Why Radio Plays The Same Songs Over and Over
You may know of Pat Holiday’s YouTube channel. He’s a veteran program director from my generation now doing a valuable job teaching things we all used to learn by doing. From its invention in the 50’s to the end of the century, radio guys learned the craft by working with groups of guys (mostly guys) who all wanted to do the same thing; to live and work in the radio biz. To get paid to play records.
From the time I got into this biz myself (the middle ’60s, children) until the end of the decade, radio programming continued improving. Small steps, yes. But it got better. The announcers got better. The formatting became much more strategic. Then, in 1996 it all changed for American radio. Congress did its thing and gave the licenses to corporations. Now, Pop music radio has always played “the same songs over and over”; for some it’s a few hundred songs, for other stations it’s a few thousand. We learned early on: if we don’t play the hits over and over, we’ll lose the audience to the station that is! The principal problem isn’t so much playing a song too much as having it play at the same time of day today as it played yesterday. That’s why I’m always telling M1 folks; Keep your eye on the Average Turnover chart for each category. Know when and where the repeats are going to fall.
SW
Written by
Steve Warren
Steve Warren has programmed radio since 1964. He built MdB, the first music scheduler for the Mac, in 1987 and Music 1 for Windows in 1994, and is a founding partner of MusicOne.
