MusicMaster Blog

Dave Tyler

As one of the Music Scheduling Consultants here at MusicMaster I get calls from Programmers from all across North America on a daily basis. Every day is different and so are the questions. I enjoy the challenge of finding solutions for our clients to unique questions.

Recently on of these terrific programmers called and said that because of great numbers in a recent book they are sold out! Great news! He also said because of this their stopsets are full and sometimes even over what they are set for and he knows as a result they are playing less music. His boss wanted to know how many songs are being played each hour given this “Sold Out” situation. With Turnover Analysis we can easily see the average song count and the actual calls for the category per hour. In the screen shot below you will see that I click on the Turnover Analysis icon (2 blue arrows) and in my example we are looking at the B category (Secondary 70s) in the top part of the graph we can see how many songs are in the category how many times the category is scheduled weekly, how many hours the category is used in, the average plays per hour and a whole lot more information that pertains to the category. I can also see exactly how many times per hour, specific to the hour, that category is being used by clicking on the small musical note in the bottom half of the screen for “Format Clock Category Usage” then using the dropdown I select my B category and there is a grid with the exact clock calls.

This was all good information but this particular Music Director said his PD actually needed to know not how many songs were scheduled from each category but how many songs were actually playing on the air each hour. Like most of us they overschedule the end of their hours in the event that they run short and songs get bumped and being sold out is only amplifying this in their case. Finding this information is different but totally doable in MusicMaster Pro. This client reconciles their music against their aired log from their automation system on a daily basis so MusicMaster knows what actually played. To see this very specific information simply open any day you wish to find this information for then click on the Schedule Analysis button.

Now click the “SetUp” button and enter the settings below. We want to test the current day and test just the Song Elements (which are Music from the dropdown) the against setting would be “[None]” and the Display is count.

Now click OK and you will see exactly how many actual songs played during that hour.

This very specific data about actual “Aired” plays is very important especially if you are positioning with “We Play The Most Music” or “12 Songs Every Hour GUARANTEED”. This particular feature also requires a reconciliation.def file. If you do not have one just contact your MusicMaster rep and they will create one for you based on your automation system.

Musicmaster Pro is developed by radio people for radio people and this is just one of many functions to help you better know and program your station.