Pete Schiecke
Shortly after his recent promotion, FMQB checked in with Sr. Programming Manager for AOL Music and AOL Radio, Pete Schiecke on the ins-and-outs of one of the music industry’s more successful new players. While Internet radio remains somewhat influx, AOL Radio and AOL Music remain dominant in their fields and continue to grow. We start off with how Pete’s radio journey landed him at AOL’s doorstep…
Give me a brief synopsis of your radio career.
I started at WPGU/Champaign as program director when I was in college. Afterwards, I went to KQXR in Boise and was the Music Director and did nights on-air. I worked with Jacent Jackson there. Then I went to WXTM in Cleveland, which has different call letters now, when it was Xtreme Radio. I was Music Director and afternoons there. In October of 2004, I came here to AOL Radio (http://music.aol.com/radioguide/bb) which is now headed by Lisa Namerow. I am currently the senior programming manager for primarily the Rock, Alternative, and Metal music genres. Recently, my duties expanded into AOL Music where I do industry relations for artists in the same music genres.
Give us a brief synopsis of AOL Radio.
First off, AOL Radio (http://music.aol.com/radioguide/bb) is a free, online destination, aolradio.com. We have over 200 CD quality stations featuring XM. If you’re listening to the free version of AOL Radio, you get all the AOL stations and 20 XM channels to check out. Those XM channels change from time to time. We rotate them in and out to always give a different sampling of the XM programming. If you’re a paying AOL member you get all the XM music channels. There are multiple ways to listen to AOL Radio. There’s the traditional way by going to aolradio.com. Also when you log into AIM, if you look at the bottom of your buddy list there’s a little box at the bottom, you hit the headphone icon button and you’ll listen to AOL Radio right there, which is really cool. Then you can always hit a button on there that maximizes the radio player to the big size that you get from aolradio.com. If you’re a Mac user we have a special AOL Radio application you can download. If you’re into iTunes, you’ll love that application.
AOL Music is one of the largest on-line music destinations in the world. We touch everything in terms of the Pop culture with AOL Sessions (http://music.aol.com/videos/sessions/sessions_flash), AOL Music Live (http://music.aol.com/videos/live-concerts), AIM Interviews (http://music.aol.com/artists/aim-celebrity-interview), AOL Breakers (http://music.aol.com/franchise/breakers), and we have one of the largest music video selections out there (http://music.aol.com/video-hub/). We have everything. We really specialize in creating exclusive, world class programming. Really fun, unique, compelling content. Lots of cool photo galleries (http://music.aol.com/photo-galleries), countdowns (http://music.aol.com/feature/countdowns), video premieres, quizzes (http://music.aol.com/quizzes-and-trivia), all kinds of stuff.
How many channels do you program?
Currently I program 60 stations on AOL Radio, mostly in the rock genres. We have more programming managers that handle other genres. When I first started here I programmed about 25 stations. One of the great things is I have a lot of creative freedom and we can build a station and launch it within a week or two. It’s very easy to put together a station and get it up on AOL radio. There isn’t a lot of hurdles; that’s what I love about it. You’re only limited by your imagination for what you can create on AOL Radio.
When I started working at AOL Radio, I worked on filling in a lot of the holes we weren’t covering. For instance, we only had one Metal station that just played Classic Metal, and now we have ten. I just picked out every little genre of Metal: Metalcore, Death Metal, Black Metal, Power Metal, All Metallica, etc. We have the official Metallica station that the band promotes from the main page of their official site. We have a Slayer station that the band proudly promotes on their Myspace page as well.
What are some of the most well received, interactive stations?
Actually, there’s no shocking surprises. The stations that do the best are our Classic Rock station, Top Pop station, Top Country station, Top Hip-Hop station, Top Alternative station, etc. The most popular AOL Radio stations in many ways mirror the big formats that are on terrestrial radio. Many people still want the stations that just play the hits nonstop all day long. But, at the same time, one of the reasons why we’re so successful is that we go way beyond that.
