Radio Drops #22: Dayparting/Hour Restrictions

The Word and the Phrase = the Same Thing

In the early days, Top 40 played whatever were the current hits. The weekly Top 10 might include Frank Sinatra and Little Richard. Smart programmers played Sinatra in the daylight and Little Richard after dark. Dayparting. Later came two versions of the same Hit record, the three-minute radio single and the seven-minute album version. The Album version of “Light My Fire” was hour-restricted. It wasn’t played in the hours with the heaviest commercial load.

Watch the video on YouTube: Radio Drops #22: Dayparting/Hour Restrictions

Sinatra While the Kids Are in School

Not long ago, a MusicOne user asked me about dayparting, and I had a long answer for him. I’m going to read most of it to you and ad-lib along the way.

The idea for dayparting came up in the early days of Top 40, in the 1950s. Top 40 originally served everybody and played essentially every song in the Top 40. That could include Sinatra and Tony Bennett, and also Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis and Fats Domino.

The younger listeners didn’t much care for their parents’ music, and the older listeners were outright offended by Little Richard. Playing a Sinatra record into a Little Richard record was what we call a train wreck.

So the idea was to play Sinatra when the kids were in school, and Little Richard in the afternoons and evenings, after school let out and most of the Top 40 audience was on the younger side. That is dayparting, also called hour restrictions.

If you were a Top 40 station in the ’50s and into the ’60s, at any given time you had four or five records you only played during the day, and another handful you only played in the evening.

In the 1970s, with the rapid growth of FM listening in the United States, pop formats began to evolve and become more specialized. Album rock stations wouldn’t play any of the so-called adult music, and adult contemporary stations wouldn’t play Jimi Hendrix at all. Once programming became more strategic, more focused on specific demographic groups, there was little need for dayparting.

If you’re programming a station today, I think you have to be laser focused on a specific demographic. You need to be the same radio station with the same music mix 24/7. So there’s very little reason to daypart anymore.

The only reason to daypart is to keep a song from scheduling at a certain time of day, for whatever reason. Let’s say your oldies library has a good number of songs that run five to six minutes, while most are under four. Play too many of those long songs in the daytime, when your commercial load is much higher than at night, and that can throw the hour off.

Instead of getting in, say, 14 songs an hour, you might only get 12. That might not please you. It wouldn’t please me.

What I would do is put those longer songs in their own category, and then just put that category on the format clock at night. And that is the essence of dayparting.