MusicMaster Blog

Planning For the Holidays

By Dave Tyler

We all love the holidays right? I know I do but we also know that if anything is going to go wrong it is going to happen on a Friday, when you are on vacation or over the holiday. So what can you do to minimize that?

When do you start playing Christmas tunes? Maybe you add some new clocks to your grid or perhaps you have a “Holiday” grid(s) that you use each year. No matter your format, it’s likely your regular playlist freezes around this time too. This gives you a unique opportunity to take the stress out of your scheduling.

Since you are doing your holiday music and your regular playlist is frozen, you can safely schedule out a week or more because you won’t be adding any new music or making changes. Think about it. If you’re using the Format Scheduler to activate those holiday grids, your regular grid will come back up all by itself. That means you might schedule the entire month of December and into January!

When you reach the point where you know nothing is going to change between when your holiday music starts and your playlist is frozen, get going. This accomplishes a few of things. It allows you to get the scheduling completed well ahead of time. It also gives you the opportunity to make just minor changes as each day comes along if needed. Finally, you won’t be in any big rush on that Friday before you take off to get tons of logs done.

We do get calls every year where someone says they have Christmas music scheduled on December 26^th and they don’t know why. It’s because they are manually activating grids and forgot to re-activate their regular grid. This is why we highly recommend the Format Scheduler. If you’ve never used the Format Scheduler before, this is the perfect time to give it a try. It’s just too easy to forget which grid you have active when you are manually changing it. By using the Format Scheduler, you pick the grid and date(s) where it applies. If you don’t change anything, your regular, active grid is used. You can even do this down to the clock level, which means if you decide to start playing holiday music at noon, you can change the individual clocks from noon to 11pm. You’ll assign the holiday grid to the entire day moving forward.

As you can see in this screen capture, the Fixed Christmas Clocks are scheduled across the day. I assigned the grid that contained this clock across multiple weeks. Any dates in yellow mean something different is going on. Any dates in white mean the regular grid is active. Dates in red (if you see them) mean the log has already been scheduled.

When you put this all together, with a couple of simple adjustments in MusicMaster, you can schedule your holiday music and get back to your regular programming automatically. When you factor in the ability to schedule ahead, it adds up to the MusicMaster way to take just a little bit of the stress out of the holidays. You’re welcome!

If you have any questions about implementing your holiday music, do not hesitate to reach out to your Music Scheduling Consultant.