Radio Is Changing Its Tune

With The Time Poverty Level Rising, Radio Has To Re-think Its Music Strategies

As time passes and we near the end of summer 2006, we have some observations to share with you about the format and its future. Urban, like other formats directly affected by new technologies, is changing its tune ... or at least it's changing some of its tunes. And the reasons are based on research and the new technologies competing for its audience. It's not just satellite radio, Internet, cable television offerings and "podcasters." Now, even cell phones are part of the game.

For consumers, it means more choices and more control over when and where they can hear them. For radio, all this competition means there are reasons for concern.

Winning today means using a combination of format and personality to make our distinction in the market. Distinctively-formatted stations take some organizing to set up, but once rolling, they usually establish a broadcast routine or pattern which simply has to imitate itself day-after-day and stay fresh. With a limited number of really strong personalities developing, stations are leaning more and more to proven music formats to help them win.

Format success is usually a function of timing and need. It is often based on what has worked in other markets. There is some math that can factor into the decision. For example, if ten percent of listening can be expected in a format, but your market studies show only six are available, should you go after the remaining four percent? The questions continue. What about your station's performance or under-performance? Is that condition simply because the format is too crowded in your market? Or is it because your signal is too weak to effectively penetrate the total market.

Is the format itself under-performing in your market? And if so, what can you do about it? Probably before you bail, you should look for ways to stay in the format and expand or improve your performance levels. Perhaps what you may need to do is change your tune.

You may have heard that some rock stations lately have been criticized for having moved their demos younger, not older. While with the advent of the Jack format, many oldies stations have just the opposite problem. As a result, in the case of the rock formats, many wound up with an overabundance of boy teens. The adult audience had moved elsewhere -- in most cases to a Top-40 or even an urban-leaning station.

Some smart Top 40 and rock stations attempted to return to their adult audience base by borrowing an adult contemporary (AC) trick. They tried to define their audience with oldies and re-currents rather than with current hits. In the case of the modern rockers, many had chosen to concentrate on dominating the 12-24's, hoping for some "spillover." What rockers and some Top-40s have in common is an audience that slants, on average, about two thirds male. This is unusual because most formats (and listening in general) tend to favor females.

A part of the reason for the fragmentation and problems with Top-40 stations had to do with an identity crisis of self-denial. It doesn't want to be what it is. Urban stations often suffer from the same problem. Because of image and record-purchasing patterns, mainstream urban stations found they always attracted substantial teen audiences. The program and music directors were tired of sitting in meetings where the GMs and sales managers told them to cut back on the teens and get them some adults or look for a new place to program.

In the past few years we have seen have seen mainstream urban stations siphon off the lower demos and urban ACs take the upper demos. And often, in an attempt to please the sales managers and GMs, the station lost its audience base and failed miserably. What's the answer to fitting the format to the folks? It's the same old song. You can't find an audience for the format; you've got to find a format for the audience. Improve the overall sound of the station. Be what you are and then determine to be the absolute best at it. Get the music and the presentation right.

Now, not only is that easier said than done, it also can't be done quickly or without proper support from management. If the station doesn't do any research and it's up against a competitor that is doing regular research studies, I don't have to tell you what that advantage can mean. And yet, there are still many stations, some in major markets, which are not doing any meaningful research. They're simply sitting there, going through the motions, hoping nobody comes into the market and does it right. That's ridiculous. Someone is eventually going to come into the market and do it right. Why? Because if they do, they are going to score.

In the past, we have talked about the most effective place to put your programming elements in recent editorials. This time, we want to review a portion of that strategy and then tell you what it can mean. Naturally, you want to put your key programming elements in the most listened-to quarter hours. And since the largest numbers of tune-ins occur in the first quarter hour, this is your chance to light up some numbers on your side of the board.

So even if you're in a more music sweep, and a lot of urban stations will be, in the first quarter hour, your one-liners can capture your largest audience's ear for a few seconds without interfering with the overall effectiveness of your music sweeps. If you know how to do it, that's still the best time to advertise or cross-plug. Your key contest liners should go in this quadrant. Between the top-of-the-hour and: 15 is the busiest spot on your music freeway. And we shouldn't let this heavy traffic get away without creating a positive impression to take home with them.

Naturally, there is a lot to be done with the addition and division of your music rotations. Mathematically, it's possible for gain or lose some quarter-hours by playing your math right or wrong. With your music set up on computer, you can approach this from another angle, but it is necessary to quickly analyze your music's strength mathematically once it's set up.

You may have to do a bit of additional monitoring in order to analyze your rotations properly. And once you've done it for your station, you must then take time to monitor the competition. A music monitor has to be at least 24 hours long.

And if you want to be really thorough, you will do it for both weekdays and weekends. There is a definite difference between the weekday audience and the weekend audience. For one thing, the feeling is different. For another, time-spent-listening increases significantly on the weekends, when many people are not working or going to school. Now that summer's coming, there's another consideration. The residual effect of what you gave those summer teens and "music freaks" are going to continue and influence the audience well into the fall and winter.

Calling On Callout Research

Probably nothing confuses and affects urban formats today more than call-out research. The question is do some of these younger, ill-trained programmers and music directors really understand callout, its purpose and the answers it can provide? And are most urban programmers using it correctly? Or, are they using it an excuse for not adding a song because they don't particularly like it personally or say it doesn't test well?

