Ours Is Still A Very Connected Business One of the biggest day-to-day challenges Urban programmers and music directors face today is being able to connect with label executives who are only too willing to assist in the station's endeavors to offer compelling content on ...

New Insights Into Rating Realities There's some new thinking that's already quietly making the rounds with a number of programmers in both large and small markets. It has to do with the numbers behind the numbers -- a combination of little things that, when properly ...

Did We See It In Time? This time we want to examine the light at the end of the tunnel. What does it mean? Is it daylight or another high-speed train on the same track? If you're a "conductor" or programmer, you have to know and you have to be right. Fortunately, there ...

Balancing With Genre-Based Sound Increasingly, today's generation of Urban listeners are more tech-savvy and always hungry for new music. Add to this the mass proliferation of file-sharing and there is less musical compartmentalizing than in the past. We used to live in ...

It's Time To Invest In Our Future There's nothing like the exhilaration of feeling you've been lapped by technology, coupled with the unsettling realization that it's perpetually breathing down your neck. Radio's information age is a sleek stallion, and if you're not ...

Traffic Tie-Ups -- In Effect One involvement element for drivetimes in nearly every market, regardless of format, is the traffic report (even though it has changed and in some markets it's handled by a syndicator). Just to lighten the load this summer, I thought we would ...

Should Urban ACs Re-focus Their Summer Programming Strategies? Recent studies have shown that in the summer, Urban adults are being lured away from traditional Urban AC stations and back to stations that feature hip-hop and uptempo jams. The question becomes: Are these ...

Achieving Product Differentiation One of the biggest problems Urban-formatted stations will face this year is meaningful product differentiation. Most of your ratings success still comes from a very small group of extremely passionate listeners and when similar products ...

The Composers For the fourth and final chapter in our current series for Black Music Month 2011, we want to focus on African-American composers. They composed all types of music that have made and are still making a difference. Before the 20th century, many ...