We have hundreds of other niche stations that hyper-focus on genres of music that no one else is covering. We have a station called Anime radio that just plays Japanese Pop and other stuff from Anime TV shows and movies that has a gigantic audience. We have a station that just plays lullabies for parents to put their baby to sleep to. There are two video game stations. One is called Video Game Scores; it’s primarily instrumental music from video games. A lot of people don’t realize that most music in the games these days are more intricate and amazing than most modern movie scores. There’s a whole subculture of kids online that love this stuff. We also have a video game station called Final Fantasy Radio – Final Fantasy is one of the biggest video game franchises out there, and it is also incredibly well known for the amazing musical scores. We have a Progressive Rock station, which I think is the greatest Prog station in the world. The Prog audience is so incredibly passionate about that type of music, and we have a very large dedicated fanbase for that station. You name the genre, we have a station for it.
AOL Sessions is a major destination for artists when promoting new albums.
Yes, AOL Sessions (http://music.aol.com/videos/sessions/sessions_flash) has always been a big factor in the marketing plan of record labels when they’re releasing a new album by an A List artist, and it will continue to be that way. With Rock and Alternative artists, we’ve recently created a subset of AOL Sessions called Sessions Under Cover (http://music.aol.com/sessions-under-cover), and that’s strictly an acoustic set… it’s focuses just on the Alternative genre – primarily the Emo and Punk Rock bands. It caters to the Warped Tour audience, and it’s very gritty and raw. There’s one cover song and at least two originals. A really bare bones set, but still very compelling. The fans love it, and it allows AOL to create a whole community around these type of bands. I’m overseeing that feature, and it’s really exciting to watch it grow. We also have the Breakers Program (http://music.aol.com/franchise/breakers) for new and developing artists in all genres. We launch a new set of Breakers every two months. The AOL Music staff picks twelve bands each round that we think our audience is really going to dig. Then, the fans decide which of those twelve bands are going to be the next big thing by voting on who they like the best. The program has played a large part in breaking bands.
How much more refreshing and satisfying for you is it to be on this side of radio as opposed to the terrestrial side?
I love it. I really had a lot of fun working in terrestrial radio for nine-or-so years. But, there’s just so much more creative freedom here. It’s so much more exciting to deal with all these different genres of music. On the AOL Music side, it’s so rewarding working close with artists by booking them for an AOL Sessions, premiering music videos, and integrating them within all the other amazing features we have. I’m in a growing industry now. The Internet’s growing and it’s got no signs of slowing down.
What are its benefits and advantages over other Internet radio destinations, satellite and terrestrial radio stations?
We offer more in quantity and quality. We have well over 200 stations including XM channels. Each one of our stations is very hyper-focused within that genre of music. Whereas, terrestrial radio… they have to try to get the biggest audience possible on one station which sometimes causes the music to not be as focused. With AOL Radio, there’s minimal music interruption. We don’t have deejays on our stations. There’s less than four minutes of commercials per hour. So it’s really nice if you just want to hear a specific genre of music with minimal interruptions along with high quality sound for free. You can’t beat it.
There’s also very little production in-between the songs. You’re not going to hear a liner in-between every song. We only play a few liners per hour. There’s really no reason to do it. People know what they’re listening to; they’re listening to AOL Radio and we don’t have to remind them every song. We just try to keep the listening experience as clean as possible. It’s CD quality (with a high speed connection) but in terms of the quality of the programming, our stations are overseen by humans. There’s a lot of other Internet radio properties that are automated. It’s all scheduled by formulas and the things the user enters in, and it just decides what it thinks you like.
AOL Radio is also primarily programmed by the listeners in a way. We’ve got music experts, like myself and all the other programmers that program each of the stations we have. We use our expertise and knowledge to pick the songs that are proper for each station. But then, the listeners take over and can rate the songs that they’re listening to. We take that research, and then based on that we’ll play a song more or less. Or, we’ll stop playing the song completely if the research is really bad. It’s great, because it’s so incredibly accurate. It’s voluntary. The people who want to rate the songs do so. It’s just so refreshing to get such great, accurate, instant feedback. I get an average, overall listener score, and I can see how big that sample size is that’s contributing to that score so far – which terrestrial radio doesn’t have, satellite radio doesn’t have. They’re just depending on the really talented people that work behind those stations to make as good as a possible educated guess while using the other research that they have – which I don’t think is nearly as good. And as I said, our research is free too. We don’t have pay for it.
That kind of research is starting to carry more weight in the label community as they promote their records.
