MusicMaster Blog

Daylight Saving Time – Hope Springs Eternal

By Brian Wheeler

I don’t know about you, but I’m about ready for Spring to arrive! It seems a lot of people have endured more than their fair share of Winter and it is time for things to thaw out a bit. With that change also comes a slight time shift for many of us. Here in the U.S. and Canada, we will ‘spring forward’ one hour on March 14, 2021. MusicMaster will skip an hour at 2 a.m. to account for this change.

There’s not much you’ll need to do for this. MusicMaster will take the settings from your computer operating system for how you’ll handle DST in your area, but you can check to see if your settings are correct in MusicMaster by going to Help, System information. That will bring up the following box:

As you can see, it states that Daylight Saving will be recognized on the second Sunday in March at 2 a.m., and the fallback will occur the first Sunday in November, also at 2 a.m.

To confirm that your copy of MusicMaster is set up to recognize Daylight Saving Time, go to Tools, Options, Additional Options. A zero in the Ignore DST column will ensure that normal Daylight Saving adjustments will occur. If you do not wish for MusicMaster to adjust for DST, you would place a 1 in the column.

NOTE:  If you are using MusicMaster CS, please go to Enterprise, Stations and pick your station.  Then go to the Misc. section to find the Ignore DST setting.

There will be a slight impact on your rotations on the morning of March 14^th because you are skipping an hour on the overnight. The good news is, the adjustment is happening in an hour on the overnight, and it’s a Sunday. Most programmers agree that listenership is a little different on the weekends, so by the time Monday rolls around your rotations will be back to normal and it should have little to no impact on your rotations for the week. To show you the difference, here is a normal five song, one song per hour current rotation:

Ahh…a nice stairstep pattern. Now here’s the same song after DST adjustment:

There is still a nice stair step pattern but if you look closely, the play On March 14 in the first capture is at 2am. In the capture above, you will see that it’s in the 3am hour. That gap is due to the extra hour being skipped. Again, after a day with these new rotations, the new pattern is fully established by Monday.

If you have any further questions regarding Daylight Saving adjustments, feel free to reach out to your MusicMaster Scheduling consultant and they can help get the spring back in your step.