MusicMaster Blog

By Paul Ziino

Special Sets can be used for creating “Two-Fers,” scheduling unique imaging ahead of specific songs, and more. In this article we discuss the basics of scheduling Two-Fers. (more…)

By Sean Ross

They were subtle, but when the early ‘70s airchecks of Dan Mason and Bob Pittman were played from the stage at Radio Show 2014 in Indianapolis earlier this month, you could hear differences in their influences.

Mason was channeling the tail end of the Bill Drake era of top 40 – big, bold, and “Boss Radio.”

Pittman was a product of Buzz Bennett (whom he acknowledged from the stage), whose “Super-Q” era of top 40 upped the ante, even more high-energy than its predecessor, but also even tighter than Drake. And Drake had been attacked by jocks from a generation previous for his tightness.

Pittman was one of the key PDs in the next iteration of top 40. WNBC New York was one of a handful of AM top 40s that kept the tightness of “Super-Q” but with a far more conversational delivery, a nod to the influence of FM rock radio and its lower-key presentation.

The station that came to call itself “W-NNN-BC” did well enough to push past (and outlast) the legendary WABC, already an odd presentational holdover from the pre-Drake era. By the time WHTZ (Z100) brought Top 40 to FM in New York and sent WNBC looking for another franchise, Pittman was already at MTV (which, ironically, helped foster the top 40 resurgence that made Z100 possible).

The next chapter of WNBC is familiar to anybody who read or saw Private Parts. WNBC, already the home of Don Imus, adds Howard Stern and turns to more personality. Kevin Metheny, who had also programmed a handful of low-key WNBC-like AM top 40s, became Stern’s public foil, but also deserves credit as his co-conspirator. Stern famously mocked “W-NNN-BC,” but by that time, it was one of the few Pittman-isms left.

The clash was more fraternal than generational. Pittman, Metheny and Stern were all around the same age and all influenced by ‘70s rock radio. The PDs and the morning man had just taken vastly different things from it.

If you’ve made your way through all of this radio history, it’s worth mentioning that every so often somebody writes an article or makes a comment on a convention panel that says, basically, “Enough with all this talk about radio history.”

You would think the people making those comments would be 25-year-olds, but they’re almost always radio veterans of the Pittman/Stern generation (and from both camps). New talent has other outlets. They don’t need radio. The 55-year-olds do, and I’ve always felt like some are trying to demonstrate their continued currency by going after the weakest people in the room – hobbyists and those who have been nudged out of radio and have the temerity to be upset about it.

And yet, the battles of 30 years ago are playing themselves out on the air today. Team Howard was winning until the advent of PPM measurement. Today’s tight, low-key radio predates Pittman’s return to radio, but there’s a lot of W-NNN-BC in radio’s present D-NNN-A. The promotional flair of Pittman’s MTV era is visible on iHeart Media’s concert stages. What happens between the records after 10 a.m. is brief and conversational.

And that’s why nobody should be ashamed of knowing or discussing radio history. Those who know radio history know that neither “less talk” nor more personality ultimately saved music on AM. The biggest AM programming problem – too many commercials – was never addressed by AM in a sustained, meaningful way. The technological issue, for most stations, was eventually insurmountable. Today’s equivalent of the AM-to-FM transition is traumatic for broadcasters largely because it’s not an inside job. We don’t own most of the “FM stations” as well. But when we do, we are saddling them with AM spotloads.

Here’s some good news. In the late ‘70s/early ‘80s, the viability of top 40 – not just on AM – was in question as well. The consultant credited with reviving it, Mike Joseph, preceded Bill Drake as a prominent programmer. The “Hot Hits” format he created had elements of Drake (in its brassiness), Bennett (energy level), and Pittman (tightness). WABC, too (jingles). Joseph’s WCAU-FM Philadelphia was as disciplined as any early-‘80s “liner card” radio station, but a lot more entertaining. Playing only currents kept WCAU contemporary. And no 17-year-olds knew they were hearing a throwback.

