Smooth Jazz - Another Consuming Passion

Are Urban AC Stations Losing Audience To Smooth Jazz?

Smooth jazz is being called the Clark Kent of formats. Much like Superman's alter-ego, it's mild-mannered, even dull. It looks like the other button-down guys. Yet it pops up seemingly everywhere, often on great signals. And just before the ratings come out, it darts into a phone booth, dons a cape and zooms into the clouds.

Is smooth jazz siphoning off some audience from Urban AC stations? The answer is "yes." And the reason is that they've become very listenable for some adult listeners. And with Arbitron's PPM fast approaching, that's just one more concern we should thoroughly examine.

This time we're going to look into the competitive environment which exists today between the smooth jazz and urban adult stations. The research and probing are complete and the results while not shocking, are very revealing.

We've known for years that format similar stations share the same adult audience. What we didn't know was that when an urban adult station is P-1, often the smooth jazz station is P-2. That means the first place the urban adult station's audience goes on Sunday morning, or when their favorite urban adult stations drives them away, is to the smooth jazz station. There are a lot of them whose frequencies are the second button on the car radio

Statistics show that these smooth jazz stations are very listenable in middays, at work and on the weekends. There's an awful lot of sharing going on. And a shared radio can be a changed radio.

When we looked into the reasons for all this sharing and growth, much of it at the expense of even well-run urban adult stations, we found there were many. Some predictable and some surprising. With its sexy sax melodies, passion-filled guitar riffs and dreamy Sade and Luther vocals, the amorous aspects of smooth jazz are hard to ignore.

Smooth jazz stations all do a number of things right. They limit the number of commercial interruptions per hour. In addition, the smooth jazz stations owned by Clear Channel continue to practice the "less is more" strategy. That's the practice of emphasizing 15-second and 30-second commercials and shorter commercial breaks as a benefit to both advertisers and listeners.

And from what we can determine Clear Channel is committed to "less is more" for the long run even though it may mean lower revenue in the short term.

According to Clear Channel demand and price for 15-second and 30-second ads were both up in the first quarter compared to a year earlier.

TSL And Cume Concerns

In most markets, where a major portion of the available audience will pledge allegiance to an urban or urban adult station, in order to stand up against a fierce competitor such as a smooth jazz station, that station needs to improve its TSL in order to maintain that better TSL we mentioned. That's the limited cume that you can conceivably attract as an urban adult station. You have to decide whether you're going to continue as a mainstream urban station whose target audience is 12-34 or to change over to a strictly adult station whose target audience is adults 25-49 or adults18-49.

Actually that TSL number is somewhat illusory because more than 70% of your AQH comes from your P1s and those P1s may be using that urban adult station maybe twice that number of hours. That's really the number that we need to drive.

Also, at least part of the mass of listeners who come to an urban station come because of their interest in some of our core artists who are making music that's being played on other formats. That's a natural thing for bringing cume, although it can also hurt us. I participated in a study which asked" Would you listen to your favorite station less because you can find some of your favorite songs and/or artists on other stations such as a smooth jazz station?

There was an indication by between 10% - 15% that they would indeed listen less. However, when their music was being played on other formats, hopefully we will get an influx of cume, which we can then turn into TSL.

Time is really becoming the issue. Radio competes with lots of different media for people's time and attention. We have to brand the product and make it better to be competitive with all these outside things, not just with those in our own radio world. People who love urban music love it - but there's only so much TSL we can generate from them. We have to find new audiences to grow the format. And the quicker we can convert people to love us, the better our Arbitron results,

especially with PPM are going to be.

It's also important to point out that some of the TSL declines we've seen may be occurring because of audience sharing and the available audience being divided between two or more stations. Plus, as I mentioned earlier, it probably wasn't being actively recorded because of the dialing back and forth. If there's only one station, the identity is much clearer. It doesn't mean that radio necessarily gets better when there's only one station, it's just less confusing to the listeners who are keeping diaries and who may soon be carrying meters.

