Stopset Design: Common Sense Thrown Out the Window

Several sources have reported that some Clear Channel music stations are moving from 3 stopsets to 2 stopsets per hour.

Why?

Because PPM data shows that most people are not tuning out during a stopset.

This raises a few questions:

1. When we survey listeners properly, they indicate that they prefer more frequent, shorter interruptions. Isn't that important?

2. When we survey listeners properly, they seem to become far more uncomfortable once breaks are more than 2 minutes in length. Isn't that important?

3. If a wife hasn't actually left for another state and filed for divorce, there is no problem with the marriage, right? Isn't that what these programmers are saying? Could it be that people, once they pick a station that they are mostly happy with, simply are too busy to walk over and change the station every time a commercial break comes on? If the station abuses that decision enough, might they simply pick a different station, rather than keep fussing around with their radio? To me, there is absolutely nothing in the PPM data that suggests anything about whether people are happier with long commercial breaks or short ones. They simply aren't asking for a divorce twice an hour.

4. But by the way, some of them are! It is not true that 100% of the listeners stick around through the commercial break. I'd like to know more about that:

• How do the numbers break down by listening location? If you look only at in-car listening, where it is far less of an effort, do tune-out rates jump?
• Has anybody actually gone to shorter, more frequent breaks and measured the effect?

5. Can anybody explain why both research survey results, and the 25+ years of the Drake-type formats seemed to show that 6-8 short breaks an hour worked well?

6.  Long breaks weren't thought to be an advantage, ever, for most of commercial radio's history. Until certain classic rock stations began creating very long music sweeps as a point of differentiation. But that was the answer to "what unique thing can we do and promote?" It was not the answer to the question, "What will the listeners actually enjoy the most"?

Have we forgotten that this was a promotion, and not a programming philosophy?