MusicMaster Blog

By Dave Tyler

One of the greatest parts of being a Music Scheduling Consultant for MusicMaster is that I get to work on a daily basis with many of the top programmers in the world. It is an honor to be able to help them. As a 34-year radio vet, I love sharing and learning from them too!
Recently I was speaking with a terrific CHR Programmer who had an interesting question. He said “I have my Artist Keyword Separation set to 1:05. We are a hits/current driven format so a lot of the songs we play have “Featured” artists that are named on the song but do not necessarily play a big role in the song. By listing them as a Secondary Artist on the artist keyword this means that one of the featured artist’s songs will also be restricted from playing for 1:05. Is there a better way to control this or do I just have to decide if I list them on the keywords?”.

What an awesome question! You can see in my example below I have a Brad Paisley song that features Allison Krauss. Although in this particular song Allison plays a substantial role we can use it as an example. For demonstration purposes let’s say she only does background harmonies but is featured in the video and listed on the CD. As you can see in my Library Maintenance view in the Artist Keyword field they are both listed and therefore (per my rule settings which you can also see below) once this song plays BOTH artists will have to sit on the bench for one hour and five minutes.

While it makes complete sense for Brad to have to wait the allotted time it may or may not (depending on your programming philosophy) make sense to have Allison have to wait that long. As mentioned before the programmer I was talking to programmed a CHR station so he faced this constantly in his Currents, Recurrents and even Golds. What can we do?

MusicMaster provides several ways to control artist separation from rules to custom settings on a per artist level. However, let’s go deeper and do something cool. By going to Dataset/Library/Fields I can open my Database Field Editor and sort by “Type” and see if there are any Keyword fields that I am not using. In my case I had a Keyword field for “Theme” that I was not using. I can, within the editor, just type in a new name for this field. I will call this “Secondary Keys”.

I can add this field to my Library Maintenance layout and now I have an option when entering artists. If the song is literally a duet or the featured artists play a big and obvious role in the song, then I will add them as a secondary artist on the regular Artist Keyword field and the full separation will apply to them. If I deduce that they play a very minor role overall in the song then I can list them instead in my “Secondary Keys” field and then apply a shorter time restriction on those keywords.

In my example above my “Secondary Keys” only have to separate by 20 minutes. This keeps this artist from playing back-to-back with a song they are the lead on but also allows it to play a lot sooner than it would otherwise. It is a unique way to use MusicMaster to get even more control over your sound.

For the record (pun intended) I can already hear some of you saying “Great idea Dave BUT I do not have a Keyword field that I am not using so what now????” No problem any of the MusicMaster Music Scheduling Consultants on our Support Team can add the fields you need to your database.

No matter what you format is, if you have a primary and secondary artists, consider this method to assist in your scheduling.
As always if you have any questions just give us a ring. We are always happy to help.

Coming next time, another perspective on this topic.

By Dave Tyler

Around the MusicMaster headquarters we are proud to talk about how MusicMaster is the only music scheduling software that allows you to create a custom database! That’s a big deal. I have programmed radio stations for more than 30 years and I have used most of the popular schedulers at one point or another. You know one thing that used to drive me crazy? Tabbing! Especially tabbing past fields I don’t even use to get to ones I do. MusicMaster allows you to set up your layout so you only have the fields you actually use in your view but MusicMaster goes way past that with customization! You can even rename the fields anything you want.

In the following example I am going to exaggerate a bit.  I am not recommending you actually change your field names to the examples but I am showing that you could if you wanted to.

Let’s say there are three fields that are driving you nuts:  your Artist, Title and Energy fields. You wish they were called Singer, Song Name & NRG (because that looks cool!). Here’s how you would change it.

First if you look at a category in Library Maintenance, your layout displays Title, Artist and Energy.

To change these names go to Dataset/Library/Fields.

Now you can rename these fields by simply selecting the field and typing via direct entry. As you can see those fields names have been changed.

Now close and reopen the category you were viewing in Library Maintenance and viola! Your new yet slightly ridiculous new field names have appeared.

Making this sort of change does not affect your export or anything. It is simply the name of the field as you see it. Let’s face it you sit in front of your computer potentially for hours a day, you set your computer’s background graphic and choose fonts etc. to your preferences.  Do the same with MusicMaster! Make it look your way today.

If you have any questions always feel free to contact any of us here on the MusicMaster Support team and we’ll be more than happy to help.

By Aaron Taylor

For this article, I thought I’d try to create a reference guide to some other common questions that seem to come up for us on an ongoing basis here at MusicMaster. My hope is that you’ll be able to utilize this as a “Go to Guide” the next time you have one of those “I know you showed me this once” types of questions. (more…)