One of the ways that stations that share 85% of the same audience can differentiate themselves and drive TSL is by allowing talent and personalities to be personalities around the clock, including weekends. Have them connect with the audience and be real. Compelling personalities can definitely help to build cume and brand your station.

The key is to maximize the station at the local level. If the average TSL for urban radio is now say 81/2 hours, the P1s still average 16-17 hours, while the P2s fall to the five, six or seven range. We have to look at the opportunities. Can we squeeze more TSL out of the P1s or do we need to try to raise our TSL in the P2 level? The answer varies, depending on which researcher or consultant you speak to, but I personally prefer to do both. The key to understanding TSL is understanding the values that drive listeners to our format.

Today's urban radio continues to be a cume game. P3s are cumers and they're as important as P1s in that sense. But they are too expensive to get and too expensive, asset-wise to convert. The time and money spent converting a P3 to a P2 can be better spent squeezing more time out of a P1 by focusing them more effectively.

We don't want to become too one-dimensional in our values. If we're just a jukebox that gives away money and prizes, those values are fairly one-dimensional. You wouldn't want to have lunch with somebody like that every day, because they'd talk about the same thing every day. So we need to stay as broad as we can from a values point of view.

Musically, we want to accomplish an urban music mix that balances the titles in the library so they reflect the overall balance we are trying to achieve. In other words, we want to have the station mix up its tempos and textures. This balance helps our TSL.

It's also important to remember there's a difference between tempo and intensity. A song can be intense and not have a lot of tempo and a song can have lots of tempo and not be intense. As songs age and become familiar they lose their edge. The first time a listener hears an intense segment in a song, it can be repulsive. It is new territory and most adults like comfort. A new song can be as loud and aggressive as an old song they know and love, yet the new song is offensive to them, while the old song is acceptable because it is comfortable. Finding acceptable classic songs that have not been overplayed is an excellent method of extending time-spent-listening. These songs will add tempo, while adding a thicker texture in the breadth of musical styles for the station.

It's important to present the diversity of the station within every music set. Staying in the same musical style for more than one song at a time limits the station's appeal and thus its TSL. We call this "clumping." TSL is helped by clumping or bringing together a group of listeners who were into being directly affected by this diversity.

One of the problems with heritage urban adult stations is that for years it has been kind of an icon in the market. That means that some of your core audience takes it for granted and although we've seen some great books from a cume standpoint, you definitely have to improve your TSL. What we want to do now is keep those people listening longer. Urban adult is still a niche format and if we hyper-target too narrowly your TSL gets hurt. That means that we want to make certain musically and creatively that we give our listeners a reason to listen longer or think they listened longer for Arbitron purposes.

Next, we need to look at how the number and types of commercials we play and

how they directly affect our time-spent-listening. It is has been proven through research that listeners do not perceive commercials to be evil and that most find them to be informative at least the first one or two times they hear them. Eight of ten adults recently surveyed say listening to commercials is a fair price to pay for free radio programming. Listeners say they generally prefer more frequent commercial breaks as opposed to long blocks of programming followed by long blocks of commercials. Just as many listeners say they are bothered by stations playing annoying commercials as are bothered by too many commercials.

For urban adult-based formats to better satisfy their audience's needs they have

to become more mass appeal and that means lowering their median ages. Right here I would point out that the younger the listeners, the louder the complaints about stations playing too many commercials. This finding matches a long-term, overall national trend in TSL among the younger listeners.

Nationally, according to a recent study there was a 9% erosion in overall TSL for urban formatted stations. During that same period, 18-24 TSL was down 14%, teen TSL was down 11% and 25-34 TSL was down 10%. The scary fact for urban adult stations is that 31% of the 18-34 audience indicate they are listening to the radio less, compared to 17% for 25-54 year-olds and 11% for those 49 and over. Forty-seven percent of urban listeners also say there are "a lot more" or "somewhat more" commercials compared to a year ago. Whether this is real or perceived, it's a fact in their minds.

Are smooth jazz stations going to continue to take audience away from urban AC stations? The answer is yes, but there is something we can do about it. Now that we know some of the "music freaks" are going to leave us, we have to just make sure we make sure ours is the station and the format they come back to.

Word.