Sharing the Love: Connecting with Listeners by Expressing Passion for the Music

“Lovin’ on the Music” is a phrase we use at one station group to remind ourselves that we need to regularly demonstrate our passion for music just as our listeners do.

That we remind ourselves of this is both deliberate and strategic.

We remind ourselves because we recognize the distractions that come with working at a promotionally active station with content-filled shows and high profile personalities.

We also remind ourselves to love on the music so that we don’t fall victim to a ‘been there/done that’ attitude, or become blasé about our product while are fans are so excited about it.

We’ve already heard the newest music.  We’ve seen every act – from newcomers to superstars – in concert, often more than once. We’ve photo-opped with the stars and had drinks with them on their tour busses.

A&O&B did a quick poll of programmers and listeners the day after the ACMs.  Compared to Programmers and Talent, listeners rated nearly every aspect of the awards show higher – in several instances significantly higher.

• In rating the show overall, three times as many listeners as Talent and Programmers rated the show a “5" on a 1 (lowest) to 5 (highest) scale.
• On the hosts, nearly four times as many listeners rated Blake Shelton and Luke Bryan a ”5” as did Programmers and Talent
• Listeners were more enthusiastic about the speeches and even the sets while being less critical of who won what award and the technical issues.

As professionals, we’re excellent at, of course, “professional opinions.”

Listeners meanwhile are experts at “Lovin’ on the Music.” 

The NAB Crystal: One of Radio's Most Special Awards

I’m a fan of meaningful awards (meaningful being the key word). 

Ideally, they showcase the ‘best of the best,’ those who have risen above their peers. And as such, they not only shine in the spotlight themselves, they give the industry they represent that same opportunity as well.

Country is coming off a great night of awards Sunday; the Academy of Country Music Awards Show was a record setter in terms of audience.

Today the Country Music Hall of Fame announced three inductees.

A number of stations and personalities won awards at February’s Country Radio Seminar, April's ACMs, and last year's CMAs.

Terrific awards, all of them and a heart-felt ‘well-done’ to the winners and inductees.

Yesterday a special award was presented in Las Vegas: The NAB Crystal Award. The Crystal recognizes radio stations for their “outstanding year-round commitment to community service.”

Let that just sink in for a minute. 

Not once or twice a year, but year-round.

Not a special ratings or revenue-generating sales promotion, but something a station does freely with no expectations of financial or ratings gain. It’s something that when undertaken says, "We believe we live in a great community, among equally great people, and we want to use our resources to improve and enhance life here for all."

The Crystal is certainly one of the ‘meaningful’ awards. 

Congratulations to this year’s NAB Crystal Award winners including country stations KUZZ/Bakersfield and WYCT/Pensacola.

You make our industry and format proud. 

Read an earlier blog about the advantages of entering your station in an awards competition here.

Making A Difference - for Better or Worse

How cool for country radio to have two of its artists- Darius Rucker and Randy Houser - featured on Saturday Night’s Making a Difference segment on NBCNightly News (watch that segment here).

Both are members of Musicians On Call (Chuck Wicks, Chris Young, Joanna Smith and Mark Wills are also among the Nashville-based volunteers) an organization that connects musicians with hospital patients and often results in bedside performances. 

The NBC segment featured Darius and Randy performing for patients at Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt. Musicians On Call's executive director cited medical benefits of music while patients and parents voiced their appreciation.

This is a great example of doing good not only mattering but getting noticed.

Recently I was in a market conducting listener panels and the groups could not stop talking about all the great things that one of our morning hosts does for the community (he's also strong on the air). Without even needing to pause and think, the group reeled off half a dozen specific ways he’d made a difference in the community over the years.

They felt connected to him in a special, personal, and very positive way. 

Doing good and getting noticed.

Contrast those two stories with these.

A General Manager who, on pitching his station to an agency in New York City, was asked, "Morning shows...those are the guys that run around the building with underwear on their heads make dumb jokes right?"

