Radio Drops #15: Picking the Hits; Early Lessons

It used to be a lot easier.

When yours was the only Top 40, or only Country, or only R & B station in town, you could afford to make a lot of mistakes. The mistakes being: Playing stiffs. Non-Hit songs. The songs that cause some listeners to switch stations. If yours was the only station in town with your music format, you took comfort in knowing that the listener would be coming back pretty soon, just as soon as that other station played a crap song.

The game has totally changed now. Seemingly all the music ever made is available for our ears everywhere all the time. Today, to be a successful "Today's Hits" station and attracting a young demographic group of listeners, you need to be really, really good at selecting the new songs that you add into your library.

This is the first of two Drops on this topic. #16 is also posted.

Watch the video on YouTube: Radio Drops #15: Picking The Hits

Follow the Dollars

I want to talk about picking the hits: selecting new music for your radio station.

If you’re a new music or today’s hits station, your audience is mostly teens to about 30, the people most into new music. When you’re a teen and first get into music, everything is new. The oldies are new to you. By around 30, people aren’t so interested in new music anymore. You’re a full adult. You’ve got a job, you’ve got debt, you’ve got kids yourself. Your brain doesn’t have room for all the new music it once did when you were out catting around on weekends.

So how do you pick new songs when you know any one of them could be a tune out, that as soon as you start playing it some of your listeners are going to switch? The dreaded tune out is not an imaginary thing. Look at how quickly people hit the skip button on Pandora: within the first 10 seconds, often within the first 5.

Requests, Then Sales

Back in the 1900s, when music radio came to maturity and we were all learning how to do it well, stations would add new songs, play them for three to five weeks and watch for listener requests. If the requests came, they kept playing the songs, maybe moved them up in rotation. If not, the songs were dropped, never to be heard again.

Requests were just the first barometer, though. The most important indicator was the dollars spent on that new record. Sharp music directors called the record stores in their town every week to ask what was selling. I always asked the clerks, too, whether customers were asking for a new song they didn’t have in stock. What was that song? I wanted to know.

Many times there were what we called turntable hits: records that showed up on your request tabulations every day for several weeks but did not result in sales. People liked the song enough, some enough to call in and ask for it again, but they were not going to spend their money to own it. That’s the kind of record you dropped, and it wouldn’t be in your oldies list in years to come.

Mo and the Free Stock

Here’s a story for you. The first record promotion man I ever met was Mo, an independent record promoter, one of the first in that trade. Indie promoters signed one-off contracts to work new singles for different labels, so one might have five or seven songs to talk to you about. If you added a song to your playlist, the promoter got a bonus.

I was a very young program director and music director at a station that reported to the national trade chart the Gavin Report, the first of the disc jockey and music director oriented charts.

If Mo can get a reporting station to play the record, he can tell other stations this reporter is playing it, so maybe you ought to play it too. But Mo did more than that. He played five or six records for me that day, I don’t remember exactly, and I added one of them.

Then Mo told me he was going to take five copies of that record to each of the three record stores in my town and just give them to them. He’d tell them my station was going to be playing it, here’s some free stock so you’ll have some on hand for the first comers, you can order some more, and here’s my card. There you go.

The radio and record businesses were different, but very complementary. The record company just wanted to sell the product. I wanted to know which product was selling, because if I was playing that good product, I was more likely to build and maintain my radio audience.

More Data Than I Ever Had

Things changed with the coming of MP3s and then streaming. Today people don’t much phone radio stations to make requests, and usually there’s nobody answering the request lines anyway. I don’t remember the last time I heard a station promote its request line number. And there aren’t many local record stores to call for sales reports.

On the other hand, you can find tons more data about music consumption online than I ever had. If I were programming a hot hit station today, every week, maybe every day, I’d be looking at the Spotify charts, the iTunes charts, and the YouTube Music and Amazon Music charts. It’s pretty easy to find out what’s getting a buzz and what the most active music listeners are listening to.

That doesn’t mean you’ve got to play everything that looks hot. Say a big star drops a new album and suddenly there are five or seven songs from that star in the iTunes top 20. What you’ve got to do is pick the two songs you believe are the absolute best and play the heck out of those. If you later learn that one of the other songs was the standout record, the listeners’ favorite, well, you just start pumping that one, of course.