Opportunities

Previously I was wondering whether Radio 2 is really becoming younger, as some of critics claim, or is it simply evolving with the passing of time to encompass a fresh generation of 45+ listeners?

At the time of writing, and using the rather good new website www.comparemyradio.com from Absolute Radio’s One Golden Square Labs, Radio 2 shared just 6% of its playlist with Radio 1 over the previous 30 days. It also shared 35% with Heart London and 20% with Smooth London.

I also carried out a further comparison using data from Nielsen Music Control, which, unlike comparemyradio.com, works with audio recognition software rather than website meta data. In the week 18th-24th October, only 5 of the 50 most-played tracks on Heart also featured in Radio 2’s list.

Maybe Radio 2 could still do more to broaden the range of music it plays during the day though. Thanks to a higher speech content than its commercial rivals it does make it easier to provide a transition between two tracks which might not otherwise work together as a segue.

There’s a great opportunity when Terry Wogan hands over the Breakfast baton to Chris Evans on January 11th next year. As with any major change, especially one at such a crucial time of day when much of the choice of radio listening is done out of habit, it’s extremely likely that many listeners may decide to start looking elsewhere for their morning fix. That’s not just existing Radio 2 listeners but also those who currently listen to other stations who might decide to give Chris a try.

If you’re a radio programmer and you’re not already evaluating every aspect of your station’s breakfast show then you’re heading for probable disaster.

Do you have the right people on-air? Are your features still sounding fresh or is it time to try something different? Most importantly, as this is something national radio can’t do, are you making the most of your localness?

Obviously I’m not advocating a return to the days when ILR stations were required to provide ‘meaningful speech’ and presenters were regularly giving out details of jumble sales and lost pets; far from it. Local doesn’t have to mean yokel. There’s more to ‘localness’ than just doing ‘What’s On?’ features or tagging local place names onto the end of weather forecasts; for example “In Neasden it’s currently 22 degrees” . Is it really, or is it just somewhere selected at random off a list of place names for this hour’s forecast? Personally I suspect it’s the latter.

Successful local stations understand that their strength is not only in being able to give listeners a sense of ‘belonging’ but also providing the feel for an area a listener should get by tuning into a particular station.

If you’re a presenter there’s no reason why you should not be able to talk about your area’s hot topics of conversation rather than rely simply on wacky stories from the tabloids, lame jokes from a prep sheet or reading out lists of celebrity birthdays and significant events verbatim that occurred on this day in history.

This is a good time to increase your audience by playing the local card and making sure that as many people in your area as possible know that your station is the one that is constantly in touch with what is going on in their local area. You can’t afford to miss it.

London Rajar - Q3/2009

The latest figures are now out and, as usual, here's my usual chart showing how each of the main commercial stations in the capital are performing throughout the day.

(Click on images to enlarge)

Weekdays:

I've never done weekend charts before, so for the first time here they are.

Saturdays:

Sundays:

As you can see, The Big Top 40 is doing well for Capital.

The previous quarter's chart (weekdays only) can be found here

Talkin' 'bout My Generation

It has always been a rough rule of thumb in radio programming that you play a lot of the music that your target audience enjoyed during their teens and early-twenties; often referred to as “the soundtrack to your life”.

Obviously I’m not for a moment suggesting that’s all you should play, but it does provide a useful starting point for understanding what your listeners are most likely to want to hear; something which can then be fine-tuned by properly-conducted research to help compile your core playlist.

It does also mean that a station targeting a particular age-group will need to ‘refresh’ its music every few years in order to take generational changes into account.

Ten years ago if you were targeting a 45+ audience then your listeners would have been born before 1954, while someone in their mid-50s at the same time would have been one of the post-war ‘baby boomer’ generation and in their late-teens/early-twenties during ‘Beatlemania’.

Fast forward to 2009 and today’s 45 year-olds became teenagers during the rise of Punk in 1977. Meanwhile, the Teddy Boys of the mid-1950s are now at least in their mid-70s.

I realise I’m not a typical radio listener and aware that I consume our medium differently as a result, but I still get annoyed with people (including some who should know better) who seem to think that as soon as we hit middle-age our musical tastes undergo a radical transformation and we either dump our existing music collection in favour of Mantovani, Jim Reeves and Doris Day, or just want to hear the same few hundred oldies over and over again.

In my case I haven’t and I don’t ; and I know I’m not alone in this.

So is Radio 2 really becoming younger, as some of critics claim, or is it simply evolving with the passing of time to encompass a fresh generation of 45+ listeners? Maybe it’s actually a bit of both; although it’s a difficult call because many of today’s adults tend to listen to a broader range of music than their counterparts might have done 25 years ago. One friend says he keeps in touch with current music through his kids and still listens to Radio 1 fairly regularly. Maybe it’s the balance between old and new that is provoking many of the criticisms; especially from the station’s older listeners.

Looking at Radio 2’s Rajar figures across the day the number of over-65s declines as the day progresses, which means Steve Wright and Chris Evans have a younger audience profile to that of Terry Wogan.

(Click chart to enlarge)

While Adults 55-64 dominate the mornings, 45-54 year-olds make up the next-largest group of listeners through the day and dominate the afternoons, followed by the 35-54s.

The decline in afternoon listening among the older listeners is most likely to be because they watch more TV at that time; a fact not lost on advertisers, which is why there are usually many commercials during that period for products such as walk-in baths and Stannah chairlifts.