Being able to draw on 50 years of successfully entertaining and engaging an audience is the thing that broadcasters have in their quiver while newer, better-funded, consumer-press favorites like Apple, Beats Music, and Google continue to sort it out. It is only when you think of broadcasters’ track record as the limit of our offerings that invoking history becomes self-indulgent or a study in denial. Much of radio’s history is useful. None of it is enough.

Ironically, what I am most often nostalgic for is that radio used to offer something new on a regular basis. Great new hit songs every Tuesday. Another new station that galvanizes the business every nine months. Attack radio geeks from the dais if you will, but geekery in general is also about obsession with the new, and it’s a salable commodity these days. But broadcasters are not the ones offering it these days. We need to go back at least long enough to reclaim radio’s self-reinvention. And we need to do it to move forward.

Update:

Shortly after the release of “Private Parts” the movie, Kevin Metheny gave me one of my best Billboard interviews, talking candidly about his tumultuous relationship with Howard Stern at WNBC.

“Did we endeavor to bring Howard into compliance with NBC standards and practices? Yes, we did. Did we drive Howard up a wall? You bet. Did he know that we were going to do it before he agreed to come work for us? Absolutely. Was there ever a sinister insidious plot to force him into compliance with our small-minded criteria that would have stripped his art of all its programming potency? . . . Absolutely not. We had a vested interest in his success,” Metheny told Billboard in 1997.

It was that discussion in part that shaped my above characterization of Metheny, who died Friday Oct. 3, a few days after the above article was posted, as Stern’s co-conspirator, not just his nemesis. Over the next 30 years, Metheny would continue to program both well-tuned music stations in every conceivable format and full-service talk stations, putting him at various times in both the galvanizing personality and “tight-and-right” camps.

The reaction to Metheny’s death confirms that many of those on one side or another are still fighting those battles today. One of the WGN Chicago personalities who clashed with Metheny during his tenure opened up the phone lines on Saturday to ask if it was sometimes appropriate to speak ill of the dead. According to reports, Stern mustered appropriate sympathy for Metheny and his family before turning more critical.

Even during Metheny’s lifetime, I felt bad that Stern’s public derision, in “Private Parts” and elsewhere, was allowed to become such a part of the public record on a non-celebrity’s life. I’d prefer the many positive reminiscences on Metheny’s facebook page to stand as the definitive public record. What emerges is that if you respected the art/science mix of radio programming, Metheny respected you and the feeling was usually mutual. Stern just happened to be in another business.

And now it really is time for broadcasters to move on from the battles of 1983. It is dismaying that a 25-year-old doesn’t want the airwaves bad enough to fight for them, but perhaps there’s just no need to grapple over custody of an infinite dial. Sirius XM, Stern’s current home, proves that with its wide range of offerings – mainstream and niche. Any appropriate battle for broadcasters is, at this moment, with the outside world.

By Drew Bennett

One of the most common phone calls we get is how to change a layout. Many times, our customers have been so conditioned to accept the layout they are given in a music scheduler like DOS or other Windows-based software that some of them don’t even know they have the choice of what fields to see or not see on the screen! (more…)

By Sean Ross

There was no intention to “push poll” my dentist. But I was seeing him for the second time in a few weeks, and the same song was playing on AC WLTW (Lite FM) New York, Katy Perry’s “Dark Horse.” So I asked, “What do you think about this song on Lite FM?”

“What do you mean?”

I tried to express it as neutrally as possible. “It’s not the kind of song they used to play.”

“Yeah, you’re right,” he said.

I had one more session with him. At the next appointment, he was playing the Classical station, WQXR.

I related that story to a colleague who is married to a doctor. He was driving her to work and Rihanna’s “Only Girl (In the World)” came on. This prompted her to announce that her office had switched to Oldies/Greatest Hits WCBS-FM after complaints from older patients.

Over the course of the summer Nielsen PPM measurements, WCBS-FM was up 6.3 – 6.4 – 6.9 6-plus. During that same period, Lite was down 7.1 – 6.2 – 6.1. That’s the kind of down month many broadcasters would be thrilled with, of course. It does coincide with a Nielsen press release declaring Classic Hits (still the Arbitron designation both for former Oldies stations, the format I call “Greatest Hits,” and softer Classic Rock outlets alike) to be the upset winner of the “Format of Summer 2014” crown, based on its growth.

