Music programmers understandably focus most of their attention each day on the song-for-song music flow of their station. Massaging the day’s music log to balance tempos, eras, artists and styles is what makes a station’s music sound great. But flow is only one dimension. The second dimension is rotations, or the science and mechanics.
Pat Welsh
by Pat Welsh
Music programmers (PDs and MDs) understandably focus most of their attention each day on the song-for-song music flow of their station. Massaging the day’s music log to balance tempos, eras, artists and styles is what makes a station’s music sound great. But flow is only one dimension; it’s the art of music scheduling. The second dimension is rotations, or the science and mechanics.
Rotations involve more subtle long-term patterns to your music and, therefore, to your levels of audience satisfaction. In this article I’ll ask a number of questions that PDs and MDs need to ask themselves, and I’ll present a few music rotation analyses that should be performed on a regular basis. The essential questions are: What’s going on behind the scenes? and What’s happening that may not be obvious on first look? The view for a guy like me, coming at it from 30,000 feet is different than that of the PDs and MDs. That’s why we complement one another so well.
One of the first things I do when I receive a client database is to run the analyses described below. Often I’ll run them when I get the database, then I’ll schedule a couple of weeks worth of logs (without any manual editing), then quickly run them again. I want to see what did happen over the previous few weeks; then I want to see how much of it was the fault of the way the database is set up.
Now let’s go in for a closer look at the keys to proper rotations:
• What you seek is what you get – This is the common theme for all of these tests. Spending hours to sort a music test and more hours to massage a music log doesn’t matter if the output doesn’t equal the input. In other words, are you getting results that are consistent with what you intended?
• Wag the Dog Test – This one answers a simple question about the structure of your library and the clocks: Do the most important categories turn over faster than the less important ones? The test is very basic, look at the rotation calculator and see what the projected turnovers are for the categories. Are your recurrents rotating slower than some of your gold categories? Are your power categories set up to play faster than your secondaries, or does the tail wag the dog by guaranteeing that your Power 90s rotate every 4 days while your Secondary 90s go every 3 days?
This one is all about the structure of the database. If you see problems with the way the categories are structurally set up, then you know you’re going to see a lot of problems when you run the other tests listed below. This will require adjustments to the clocks or category counts to bring things into alignment.
• Use It or Lose It Test – One of the most subtle tests is for what I call category usage. In other words, are all the songs in your library actually being played (and exposed to the audience)? Or do some of them rarely see the light of day, while others (one hit wonders and the like) play all the time? The category usage analysis can only be done by running specific diagnostic analyses. You can’t see category usage in the hour-by-hour logs or during manual editing.
You need to analyze each category separately. You want to see the entire category and see which songs play a lot and which ones don’t. Do this for a one month period for gold categories; doing it for a shorter period is not going to be as meaningful. You can run it for a two-week time period for recurrents, but keep in mind that any recent additions to recurrent from the current categories will distort the results.
Another nice benefit of looking at the usage of the categories one at a time is that you can usually also see the play histories for each song with no more than a key stroke or two. You can quickly flip through the entire category and see if there are any consistent rotation pattern problems that crop up.
• The Berlin Wall Test – This is one of my favorites. Are your Powers really powering? Are your Secondaries really lurking in the background, or have they assumed a starring role? If, for example, your gold library is divided into eras and you have power and secondary versions of each (or two levels of the same category to make this distinction), create a most-frequently played report for the combined powers and secondaries. Again, do this analysis over a one month period.
What you want to see is a clear line (the Berlin Wall) between the powers and the secondaries. If you have a mushy middle, where powers and secondaries are co-mingled, then you need to find out why this is happening. There’s a reason that powers are in the faster-rotating categories. You want to make sure they play that way.
• Core Strength Test – This is an important one whether you’re talking about fitness or music rotations. The question to ask is: are the artists that play the most often really what you consider your core artists? Run a core artist analysis for a one month period and see who’s in your Top 20. Is this what you intended for your station to sound like? Is there anyone that shouldn’t be in that list? Is there anyone missing that should be there?
A core artist list is less relevant for a CHR station, or any other format that has a high percentage of currents. The hits are the hits and manipulating your categories for the sake of artist concerns may be counterproductive. In these cases, songs are often much more important than artists. Besides, with (presumably) lots of small, fast-rotating categories, it can be hard to do much about it after the fact. Still, I advise doing this periodically to see what message you’re giving out from an artist perspective.
All of the scenarios referred to above with respect to rotation problems are real…the names have been left out to protect the innocent. It’s surprising to me sometimes how often things are happening under the hood that programmers didn’t intend. Then again, if I look under the hood of my car, all I see is a lot of dirty metal. Consider the tests above my equivalents of checking the oil level, refilling the windshield washer fluid and checking the tire pressure.
Pat Welsh, Senior Vice President/Digital Content, Pollack Media Group, can be reached at 310 459-8556, fax: 310-454-5046, or at pat@pollackmedia.com.
