MusicMaster Blog

By Marianne Burkett

Today’s blog focus is about dealing with One Hit Wonders scheduling more often than your core artist songs. The reason this happens is because the One Hit Wonder has no artist conflicts. It’s really that simple. When you’ve got a really deep search depth and a lot of coding rules accompanied with a reasonable minimum rest in any given category, those one-hit wonders will schedule with more ease than an artist that has a large number of songs. So, what to do? There are a few very effective fixes to consider:

• You can increase that One Hit artists “Individual Keyword Separation Time” (Dataset/Library/Artist Keywords), which will override any Artist Separation Rule used in the rule tree.  Another option is to add a Title Keyword to the one hit wonder song. Set the Separation time to somewhere around the average turnover of the category, and you can set the rest time right there as you create the new keyword! Remember to put some kind of Title Keyword rule in the rule tree as well. The Individual time separations override the Rule Tree settings (unless you’ve set the rule properties to ignore Individual Keyword settings). Either way, the One Hit Wonder will slow down. Conversely, you may need to adjust downward, the Individual Artist Separation times on your Core Artists which will enable those titles to play more freely.
• “Packeting” your One Hit Wonders within any category is also another way to slow them down, but they will slow down significantly.

In MusicMaster there are typically multiple solutions to your programming needs. As always, if you have any questions – contact your Music Scheduling Consultant.