Programming Thoughts: Using Your Research (Rather than Charts) to Move New Music Through the Current Categories

Many radio stations use national airplay charts to guide them as to which songs are moved from new music to secondary to power categories, as well as when they are moved up and for how long. Here are some guidelines about  how to use the weekly music research (call out) as a tool, rather than the national charts.

1. Start with the Powers, and deal with the entire category. Look at the AVERAGE burn over the entire category. And before you do anything else, go back over the past 2-3 years and see what the range of category burn has been. And look at what the average burn has been for songs during the first 8 weeks in Power. If there is a difference, use the lower figure that you’ll find in the first 8 weeks. If that number is still very high, perhaps you’ve been managing Powers badly for a long time.

2. You need the category to be the best music, but not communicate “yesterday”. The recurrents can do that. It is a balancing act. So when you see the burn in Powers move up past the average you’ve decided to use as a trigger, you simply must force out the weakest Power. By weakest, I mean a song with high burn and the least amount of favorites to balance that burn. Even if no single song has reached a very high burn level, a Power category with a higher than normal average level of burn will make the station sound far less “now” and interesting.

3. The songs moving up have two scores you should watch. The first is the popularity index. Different companies use different methodologies, but in the end it boils down to the positive energy is there for this song. The second score is the “potential” or “breakout”. This is simply the popularity index calculated only on those people who are familiar with the song. We learned many years ago that the relationship of potential to popularity will usually tell us when to move up or give up on a song.

4. Every song will start out with a potential score that is higher than the popularity score. Over time the spread will shrink. For new music, you simply expect the potential score to move up each week until it shows real strength. If and when that growth stalls or fails, the song is over. Otherwise, the familiarity eventually will be at a point to support a medium rotation.

5. In the secondary/B category, we’re allowing the song – which has shown good potential – to mature. Not all will reach Power status. As the familiarity comes up, the gap between potential and popularity will shrink. At some point, the spread will become fairly small. For a scale like the one I use (and CMM and many others), a spread of less than 10% pretty much signals a peak. If a song hasn’t “come through” by then, it is usually time to accept that it had a nice run and made some people happy (or else the potential score wouldn’t have allowed it to move out of the new music category). But now, it is time to let it go.

6. A real strength of call out is the ability to notice if and when songs reach certain points in their lifecycle. To recap: New music needs to establish an increasing potential score. Once the familiarity is fairly high (75%+) you can safely move it to a real rotation. Now we watch the potential/popularity gap. And when that stalls or the scores drop, we’re done, or we’re in Power. The average burn level of Powers must be monitored and managed. It isn’t enough to deal with each song individually.

7. By managing the burn of the Power category as described above and watching the shifting balance of unfamiliarity/popularity/potential scores in the music research, we should be able to avoid big playlist logjams while not accidentally throwing out perfectly good hits that simply need a bit more time.