You’re totally right. More and more labels are just aware of what a great research tool AOL Radio is, beyond just the fact it has a monster audience and it’s great exposure. They can use that to spread the story to other places. They have been utilizing it more.
How do you gauge the traffic and listens?
Internally, which is very helpful for me on the programming end for my varying channels, I can see exactly how many people are listening to the stations I program each week, and exactly how long they’re listening for. So, not only are song ratings really helpful for programming, but if we see there’s a lot of people listening to a station, but the Time Spent Listening isn’t that good, we know there’s obviously a hunger for that station but the programming needs to be better, so we fix it. We just have so many incredible tools being online, being able to track every little thing. It just helps us make the product so much better. It’s great.
Overall, is your listenership more on the young end of 18-34?
I’d say it’s across the board – we have a station that caters to every single demo. In terms of interaction, the demo leans slightly towards the younger end. From my experience on working online for a while now, the younger end is more passionate about Internet radio or any kind of consumption of music online. They’re not getting what they want on terrestrial radio. One station that caters to the younger audience is an Alternative music station that is simply called ‘Emo.’ All our stations are clearly named. They don’t have a quirky name – they simply define exactly what you’re looking for.
But the Emo station is huge on AOL Radio. Terrestrial radio, for the most part, is not playing music from this genre. There’s definitely a huge passion for those kinds of bands online, and obviously the younger audience is definitely more interactive with rating the songs and just being a part of the whole online experience. Our older audience still has a large presence on AOL Radio, but they’re also the ones that are at work all day so they just click on their favorite station, and keep it on all day long. So the Time Spent Listening with the older demo is huge, but they may not be as interactive per se.
You’re definitely not beholden to the beer demographic, which is something that is really frustrating to labels, artists and some programmers as well.
The nice thing about AOL Radio is that we reach every single demographic. From the lullaby station for the one-year-olds to the Oldies stations. In terms of Alternative radio, yeah ……obviously they do have to cater to their advertising, and that affects what they play. Advertising definitely doesn’t change what we program on our stations. If an advertiser wants to reach a certain demo, they target their commercials on the specific AOL Radio stations that those demos cater to. It’s really nice, so there’s no influence there.
And these days, the younger audience… even like people in their twenties and thirties, they’re getting more and more used to being able to consume their music in so many different ways and having the power of how to consume it. I get kind of bored listening to Alternative FM radio these days, when I can instead go online and have so many different options of what kind of Alternative station I want. I’m not forced to listen to just one station where there might be some songs I like, but I might have to sit through a lot of songs I don’t like as well. Terrestrial radio is limited in that respect.
What are your thoughts on some of the different technologies being made available today, whether it be something like HD Radio or having streams available on cell phones? Where does AOL fit into that, say Mobile AOL radio?
I can’t really speak for where we’re going. As far as AOL Radio is concerned, we haven’t announced anything yet. But, obviously, the overall trend is moving towards that technology. Internet radio is slowly becoming more and more accessible on cell phones. It’s not there yet where it’s so easily accessible on your cell phone and you can listen to a bunch of free stations on high-quality streams. There are bandwidth and advertising challenges that need to be over come. But we’re getting there. That day is going to come. I don’t think it’s that far away. Technology is moving so quickly. It’s insane how much things have changed. That’s the one limit that Internet radio primarily has is you’re locked pretty much to your computer right now. You have to be sitting at your desk at work or at home listening, but once you’re able to walk away from your desk and easily access online radio, I mean it’s a whole new ballgame in terms of further competing against all the other mediums out there. Especially those mediums that charge you money to listen. I don’t know how they’re going to survive.
As for HD Radio, it’s really cool. It would have been even cooler if it came out ten years ago. It’s going to be really challenging for them at this point to make HD Radio the new standard. I don’t think it’s ever going to be close to as big as FM radio was as a medium for music consumption. It’s already going to be a challenge for them to get it into everyone’s cars. And also to make people pay for it when they already have all these other free options. Why should I pay for just this other thing? They might already have satellite radio in their car. They might already be an online radio listener. It’s definitely a challenge. I think it’s really cool, and FM radio should be pushing towards that, but…I wonder if it’s too late. I don’t know, only time will tell.
**QB Content By Mike Bacon**
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