Or (worse) the Todd Schnitt-Bubba the Love Sponge trial that drove the Jury Forewoman to vow, “I am never listening to the radio again.”

The choice to become a positive force in a market is a choice each station and talent can make.

And if it’s true that the media reports roughly seventeen “bad news” stories for every one “good news” story, it’s incumbent on us not only to find ways to make a difference, but to tell our story as well.

Start spreadin’ the news.

When the Ratings Are/Aren't What You Expected: A Process for Uncovering What's Important

Ratings data is noisy.

Along the pathway to “is this real?” meaningful data rests alongside the spurious or even potentially misleading.

And usually when those results are better or (fortunately less often for our stations) worse than expected, there are questions.

Also usually within the data there are some (but likely not all) answers.

You'll increase your changes of finding the meaningful when you have a plan before going under the hood.

Use your ratings data and knowledge of what happened at your station and in the market to develop a list of as many possible scenarios that could be contributing factors. This list will direct you to specific areas of inquiry. It will also help give your investigation focus while still allowing you the freedom to go down some rabbit holes without the fear of getting hopelessly lost or sidetracked. 

Let’s look at one example – a big TSL swing – and some possible scenarios:

•  There was real change in usage because of something that changed on the station
•  There was a real change in usage not because something changed on the station but rather in the market or on a competitor
• There were more/less heavy radio users, regardless of format, in the sample with overall usage that deviated from the norm
• There were more or less heavy users of your format, station or a competitor’s station in the sample
• There was a change in the demographic composition of the sample overall or in the sample of your format’s lifegroup
• Proportionality was/wasn’t an issue
• Geography/zip code returns was/wasn’t an issue
• There was a significant change in the percent of employed fans of your station who are in the sample
• There was a change in occasions of listening or in vertical or horizontal cuming (revisit bullets 1-5)
• There was a single or handful of respondents that skewed a particular cell
• There was a station identification issue (diaries) or a crediting error

Some of the above bullets can be assessed with relative ease, but others require more investigation, time, and a strong working knowledge of your ratings analysis software.  Regardless, getting a handle on the ‘degree of truth’ in your theories will go a long way in providing insight (of course you'll want to develop a different line of hypotheses for other issues).

Wading through ratings data is time consuming and some of your efforts won’t lead anywhere (we did say the data is noisy). But if you're going to get as much of a handle as you can on things, you'll need to do a deep dive. Having a plan helps.

And yet, even with as much noise removed as possible, conclusions may still be a bit murky. Sometimes we’ll need to call on the recent past to help us interpret what we’re seeing and give us guidance for the future.

But finding and then spending time with the critical information will increase the probability of being closer to the truth.

Two quotes from Nate Silver’s “The Signal and the Noise: Why Most Predictions Fail - but Some Don’t” sum things up pretty well:

“…immersion in a topic will provide disproportionately more insight than an executive summary.”

And,

“…success is determined by some combination of hard work, natural talent, and a person’s opportunities and environment – in other words, some combination of noise and signal.”


PS - “The Signal and the Noise: Why Most Predictions Fail - but Some Don’t” is an excellent read if you live in a world where data-driven assumptions, reporting and forecasting are a way of life - or if you play poker, bet on sporting events, or simply watch the local TV weather casts. Finishing the book at a time when such a large amount of ratings analysis is going on here at Albright & O'Malley & Brenner inspired the camera angle for this blog. 

Welcome Back: Country Returns to New York Metro. What Drove Past Success

Something that’s been a long time coming happened yesterday (Monday, 01/21) in the nation’s number one market: New York City got a country station again.

Having launched WYNY as a country station for NBC and programming it from 1987-1992, I know that the New York metro is a great country market.  As with many formats, some pockets are hotter than others, but with 1-million-plus cume, there are lots of fans and potential P1s.

We had a number of firsts at WYNY including being the first country station to raise 1-million dollars for St. Jude. We had a cume of over a million with no sports affiliation to inject additional audience.