The answer is simply that callout is only effective in measuring a track that has established a reasonable pattern of familiarity. You have to analyze and interpret a song's favoriteness in relationship to its familiarity. Callout can be very accurate in showing a hit that's fast out of the chute or a new track from an established artist. That doesn't apply to all songs. Some songs are first listen hits. That still requires someone with an ear making music decisions. Other cross-demo songs, such as Chingy's "Pullin' Me Back" are slow to burn in and very slow to burn out. So here again, a programmer has to apply a dose of common sense and interpret the results honestly.

One thing that is especially disturbing to me is a programmer who institutes an arbitrary score threshold before a song receives any airplay or has only been given limited play in overnights. In other words, the song has received no significant daytime rotation.

So they say, after 3 weeks it's only achieved a reading of 38% and their cutoff line is 40%. So they drop it. Meanwhile, this same programmer is playing some mid-chart stiff that's been stalled at 43% for 6 or 7 weeks or never tested.

Usually, in urban formats at any give time, there are no more than three to five true new smashes. Keeping this thought in mind, some smart programmers use layers of re-currents and some power gold songs to maintain tempo and familiarity, forsaking freshness. For new jams, they focus on established artists and use songs they feel have the potential to become powers and that fit the sound of the station. This is not a bad idea providing you can maintain balance and freshness.

For urban AC stations, here's another little known secret: The hit-process life cycle shows that the older an adult listener gets, unfortunately, the less important music is in their lives. They still like music. They still listen to and enjoy it, but they become less inclined to get excited about a new jam, even from one of their favorite artists.

So, with all those things in mind, let's try to the answer to question of how long should you leave a new current in rotation before giving up? That's really a function of the number of cumulative spins, not just on your station, but also in the market and the format, for those jams with crossover potential. You also have to take into consideration your station's efficiency in converting cume to quarter hours.

Finally, if you are the only station in your format, when you do your music research, you may only want to test the P1s. Some may say that this strategy may inhibit growth, that you're preaching to the choir. The upside is that chances are you'll wind up super serving your core. That usually more than compensates for any errors you might make trying to expand your cume.

Now let's look at Urban radio's expectations of development and growth. In the early days of "one-size-fits all" urban formats, many stations which were beginning to program new music continued to also play songs from the past. They aired library gold, short and long-term re-currents. The thinking was that songs from the pre-rock era could provide appeal to adult listeners who hadn't fully accepted the new sounds, including hip-hop.

So the question became, which is better? Should a station try to keep its sound completely fresh by concentrating on only those researched current hits or should it try to balance the list with some well-researched hits from the past? The answer depends on who you ask.

Playing the hits will always win to some extent, but the competitive landscape has been changed. It no longer has the advantage it once did. Now, more than ever, it is critical to make certain there is a "wow" factor on your station. It's that "occasional greatness" we've been talking about. One place that absolutely must have it is mornings.

Urban morning shows, syndicated or local, need to be better, more entertaining with real humor. Listeners still want to wake up - laugh, chuckle or think. They want to escape before they start their day, often unlike many of us, going to a job they hate.

Is Less Is Really More?

Despite the acceptance of the "less in more" concept, problems continue. Most spot loads on urban stations are not going to decrease significantly right away. There are still markets and times when you can almost drive to work and never get out of a stop-set. And we're not going to get the huge promotional budgets we got before. The new "less is more" theory is that you're going to have to do more with less. I blame a lot of this on consolidation and group ownership. It's not that these companies couldn't do better radio with fewer stop-sets. It's that their managers are beholden to Wall Street and the projections of cash flow have been inflated to a ridiculous extreme. This is not a healthy environment for creating great radio.

Mainstream urban stations in the future are going to have to make their stations sound better and increase the likelihood that their listeners will give more horizontal or vertical listening occasions in an era of reduced spending on outside marketing and on-air contests and promotions.

Finally, as a general rule, the person with the best information wins, providing they can apply that information. Mainstream urban radio is going to have to get some help from the record labels. New music and artists are necessary format ingredients, but only if they're allowed to become familiar or they're from a core artist for the format. That is not to say that our target audience doesn't want to hear some fresh new jams. They do. But it takes time for the audience to become familiar with a new song. The labels shouldn't try to run a song up and down the chart so quickly that the song doesn't have time to penetrate. Record companies need to make a long-term commitment to the songs and artists they release. This is why many artists have released remakes. There are almost too many nostalgia songs and covers. Hip-hop artists are going back to the 80's and 90's to find tracks they can rap over.

Despite the obstacles, mainstream urban contemporary formats are still ones for which there continue to be great expectations. It is still one of the highest performing of all music formats, based on an index that reflects the total audience share divided by the percent of stations.

When management takes on the task of trying to keep a station on top by best tapping its programming resources and delivering the greatest amount of dollars to the bottom line, often they forget about many of the things we unveiled here. Given the prices paid for many properties, who could blame them? We can and we will. The strategy involved in positioning the station in such a way that the result becomes greater than the sum of the parts is critical to the station's success in the market. And sometimes doing this it means changing your tune.

Word.