Radio Drops #24: Constructing the Music Mix

Thoughts on Mixing Currents, Recurrents and Oldies

If you are playing ONLY Current Hits, or if you are playing ONLY Oldies, then different strategies apply. If your station is like most, you've got three main types of songs to Categorize and mix.

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Variety Means Their Favorites, Mixed Up

Not long ago, one of the guys using my software somewhere in this world asked how I’d classify music for urban, soft rock or adult contemporary stations. Was it any different from, say, CHR Top 40?

As I see it, there isn’t much difference. Every format has new hits, recent hits and oldies. That’s true in all the mainstream formats: CHR, urban, country. It’s a matter of how many songs a station plays from each of those groups. What the mix is.

Some may be playing 25% current hits, others 60%. The older your target audience, the fewer currents you’ll play. That’s another discussion. I always ran stations that were current focused.

How Often Should They Hear It?

The question then is how often I want my average listener to hear the top 10 songs each week, whatever I thought were the hottest on my station or in my market. And how often do I want them to hear the medium currents?

Here’s how I went about it. Say my average time spent listening was 10 hours. If I wanted my listener to hear each current hit three times a week, I needed a rotation on my hots of about 3:15 or 3:20: a 3-hour-and-20-minute turnover.

If I wanted my target audience to hear my medium currents twice a week on average, I needed about a 4:45 turnover on those to get two plays within those 10 hours.

For recurrents, the hits from the last couple of years, my main thing was making sure every song in the category played in each daypart before repeating in any one of them. I had the same goal for oldies.

Super Serve One Group

The real challenge is to have the right records in the library. Content needs to be focused on a specific demographic, and you’ve got to super serve that group. Play only the songs you believe will be most appealing to that particular demographic.

Here’s an example. My biggest success in consulting was KKBQ in Houston, the country station. When we kicked it off, we focused on 25 to 34 year old women. That was it. Everything we did, everything we played, was with those gals in mind. And as they came to us, they brought along their husbands, their boyfriends and their girlfriends.

The station had two big-league country competitors at the time. Both had oldies libraries hundreds of titles larger than ours.

Once a year the station did a perception research study, and among other things we asked which country station in Houston plays the widest variety of music. KKBQ scored highest every time, and we were the station playing the fewest records.

What Variety Really Means

Here’s the thing to remember. When listeners say they want variety, they don’t mean a lot of songs. Variety to them is their own favorite songs, all mixed up, with a few surprises. In Houston at the time, every time a customer hit the button to KKBQ, a certified hit record was playing.

That station was also the one that broke the new hits. We were always first with the next hits, before the other two got around to them. We didn’t add more songs. We picked them better, and when we added them, we played them in hot rotations.

The other stations played their new adds a couple of times a day. Over on our side of the dial, we played ours five times a day. We won the image as the station that plays the best new songs first, directly because of how we handled those new adds, which was quite unconventional for country radio at the time.

There’s an old adage: you don’t get hurt by what you don’t play. And there’s another: nobody ever got hurt by cutting the size of their library.