MusicMaster Blog

By Joe Knapp, President/Founder – MusicMaster

Bringing your research scores into MusicMaster lets you do a very detailed analysis that can uncover some interesting trends.

For example, I’ve found that the audience prefers songs that are not “begging” or “desperate” sounding. They prefer songs that have a “happy” or “charitable” mood. Unexpectedly, they also seem to prefer songs, at least in the oldies format, that have an “angry” tone.

Clicking on the header of each column instantly sorts the list by that field, allowing you to make comparisons and observations.

I’ve also discovered that the audience prefers medium or up-tempo songs over slow or down tempo songs. The gender of the singer doesn’t matter at all when it comes to audience favorability. There is a slight correlation between Era, however. The newer songs are preferred over the older songs, in this case being 1964-1973 versus 1955-1963.

These results, of course, will vary greatly from one format to another. But, if you’re doing music research, bringing those scores into MusicMaster is easy and quite valuable. You can learn things about your audience that you cannot see by looking at the same numbers in the research analysis software alone.

With your scores in MusicMaster, you can easily establish Rules and Optimum Goals to help the AI scheduling engine select the ideal song for each position in your log.

If you need help with this, we’re always here for you. Music scheduling is all we do, so we tend to do it very well!

(For Part 1 of Joe’s series on Music Research, view this article: https://musicmaster.com/newsletters/0224.php#coj)

By Aaron Taylor

We often work with clients who find themselves tasked with a format launch (or several) in addition to their “regular” programming duties.  In years past, it could prove to be a daunting chore to research the “right” songs for the format(s) (and your specific market situation) in addition to sourcing the tracks, and then building the database in your scheduling software.  Gone are the days where the poor PD would need to beg and plead with their record reps for the product for this format (many automation vendors can provide you the standard format libraries off the shelf) or sources such as TM Century, iTunes, etc.  Not to mention the necessity (as in the “old days”) to sit for hours in a stale production room endlessly dubbing the new music to carts.  If you were lucky enough to dodge most of the duties mentioned above in a project like this, you inevitably still dreaded building the scheduling database (hand entering all the titles, categorizing them, and then building the clocks, setting up the rules, etc.)…then, once that was completed…getting the blessing of the consultant! Today, MusicMaster makes it crazy simple! Not only can we help you easily import the music order you obtained from a third party vendor, did you know you have the ability directly copy and paste from a Word or Excel document into MusicMaster? (more…)