Hello'
I am new to this board. I am running a community radio in Asia.
Could anybody please tell me how many songs one should have in a library for an AC or Jack format ? We play songs from the 80's, 90's and today's hits. What should be the ideal percentage, 33% of each decade? I would greatly appreciate your input.
Star
Adjusting the Dial
Hit by iPod and Satellite, Radio Tries New Tune: Play More Songs
After Mergers, Bland Sound Left Giants Vulnerable; Fewer Ads, Added Variety Engineering a 'Train Wreck'
By Sarah McBride, The Wall Street Journal, 3.18
The Web site of radio station KCJK-FM, known as 105.1 Jack FM, features a picture of an iPod and the taunt: "Guess you won't be needing this thing anymore, huh?"
After years of tight playlists and narrow music formats, KCJK in Kansas City, Mo., is trying to prove that it can give listeners the same thing an iPod does: an eclectic selection of music.
Previously, like most stations, 105.1 let computer scheduling programs pick the songs from a library of 300-400 titles, with the same 30-40 songs playing most of the time. Now the station is going against the grain of the past two decades in radio, more than tripling the number of song titles played on any given day.
With more than 1,200 songs on the playlist, most songs get played only once every few days, rather than several times a day. Program director Mike O'Reilly and his assistants handpick the music and the order in which they are played.
"It's all about train wrecks," Mr. O'Reilly says, using radio terminology for two unlikely songs played back-to-back. "If you hear MC Hammer go into the Steve Miller Band, I've done my job." Indeed, the station boasts that it might play a grunge rock anthem by Nirvana alongside a disco hit by K.C. and the Sunshine Band -- the kind of serendipitous combination offered by an iPod.
The station, owned by closely held Susquehanna Radio Corp., is attempting to tackle head-on a malaise that has the entire radio industry on the ropes. Radio has been an incredibly durable medium over the past seven decades, beating back challenges from new media and, as recently as five years ago, riding high on a vast consolidation that put tremendous power in the hands of a shrinking roster of large chains. Big owners sought benefits of scale through strategies like voicetracking -- having one set of deejays handle similar stations across several cities, playing the same songs at all of them.
But today, the industry is under attack from new competition that was barely on the horizon five years ago. Digital music players like Apple Computer Inc.'s iPod let listeners carry thousands of songs with them in a device the size of a pack of cigarettes. Satellite radio services like Sirius Satellite Radio Inc. and AM Satellite Radio Holdings Inc. are beginning to blossom, offering higher quality sound, a dearth of commercials and far deeper playlists than most broadcasters. Internet radio stations are siphoning off listeners by targeting small, devoted niches.
To bored radio listeners, those alternatives have tremendous appeal. "The opportunity created for XM wouldn't have been there 15 years ago, because FM wasn't too bad," says Lee Abrams, XM's head of programming and a former consultant who pioneered audience testing and playlists. Now, "research, discipline and all that have gotten out of control," he says.
In a fresh signal of radio's travails, Viacom Inc. this week floated the idea of splitting its giant radio unit and other slow-growing businesses, including its CBS television network, off into a separate company. Today those laggards are widely seen as dragging down the value of Viacom's cable networks and movie studio. Viacom shares have jumped nearly 9% since investors heard the news.
The nation's two biggest radio companies, Clear Channel Communications Inc. and Viacom, both took giant write-downs last month related to their radio operations, in part due to changes in how intangible assets like radio licenses can be valued. Clear Channel's totaled $4.9 billion, and Viacom's was $18 billion.
Now, radio is taking steps to stop the bleeding. After years of delay because of cost, some broadcasters are now racing to embrace digital radio, which can send multiple high-quality signals on one FM frequency. Many stations are trying to program iPod-style mixes of music -- often with the same "Jack" monicker used in Kansas City. Jack, a format developed by Canadian company Rogers Media, a unit of Rogers Communications Inc., is licensed to eight U.S. stations and has spawned about a dozen unlicensed imitators.
Viacom is looking to sell off stations, particularly in smaller markets that are less profitable. And some chains, notably giant Clear Channel, are trying to make themselves more enticing to both listeners and advertisers by cutting back on the minutes of commercials per hour. Part of that involves steering advertisers toward 30-second spots, rather than 60 seconds, so listeners won't be bored.
"Getting and keeping a listener's attention is so much tougher" because of the increased competition, says John Hogan, Clear Channel's radio chief, who is betting that fewer ads will make listeners more loyal to the company's stations. "We can't keep adding interruptions and thinking there won't be casualties."
Doomsayers predicted radio's demise back in the 1950s, when television became widely available and long-playing records made listening to music on record players easy. But the industry adapted to competition from television dramas by cutting many of its own dramas and playing more music. And it turned out people who bought LPs didn't stop listening to radio broadcasts. Once the 1960s hit and the invention of the transistor made receivers small and portable, radio boomed again.
When FM and stereo sound started to take off in the 1970s, conventional wisdom held that AM radio was finished. Instead, it became the home for talk radio, while music stations migrated to the FM dial. Radio overcame another perceived threat in the 1980s, when Sony Inc.'s popular Walkman became the first device to make custom-selected music truly portable.
To shore up radio's finances, Congress in 1996 greatly liberalized station ownership limits by passing a landmark telecommunications bill. Until then, companies could own only four stations in one market, and a total of 40 nationwide. Today, the same company can own eight stations in a market, with no limit on its national reach.
End of Part One (continued...)
