Radio Drops #16: Selecting New Music

For CHR and Other Today’s Hits Radio Stations

The fact is new and unfamiliar songs are the number one reason listeners switch stations. This is particularly true with teen-to-thirty-year olds, who also are the most eager consumers of new music. These folks like new music a lot. But they only like the new music that they Like! The thing they like the most is also the number one reason listeners switch stations….”a song I don’t like.” Consider the Pandora data showing a huge number of listeners hitting the skip button within the first five seconds if the player is within reach.

Watch the video on YouTube: Radio Drops #16: Selecting New Music

Good Ears Aren’t Enough

I did Top 40, or contemporary hit radio, for the first third of my career. Back then we’d learned well that that kind of format could not play many more than about 35 records and win ratings races. That’s not counting recurrents and oldies: 35 chart or new records at any given time, 35 records of this month.

If you were the only Top 40 station in town, playing some lousy non-hit singles wouldn’t hurt you all that much. People in their cars might hit the button over to the R&B station or the country station or the AC station, but they’d be back pretty soon, because nobody else in town had that full “what’s happening today” music mix.

CHR’s target audience was teens to about 30, and that demographic always has wanted, and still does want, the best new songs of the moment. Top 40 stations were the only ones giving it to them. Still, I knew there was a lot of good music on that R&B station and that country station that my CHR station would not play. I wanted to avoid giving my listeners so many reasons to click over and hear what was going on there. That’s what non-hit records do: they get people to hit the button to the other station for a while.

It’s a conundrum. Listeners to this format want to hear new music, but only the new music they like. Now, how are they going to know they like a new song unless they hear it on the radio a few times, in the mix with their own current favorites?

The Format Still Works

Radio began to lose its monopoly as the portable, take-it-anywhere music source right at the end of the ’90s. MP3 file sharing was the first breakthrough, and then this century streaming took over. Broadcast radio is no longer the music discovery source for most people. But the format still works.

The format is about 35 records. Seven to 10 are the biggest hits of the moment, the ones selling and streaming the most this week. Another 15 to 20 or so are new songs that show promise of making the top 10 before people tire of them. Then there are three to five brand new songs: the happy surprises we hope for people.

So the big question is, how are you going to pick those three to five new songs you add each week?

Three Charts on My Desk

Here’s what I did back in the 1900s. There were three trade charts on my desk each week. The first and most important was the Radio & Records newspaper, with hit charts for six or seven formats: CHR, urban, country, album rock, adult contemporary and a couple of others.

Next was the Gavin Report. Bill Gavin had created the very first Top 40 national DJ chart, in 1958. Both publications compiled their charts from weekly reports called in by music and program directors of top-rated stations across the nation. There were no more than about 75, maybe 150, reporting stations.

And then there was Billboard. At that time it was based entirely on record sales, so it ran weeks behind R&R and Gavin, which were compiled from their reporters’ airplay. Billboard was the chart that, in the end, confirmed whether a record was a hit or not. It told me what to keep in oldies rotation next year and on down the line. Gavin and R&R helped me cull through all the new and unfamiliar records that hit my desk every week.

The Gavin chart listed 50 records, and four or five would be underlined as the movers: the ones with the most new adds that week, or the most jumps on the individual station Top 40 charts. Most stations published their own weekly chart back then. The smart ones did, anyway. Radio & Records did that too. They called their top moving songs each week Breakers.

So I’m in my office with my three charts and all the new records the record companies had sent. First I’d listen to the songs underlined in Gavin and marked as Breakers in R&R. Then I’d relisten to a handful of other records that had been sitting on my desk for a week or 10 days or two weeks.

The Record That Laid an Egg

Early in my career I was complimented several times as a guy who had good ears. That meant I was a little better than most guys at picking the hits out of the bunch. But I learned early on not to trust my first impressions.

There was a Spanish rock group called Los Bravos. They had a really big hit in 1966 called “Black Is Black.” You didn’t hear from them again until ’68, when they released “Bring a Little Lovin’.” Killer intro. I loved this song from the first 5 seconds. I called the receptionist and the traffic director in and said, “Listen to this, listen to this!” Loved it, loved it, loved it.

It peaked at number 51 on the Billboard chart. Laid an egg. It was never worth playing to begin with, and it made me a lot more cautious about trusting my own good ears.

Live with the Songs First

A few years later I finally figured out a way to work around first impressions. I’d been making my new add choices based on the Gavin songs, the Breakers in R&R and what my ears told me about a song’s viability. That wasn’t really enough.

What was missing came to me from a music director I hired in Virginia Beach. She listened to the records a couple of times a day, all week, and after about seven or 10 days of regular exposure she decided which songs to recommend that we add.

I soon saw she was really good at picking the few songs out of the big stacks. She could pick the hits, the few that would ultimately make the Billboard top 10. And that’s what I wanted to play. I really only wanted to play top 10 records.

At my next station she was not there, so I adopted her system myself. I’d always done my auditioning at the station. Now I carried copies of the new records home and listened there, and sometimes copied the new songs onto cassette tapes to play in my car. I got familiar with the songs before adding them, and my accuracy rate for picking the hits improved.

That’s what you should take away from this little lecture. Use your charts. Use your data. There’s a lot more data on music consumption available now than I ever had. It will give you a leg up if you study it closely and look at who’s buying the records and who’s streaming them. You won’t have to listen to two dozen new songs every Monday and Tuesday.

Watch the buying and streaming patterns of the new songs in your format, and see which titles get the most attention from your target demo. Then listen to those songs. And listen to them again. And again. If you can listen to a song all the way through after hearing it eight or a dozen times over a couple of weeks, then you can make the best decisions about the new songs you’re going to put into your music mix.