We had a staff of high profile personalities including the great Dan Daniel and Jim Kerr – two of the biggest names in New York City radio – and Scott Carpenter from KZLA, plus talent that worked (before or after) at New York's legendary CHR Z100.  

WYNY turned out to be a radio “Who’s-Who” whose staff also included the brilliant Steve Blatter (@Steve_Blatter) who is now the Sr. VP/GM, Music Programming SiriusXM.

We marketed.

We researched (continually) which helped us develop a unique brand strategy and a programming action plan that was built on totally on the New York/NJ/Connecticut country user.

We had a stellar promotions department that had a passion to find ways to put our amazing station and talent in the midst of listeners. 

We loved on the music and the artists, from Merle Haggard at the Garden to the Kentucky Headhunters at the Plaza Hotel (I’d love to tell you about THAT event when we see each other at CRS this year).

We hung with listeners every chance we could.

We embraced them and loved on their towns.

Over the years I’ve often been asked, “Why is there no country station in New York?” I’ve responded that three big factors are in play: signal, power ratios, and the corporate passion for the format.

Certainly one of the challenges for country in the New York metro is that big pockets of the audience live to the east (Long Island) and to the southwest (New Jersey). You can be talking in the neighborhood of 100 miles between the eastern and western pockets of the metro, so a signal with a big footprint is necesary if you’re going to be able to reach the maximum audience.

Obviously the revenue potential is a key consideration of any format decision, and formats have various power ratios (a power ratio of 1.2 means you can generally charge 20% above your ratings). These ratios vary across formats and across the country, so if the power ratio of one format is better than another, that would be a consideration. Recently country’s national Power Ratio was 1.07;   all news was a 2.0. 

That may or may not be what country is today in market #1.

And finally, yes, New York IS a different market for the format. The degree to which the plan is customized for the best prospects will make a difference.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not in any way advocating watering the format down – but New Yorkers won’t accept “medium” as an acceptable suit size.

Country won’t be a ‘gimmie.’

But I’m excited for the industry and the fans that country has made a return to a great country market - hey, Jason Aldean sold out the Garden in 10 minutes and Brett Gardner, outfielder for the New York Yankees has been playing country music as his ‘walk to the plate music’ in Yankee stadium for years. 

Plus there's the market's strong sale of country music.

The blueprints for success are well documented. 

The potential rewards are great. 

The bar is high.

And those who have gone before you are here as resources to help you succeed.

The degree to which that success happens will be what Cumulus will do beyond the ordinary, and how they will treat New York as the unique – and amazing – country market that it is.

Country Music 2012 Year in Review Part 2: How 2012’s Music Compares to Years Past

2012’s music has something big going against it: 2011.

2011 of course was a great year for country. We saw new high water marks for a number of our metrics including overall Like A Lot and Total Positive scores.  So any comparison to 2011 has to take that in to account.

Having said that, 2012 was a good year for country although, in aggregate, A&O&B’s year-end scores were a bit softer than 2011’s and we saw more metrics off than up. 

Let’s look at two: Total Positive and Like A Lot.

Total Positive scores increased in 2012 making this the fourth consecutive year of higher scores. The growth was fueled by improved scores in the bottom 2/3 that more than off-set a slight decline in scores among the top 1/3 (ending two years of growing scores there).  As a result there was some ‘score compression’ as the averages for the top 1/3 and bottom 2/3 are closer this year than last, and the second most compressed since 2000.

Meanwhile, while our Like A Lot final average scores for the year’s top 1/3 are a bit lower than last year, they were not far from the average of the past 5 years. And, again 2011 was an extremely strong year.

However taking all the songs into consideration, the decline in Like A Lot scores is greater. And, unlike Total Positives, the scores from the bottom 2/3 of the list were much weaker. In fact, the overall Like A Lot average for the bottom 2/3 of our testers was the softest we’d seen in a number of years. 

