Managing Female Content

Here’s a music radio true-ism. Men make about 70% of hit songs primarily because boys make about 85% of all the records recorded and released. Now, since most music radio station libraries are generally about 30% Female songs, we should give them a little special attention and control. I don’t want to have a quarter-hour segment with three Female songs back-to-back; I’d want those three spaced out to better balance the hour.

We want to avoid setting any formatting rules that are in serious conflict with the Library content. During scheduling, a few stops for one edit or another, but if M1 is stopping with the very same violation(s) day in day out, some content or rule settings need attention. For example, if a station’s library is 40% Slow songs and the guy is scheduling 14 songs an hour, if he then sets a Clock rule to allow only four Slows an hour, his scheduling pipes are going to get clogged immediately with a basket full of Slow songs and no place to put them all.

For the best Male-to-Female balance, first figure the percentage of Females in your ‘active’ categories, those are the ones being scheduled daily. Search the total songs in play and write that number down. Then do the same search for Female only.

In our example, this Pop/Oldies station has a library that is only 20% Female. While there is nothing inherently wrong with playing two or three ladies in a row, but as the female voice is a limited quality in this mix, I’d want to spread them out and have them more evenly dispersed across the hours.

If the Female content is 33-40%, I’ll usually allow two Females back-to-back (the Clock “Run” Rule). I set a Clock maximum of six Females, so when scheduling 14 songs an hour it ensures the hours will never have more than 40 to 45% Female content.

Female separation on the clock rules

Can I get Music 1 to separate songs by Females. I don’t have many female songs in my library. With my last scheduler, I had to create All-Female Categories and All-Male Categories to make sure I didn’t get two gal singers in a row.

Yes, M1 can assure that you’ll have no 2 females back to back. Or, if you want to have 10 minutes between females, you can do that too. Always keep in mind that all the songs in any category are going to get the same number of spins. If you have a 60’s Gold category with 400 songs and the turnover of the category has songs playing 5 times a month, then every song in the category will get 5 spins. The only thing that’ll change that is what you might do manually. Like, if on Patsy Cline’s birthday, you dropped “Crazy” in five times, then that month it would get 10 spins; the 5 ‘natural’ ones and the 5 you added.

One thing about setting rules in clocks is to be careful not to set rules that conflict with the “reality” of the library. Example: if your total active library was, say 25% female and you were formatting 14 songs an hour, if you then were to set a female separation at 30 minutes it wouldn’t work. Because 25% of 14 is: 3.5. So that would mean your natural rotation and content would have three or four females every hour. That could not happen and ALSO have females separated by 30 minutes. During scheduling, M1 would be stop-stop-stopping with Female Separation rule problems.