Since onetime WLTW programmer Jim Ryan took the PD reins of CBS-FM, and even before, the intent of the station has been pretty clear: assume the format space once occupied by Lite-FM. The ‘80s, once something tolerated grudgingly by Greatest Hits listeners, are nearly the center lane, and the prominent recently hired morning man Scott Shannon is associated with those songs as well. The ‘60s have virtually disappeared, and the early ‘70s are now about once an hour.

It’s not as if WLTW has overtly distanced itself from its previous position, or completely ankled the ‘70s. They still play a handful, and I heard “You Are So Beautiful” by Joe Cocker a while ago. I can’t speak for anybody there, but the format sure seems to be “big songs that appeal to adult women.” In the PPM measurement era, there is a tendency by some programmers to ignore niceties of texture in favor of satisfying cume. And Lite FM has always been a little aggressive in that regard.

Under Ryan, WLTW always played songs that seemed to dent the format definition of Mainstream AC as well, some of which later became format standards. The difference is that “Hurts So Good” came over when it was more than a decade old, not less than a year old, like Perry. The song playing against Rihanna on CBS-FM was Van Halen’s “Jump,” an AC staple by a once-edgy act that has had three decades to soften.

As Mainstream AC grapples with just how many songs on Mainstream Top 40 and Hot AC are currently appealing to adult women, Lite FM has finessed that transition better than most. But every AC, no matter how gradually it has brought listeners along, faces the specific peril of a format evolution – new listeners will come in and swell the numbers at first, but one day the old listeners will decide this is no longer their radio station.

The worst-case scenario is in markets where an increasingly successful Adult Top 40 format fulfills the clear 25-plus appetite for “now” among adult women. The Oldies/Greatest Hits format grabs the “then” franchise – still big enough for at least a few stations in any given market. That situation doesn’t yet exist in New York, where WLTW is much bigger than the Hot AC stations. It also doesn’t exist in markets such as Atlanta, Houston, or Washington, D.C., where, despite the success of WCBS-FM, KRTH (K-Earth 101) Los Angeles, and others, no owner is willing to consider the Greatest Hits format on a viable signal. And in markets such as Long Island, San Diego, and Hartford, Conn., new owners have actually steered stations away from “Greatest Hits” to a more Bob- and Jack-FM-like Adult Hits format.

Regardless of how the Mainstream AC format is flanked, it has not just tempo and era to deal with, but also the matter of currents. Rotations at the Greatest Hits format have become bolder lately, following the success of KRTH, whose power ‘80s can play more than 25 times a week. But WLTW is up to 35 times a week on power currents. That’s not a lot, but it’s enough that you might notice hearing the same song on two consecutive visits to a station that never did that.

There’s one more disturbing possibility. With broadcast radio TSL continuing to decline, by most accounts, it is certainly possible that a format with 45-54 appeal, such as Oldies/Greatest Hits, would be hurt less than other, younger-targeted formats. Almost every Greatest Hits outlet looked awesome in the first days of PPM when not all demographic targets were indexing as well. I always root for the format, but I hope we haven’t returned to those days.

I’m not against ACs continuing to contemporize. I help stations with it all the time. I’m fascinated with stations like WALK Long Island, N.Y., and KYXY San Diego that look like Hot ACs in their current rotations (98x a week in KYXY’s case), but have the libraries of a bright AC. They also play currents when they’re hot, not after two months of saturation on multiple rival stations. In that regard, they’re very similar to the successful German ACs that often end up playing songs like “Little Talks” or “Let Her Go” before American AC radio gets to them.

The danger for Mainstream AC is being trapped between positions. As a researcher, I work with stations where the answer to “do you like today’s music” is not necessarily the same as “should we play a lot of it.”

The danger for the Greatest Hits format is that some operators may not be interested no matter how well it does. It seems like an odd time to disenfranchise those listeners most enamored with radio, but that practice continues.

By Marianne Burkett

I have many clients who also happen to be programming consultants… and the times, they are a changing. Now that MusicMaster is thoroughly saturating the Music Scheduling world – many consultants want to know what the advantages are and what are the differences between MusicMaster and the other Music schedulers on the market. (more…)