MusicMaster Blog

Turnover Analysis Overview

By Marianne Burkett

The relationship between a format and its owner is often complex, like a marriage. If you ignore it long enough, the format may start misbehaving because of changes in the library or clocks or rules.

A good rule of thumb is to run Turnover Analysis once a month or run it after making clock changes. This doesn’t take long, but you might discover a myriad of issues or find nothing important has changed.

After a few bad experiences, like getting total vertical rotations on a search depth of one category, it is second nature for me to launch Turnover Analysis when a client calls saying: “I’m having an issue with my rotations”. In a nutshell, as a Music Scheduling Consultant – this is the #1 (with a bullet) reason people reach out to me.

A few important things become apparent when you launch Turnover Analysis. The top section gives you all kinds of analytical information like turnover info, suggested Minimum Rest, Average Spins a Day/Week etc.

When you right click on the header of this section, you’ll see all the analytics available.

The bottom part of Turnover Analysis is extremely powerful in giving you a graph of projected turnovers based on a search depth of one and no rules. This becomes especially important on your “Priority Categories”, ones with a search depth of one. For example, I have a five-song Power Current category with one per hour. This would give me that beautiful stairstep diagonal rotation we all dream of IF you’re running the clock for 24 hours. Then, someone comes into your office and suggests we play two Power Currents each hour during the midday to increase our cume. Okay. Let’s see what that looks like in the graph. (It isn’t pretty)

Based on a search depth of one and no rules and inconsistent clocks the pattern above would be what you can expect for turnovers.

At the top of this graph are a series of icons. On the right-hand side of the Red X is a music note. Clicking the note will give you accurate number of fixed positions in your clocks for whatever category you have clicked on in the top portion of Turnover Analysis. Sometimes this is shocking to my clients, to see the condition of their active clocks. It’s not something folks focus on in day-to-day radio operations, but it is important like breathing air and drinking water.

There are several ways to solve the issue, but the best way (IMO) is to be consistent with clock calls on priority categories. Being a programmer by nature, I say why not increase cume for the entire day and week and play two currents every single hour. Let’s see what that look like:

This graph makes me very happy. Not only are there two in each hour, they are in opposing sides of the hour. One in the second quarter hour and one in the fourth quarter hour (that’s what the colors indicate). I’ll go a step further and do an opposing clock in the first and third quarter hour. I want to give all quarter hours a fair shake.

These are the field of dreams rotations we all want. Five songs, two times per hour and exposing all four quarter hours!

I could write a book about Turnover Analysis in MusicMaster, but my advice is to click on the Analysis Icon and see what your turnovers look like and how many of each category are in any given hour.If you dig a little bit, you’ll be amazed what you can find out about your database and what you can do to make it even better.

Any questions? Please reach out to your Music Scheduling Consultant.