Core Artists

View and Share Who They Are and Basic Bio Information with Your Air Staff Who are the artists that matter most to your listeners? MusicVISTA has for some time included a display of an artist’s biographical profile from Wikipedia. It is displayed whenever you double-click on a song title to view all the research detail for that song. This is a nice tool, and we’ve made it nicer! Clean display Most of the artist information we work with is from Wikipedia. It contains the kind of basic information that every on-air talent should have about an artist or band. But as you know, Wikipedia clutters up their display with a lot of extra information. Much of it is distracting. So MusicVISTA now senses Wikipedia-based information and attempts to clean it up as much as possible. Full page display with printing Because the bio information is shared with the song results detail, you can’t see very much without scrolling. So we fixed that. Now there is a button that will display a Full Artist Page: Click the button, and you get a full screen browser window with all the cleaned up biographical information. You can click a PRINT button to get a print preview of your document. This tool comes with options. You can: Alter your type size if you like. Shrink it and save pages, or enlarge it for easier reading in a dimly lit studio. Hide or display headers and footers. Change the margins. Print all or only selected parts of the artist information. Alternate biography sources About 25% of artists don’t have English language Wikipedia entries. When they don’t, we try first to locate a Wikipedia entry in their home country. Then, we look, in this order, for a MySpace Music page, an iLike/Facebook page, an official site, or a Last.FM entry. In truth, the most important and established artists almost always have Wikipedia entries and MySpace Music pages. After a music test, identify and share information about your key artists. MusicVISTA makes this easy. Here is what I suggest: Identify the artists you think are key to your listeners. Make a list of 30.Or whatever number you are comfortable with. Find and print out the Wikipedia biographies of each. Packet these documents together and give a copy to each of your air talent. Why not also give a copy to your station’s sales staff, so they better understand what your station is about? Benefits: By identifying this set of artists, you have communicated in a powerful way where the focus of the station is. If they take even a few minutes, your air talent will be able to refresh their memories about the set of important entertainers that their own air shifts revolve around. You will all recapture some of the excitement your own listeners feel about these musicians. Focus. Clarity. Passion. You don’t have a recent MusicVISTA AMT? Not a problem. Do this exercise anyway. Do it manually. It is a great exercise. If you have no research at all, then you will still be able to communicate to your air staff which artists best represent your personal vision for the station.