Why I still trust my gut

There was a night in the late '80s when I was programming a Top 40 station in the mid-South, and the call-out numbers came back on a song I'd been running in heavy rotation. The research said pull it. Familiarity was fine, but burn was through the roof. Every respondent who knew it was tired of it. My music director circled the numbers in red and slid the sheet across the desk like it was a verdict.

I kept playing the song.

Not because I was stubborn, and not because I didn't believe in the data. I kept playing it because something in my ear told me the research was catching the trailing edge of a wave that had already turned. The song still sounded right on the air. It still fit the station. Two weeks later, the requests started climbing again without a single change to the rotation. I never fully understood it. I just knew.

The radio business has cycled between gut and data my entire career. In the 50s, the people who invented music-format radio had no research tools. They had ears and instincts and a feel for what moved people. Then the next generation came in and ran the analytics on what those pioneers built. They codified it, structured it, franchised it. Then a new wave of programmers came along and trusted their intuition again, and the cycle repeated.

That is not a criticism of research. I have used it, benefited from it, and recommended it. But I have watched programmers treat research like a verdict when it is really a check. There is a difference. A verdict settles the question. A check confirms or challenges what you already believe, and then you decide.

The research tools we have today are better than anything I had coming up. Airplay data, streaming trends, the numbers that tell you how a song is performing before your own listeners even register they have an opinion. Those things are real and useful. But the data tells you what has happened. Your ear tells you what is about to happen.

Rockefeller and Carnegie made decisions on hunches. So did the programmers who built the sound of American radio. The executives who relied most on intuition, according to Douglas Dean's research in Executive ESP, had the highest profit records of any group he studied. That does not mean you ignore the spreadsheet. It means you do not let the spreadsheet do the job that belongs to your professional judgment.

Here is where I have landed after forty years. When the data and my ear agree, I move fast. When they disagree, I slow down and listen harder. Not to the data. To myself. Why does this song still feel right? What is the research not capturing? Am I rationalizing, or am I reading something the numbers cannot see yet?

Most of the time, if I sit with that question honestly, I know the answer. The gut does not replace the data. But neither does the data replace the gut. The job is knowing which one to believe on any given Tuesday.

I still trust mine.

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steve