"How Music Segmentation Drives Ratings"
In each newsletter, we present a guest article from one of our MusicMaster ProTeam consultants. This month, Mike Shepard, Consultant with the Tracy Johnson Media Group shares strategies for audience segmentation to guide your music decisions.
In analyzing hundreds of perceptual studies for clients, it’s clear that two primary characteristics correlate most to ratings success and stations that “over-achieve”:
1. Audience Satisfaction And Passion For the Music Mix
2. A Truly Fun And Entertaining Morning Show
Both are important for music stations. Without a strong music mix, the foundation for building a winning morning show is weak. The show will not gain traction. And without entertaining – truly entertaining –personalities, stations are vulnerable to competitive attacks that siphon audience.
In this article, I’ll address the core foundational element for driving ratings – music quality.
What the audience really thinks about a station’s overall music selection and song-to-song music mix is more important than playing a lot of music. It’s more important than being perceived as playing fewer commercials. After all, if you’re playing songs nobody cares about, what difference does it make how many songs are played?
That’s where audience segmentation comes in.
What Is Audience Segmentation
Radio programmers typically think of these concepts in black and white. We love to put complex problems into a box and come away with our absolutes.
But when it comes to music appetite, listener tastes are not monolithic. Different “types” of listeners make up a station’s audience, even though they’re tuning into the same format and dial position.
For example, did you ever wonder why some Classic Hits stations have a rock lean while others are more pop or rhythmic? Good luck trying to successfully program your station by replicating the playlists from a collection of successful stations in other markets. These high performers are almost certainly digging deeper into their own market dynamics. Copying their playlists is not a recipe for your own success. The answer comes with understanding the underlying segments of listeners inside a broad audience group.
Applying Music Segmentation With MusicFusion
There are a number of ways to accomplish segmentation, ranging from two dimensional attributes to sophisticated datamining and clustering techniques. That’s what we do at Shepard Media Research with our MusicFusion process.
In MusicFusion, targeted respondents are presented with up to 20 (or more) three-song montages that represent a specific music segment – based on style, sound, and era. Each is asked to rate the montages (from “Love” to “Hate”) and identify a station that plays that style of music. Then, a sophisticated algorithm reveals naturally occurring segments of listeners.
Each segment is a discrete group of listeners identified by shared voting patterns on all music styles analyzed.
That may sound like a similar music clustering process that’s common at other research companies. This so-called “coalition” analysis only requires that one music type is a favorite and the remainder are neutral or beMer.
But that analysis is dated. Your station can’t survive by finding a collection of songs listeners agree they don’t hate. Today, you have to play songs that inspire passion. MusicFusion gets deeper than just finding a coalition.
First, the size of each segment is identified. But that’s just a start. We then analyze the relative passion each group displays for music common to that segment. It’s all about finding the hits - the true hits - that inspire “turn it up” passion for the broadest audience.
How Music Segmentation Works In the Real World
Segmenting an audience provides useful data that allows programmers to define and enhance their music strategy several ways:
1. Identify the groups of listeners who are most important to the station and all competitors.
2. Create boundaries of the music universe for your station. Knowing what fits and what is outside audience expectation is key to attracting fans in your primary segments.
3. When primary targets are chosen, you can then do music research proportionately to have the right folks in the sample. Perhaps even more importantly, you can screen out segments that work against your music strategy.
Knowing the audience segments that matter most, and pairing it with finding the most appealing music segments define the core station sound. Now you can adjust the music scheduling software to focus on primary segments while separating secondary music styles. The end result is a greater perception of the right type of variety.
Finding Your Core Sound
The beauty of the segmentation process is finding the right music formula for each station individually. Some formats such as Adult Hits may have as many as a dozen significant music segments. On the other hand, a CHR station may have as few as two or three.
For gold-based stations like AC or Classic Hits, the musical center is constantly evolving. 70s Pop, for example, may once have been a core music segment for these stations, but over time, there’s not much upside in that style. It has mostly fallen out of favor. As gold-based stations strive to maintain musical relevance, understanding and testing underlying audience segments is vital. Likewise, as the music cycle is ever evolving in contemporary formats, it’s important to understand which sounds are most relevant today.
Conclusion
Most Fortune 500 Companies use consumer segmentation to understand customers. For music radio, nothing is more important than getting the product right. Audience segmentation research - which identifies key music segments – reveals the ingredients in the secret sauce that can produce market-leading results.
Surprisingly, many stations neglect this aspect of research. This leaves them vulnerable to competitive attack from a more focused competitor. Or at the very least, they leave quarter-hours on the table by not maximizing audience satisfaction with the music mix.
For more information on audience and music segmentation, contact Mike Shepard by email at
Mike@TJohnsonMediaGroup.com.
Want more advice like this? Read more about Tracy and his services on our
ProTeam page or on Tracy's website:
TJohnsonMediaGroup.com. Or contact Tracy directly at (858) 472-3546 or Tracy@TJohnsonMediaGroup.com.