That our Total Positive scores continue to grow is of course great news. More disappointing though is that the overall Like A Lot score for 2012 – arguably analogous to ‘must hear music’ and by extension ‘must hear radio’ – was soft compared not just to last year, but to A&O&B’s 10-year average.

Were there great powers to play this year? Absolutely – the top 1/3 was certainly strong.  However the Like A Lot difference between the top 1/3 and bottom 2/3 was widest we’ve seen since 2008, making not playing the ‘right’ powers potentially more costly.

It seems somewhat silly to say, “Make sure you’re playing the songs listeners want to hear.”  But tracking spins as your primary source of music information won’t provide the same data as asking your listeners how they feel about the music you’re playing.

Each year we see significant differences in the 'most spun' vs. the 'best testers.'

If you’re not already doing so, an important programming resolution for 2013 would be regularly taking your listeners’ pulse on the music you play.

A&O&B offers client stations online music testing, free, as part of our full service commitment. We’ll be glad to answer your questions about how it works.

Click here for Country Music 2012 Year in Review Pt. 1 Is Luke Bryan Worth of All Those Awards and Kudos?

Country Music 2012 Year in Review Part One: Is Luke Bryan Worthy of All Those Awards and Kudos?

Oh yeah. No doubt. 

Fueled by Tailgates and Tanlines, 2012 was Luke Bryan’s year.

This month alone, Luke racked up 9 awards including Male Artist of the year and Artist of the Year on the fan-voted American Country Awards December 10th on Fox (plus, earlier this year, an American Music Award). 

He also was singled out as Overall Artist and Male MVP in this week’s Country Aircheck.  Again, deservedly so.

He’d have won the Albright & O’Malley & Brenner’s “Best Testing Artist of the Year” award as well if we offered it (note to Fox producers).

Each year A&O&B produces a list of the top testing songs of the year based on call-out and online listener research. And this year, Luke led the list.

Luke Bryan scored 3 titles in our Top 10 for 2012. This is the fourth time this has happened in the past 10 years: Blake Shelton in 2011, Zac Brown Band in 2010, and Toby Keith in 2003.

Good company.

Besides Luke, Jason Aldean and Eric Church were the only artists to have three songs in the A&O&B’s top 30. Blake placed two in the top 20 as did Lee Brice. Dierks Bentley was the only other artist to place two songs inside the A&O&B top 30.

That Bryan, Aldean, Shelton, and Church all had big years mirrors data the February data we reported in A&O&B’s 2012 Roadmap online perceptual study where the “New Songs from Millennial Stars” cluster (where these artists reside) was the #1 25-54 music cluster among the 12 we tested.  

In all, 90% of songs in our top 1/3 were from Millennial Artists and there were no artists in the Top 10 whose discography (major label) precedes 2000.

Meanwhile, Historical Superstars (defined here as current or previous ‘Essence/Core Artists’ who had multiple chart hits prior to 1997) placed no songs in the top 10 (second year in a row) and just two in the top 1/3 – one each from Kenny Chesney and Toby Keith.

“New Songs from Historical Superstars” as a music cluster still was one of the top four 25-54 clusters in terms of appeal in Roadmap 2012, and Kenny Chesney (4 songs), Toby Keith (3), and Tim McGraw (2) did place multiple songs on the year-end list while George Strait and Alan Jackson had one each. However the overall presence of Historical Superstars in the top 1/3 has been trending down since 2008.

While we had more artist diversity in terms of the number of different artists overall, the top third had less. In fact, this is the second “least diverse” top 1/3 since we began tracking this in 1998.

Artists that were new to this year’s chart had a smaller footprint as well. Kip Moore had the highest chart position for a first-time-on-the-charts-in-2012-artist; Hunter Hayes made it to the top 20.

So back to Luke and his three in the A&O&B Top 10 joining a select group of artists. Listeners responding so positively and passionately to "Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye," "I Don't Want This Night to End" and "Drunk on You" puts a punctuation mark on what has been a great year. 

Next in Part Two: How This Year’s Music Compared to Previous Years