDs than that.

So? It works! If they wanted to listen to the CDs, they would and could. The
fact is, they like the blend and the jocks and the events the statin does
and so on. they are after the concotion, not the ingredients.

David, people are saying that the choice of music is an art, not a
statistical science. Near my market, there is a radio station that
actually advertises +the fact that they do not use focus groups, program
directors, or their ilk. It's WRNR. They rely on their DJ's judgment.
What a concept!

Yeah, it is 31st in the ratings, very near the point where it will not even
qualify for listing. What a wonderful concept. Totally ignore the listener
and what they want to hear, and say to them, "I don't care if you don't like
brocolli... eat it!" Listeners do the obvious... they don't listen in
droves. That is a horrible concept, certainly the kind of think an
inexperieced owner at the fringe of a metro would do. the owner, by the way,
is a guy who was one of the most research driven programmers in the US...
and I would bet that every cut in the library is pre-approved from a safe
list. No research (probably can't afford it) so they use a compendium of the
songs AAA staitons in the US play, and the jocks can play any of them they
want. That is simply using someone elses research in a different market.

One thing I want to point out to you about the artists I mentioned in my
previous post, ALL of them were highly controversial. Many things they
did weren't popular right away. Most focus groups would have trashed
these artists. You would never have seen these folks on the air before
they gathered a following outside the medium.

Again, again, again, again. We do not use focus groups to test music.

We only test familiar music. All new songs are judgement calls, and we test
them after the listeners have heard them enough to judge emotionally, not
analitically. we don't test artists, we test songs. Stations add plenty of
new songs, often by unknown artists. Using the #1 AC station in LA as an
example, more than half the artists in the current categories were unknown 5
years ago. So that station must have, at some point, been the first radio
station in the market to play them. And they gathered a following because
the station played them, as where else would they be heard?

This is why we say that radio is a vast wasteland. You are talking about
marketing, not art.

It is a blend of marketing to get folks in, science and art to get them to
stay, and sales to make it profitable to keep doing it.

Now, in the scheme of things, I'm saying there isn't anything wrong with
non-stop marketing. But they have to draw their ideas from SOMEWHERE.
Radio today is saturated with bland, simple, uber-happy talk, and a very
limited selection of statistics driven music tracks --what make you think
that it hasn't affected listening patterns?

If there is so little R&D done in this business, then where do the
marketeers get their ideas from? Oh that's right. Someone takes a risk.
No wonder everyone thinks the same as you do...

We test new format blend all the time. We look at ways of combining music in
different ways, balancing in different ways, etc. We add now songs by new
artists on every format that plays new music every week. we know too much
new music kills us, and we know that not enough makes us stale. We have an
intuitive idea of how a station should sound (good PDs can hear a station in
their head long before it is on the air), and most listeners are very happy.