Programmer burnout vs. listener burnout

I've pulled songs that were still working. I know it because I tracked it afterward.

You're in the programming chair every day. You hear the schedule going out. You hear the songs at the station, in the car on the way home, in your head when you're trying to sleep. A song that's been in heavy rotation for six weeks feels like it's been there for six months. So you move it to Medium. Then to Recurrent too soon, before listeners are beginning to tire of it.

Meanwhile, a listener who catches radio in the morning drive and the evening drive, maybe two hours total, might have heard that song four times in the same month you’d heard it fifty times and got sick of it. She never got the chance to get tired of it. You made that call for her.

Programmer burnout is not the same thing as listener burnout.

Your listener’s listening lifestyle is very much different than yours. The math makes this embarrassingly obvious once you actually do it. Say a song is in your Hot Current category and it rotates nine times a day. You, the program director, listen to the station constantly. Every one of your Hots hits your ears at least twenty times a week while your average listener might hear them twice, maybe three times if they commute and have to pick up the kids after school. Your ears say it’s done, the song has run its course as a Current, your listener has barely become familiar with it.

This is one of the reasons music scheduling software matters. Not to automate the judgment calls, but to separate your perception from your listener's reality. The numbers tell you what the listener is hearing. Your gut tells you what you're hearing. You need both, and you need to know which is which.

The rule I always came back to: You added the song because you believed it could become a valuable property, a Hit Song in your mix. Don’t begin to doubt your gut until the song has been in rotation long enough for you to get some measure of listener response to it. Originally that meant early and continuing listener requests for the song. Then record sales confirmed the song’s programming value. In today’s world, there aren’t many record stores to survey each week for sales tabulations. And how many stations even take requests anymore? What I would watch are the streaming charts. The top of those charts tell us what is hot with younger listeners. Make it a habit to study the life-cycles of hit songs. How long do they stay Top 10-Hot? What are the oldest records in the Top 100? Those are often the songs older listeners have been drawn to.

Sometimes a song really does burn fast. I could often track it in my request tabulations. Today, I’d pay attention to how quickly songs drop down the streaming charts after having reached the top. Real burn has signals that you have to learn to read. It matters because when you pull a hit song before it had run its course, some listeners lost little bits of listening pleasure. There aren't that many great songs in any given year. Play them for all they are worth.