Some may argue that those viewers stop listening to the radio during the day because they consider Radio 2 is “too young” for them, but that afternoon TV audience profile goes back to the days of Gloria Hunniford and John Dunn.

I suspect the jury’s still out on this one; certainly until Chris Evans takes over from Terry Wogan in January and we have a better idea of the station’s likely new direction.

Giving For Living

I don't usually do this but I've done a lot of work with the team at Jack and FM107.9 over the past few years and think this is a great idea, so...

Local Oxfordshire Radio Stations 106 JACK fm and FM107.9 are creating another radio first this week when both stations hand over all their airtime to Sobell House Hospice for three days.

The 'Giving for Living' Radio Appeal will see both radio stations throw their formats out the window as they relocate lock, stock and barrel to Sobell House Hospice for a 3 day radio appeal to raise money for The Sobell House Hospice Charity.

Sobell House Hospice provides specialist support for people and families affected by terminal and life threatening illnesses.

The hospice requires three million pounds a year to run, one million of which has to be raised by the Sobell House Hospice Charity through fundraising events and their charity shops.

Kath Morris, from Sobell House Hospice Charity says: 'We are completely overwhelmed at this offer from JACK fm and FM107.9. Most people in Oxfordshire know someone, or of someone, who has been in Sobell House. Without donations we wouldn't be able to continue the great work our volunteers do.'

106 JACK fm and FM107.9 have a strong relationship with Sobell House, with newsreader and Sunday Roast presenter Ali Booker battling terminal breast cancer. Ali says: 'The people at Sobell House have just been brilliant. Whether I need a drink from the drinks trolley or someone to yell and scream at, they give me the chance to just be Ali, rather than a victim of cancer. I am incredibly happy to be doing what I can to help this amazing cause, and I urge everyone else to do the same.'

In the past two years the radio stations have helped Sobell House raise almost £200,000 via two Moonlight Stroll events, and are hoping this weeks radio appeal will help the charity make up the shortfall in donations due to the recession.

Donations can made over the phone by calling 01865 318 700 or made over mobile phone by texting GIVE to 60155 during the event itself from Thursday till Saturday, October 8th - 10th, by listening to 106.8 and 106.4 JACK fm, or Oxford's FM107.9.

Recurrents

I’ve often touched upon the importance of understanding a record’s life cycle of Introduction, Adoption, Maturity and Decline.

When you first add a new song to the playlist, it’s obviously in its ‘Introduction’ phase. It can then take a couple of weeks for the average listener to become familiar with a song (Adoption), and even longer for it to move from Adoption into Maturity, and from there into Decline. It’s not uncommon for some ‘all-time favourites’ to spend many years in Maturity.

A station may play a song every few hours, but, if Rajar shows average hours of 7-8 a week, it means the majority of listeners are probably only going to hear it a handful of times across a week.

So, just as a song is coming to the end of its run on the main playlist there’s a strong chance it’s starting to become a strong favourite with the majority of your listeners, who have just heard it enough times for it to move from Introduction into the Adoption and Maturity stages; especially if your station is targeting a 25+ audience.

This where Recurrents can work well in building, and maintaining, an audience. For the uninitiated, Recurrents are those songs that are a bit too old to be current hits, but are not yet old enough to be considered as ‘oldies’. For a younger-targeting CHR station, that has been playing the hits on very high rotation, their Recurrents may only be around 6-12 months old, while on an older-targeted AC station, Recurrents could easily be up to 18-24 months old. That’s because listeners to AC stations tend to be more interested in hearing familiar songs than keeping up to date with the latest musical trends.

I once spent some time with the head of music at a station that wanted to “freshen” their music. Although they have been the number one commercial station in their area for a long time, their marketplace had become much more competitive in the past few years and their PC felt that playing the 'local' card was no longer enough to keep their audience; the music had to be right.

Looking through their music and how it was being played, via a ‘rotation check’, I noticed songs that had recently come off the main playlist were only getting played once every two to three weeks. It was almost as if they had vanished off the face of the earth at around the same time they were probably moving from Adoption to Maturity among many of the listeners.

There’s a school of thought that says you never stop playing a hit record; you simply slow down its rotation depending on how long you’ve been playing it. So, while you may be playing current hits several times a day, your Recurrents would probably get played a couple of times a week, and ‘Gold’ songs might only get played a few times a month.

At the same time, you still need to be aware of which songs are ‘burning’ in research (if you do it), or, especially with oldies, have simply lost their “sparkle”. Some of them might have been big hits at the time, but not only have they failed to stand the test of time, they’re probably driving your listeners away as well!

Well I Never...

In my previous blog I originally referred to John "Records" Landecker - I had always thought "Records" was a nickname, rather like Alan "Fluff" Freeman, David "Kid" Jensen or "The Real" Don Steele.

That was until a Mr D O'Day from Los Angeles sent me an email:

"...you got one thing wrong in your Landecker posting when you referred to John "Records" Landecker.

During his superstar DJ days -- he had so much excitement -- often he would say, "And Records truly is my middle name" -- because Records truly is his middle name.

It's his mother's maiden name; it's Dutch; and it truly is his middle name."

You live and learn - and obviously fortuitous that John Landecker became a music radio personality!

Overkill?

In his blog Dan O'Day recently posted a video interview with US radio legend John Records Landecker.



John makes some interesting observations about present-day radio but one thing that did strike a chord was his view of Facebook and Twitter etc. "If nobody has a product I don't care how many tweets or Facebooks...if it's junk nobody wants it."

Don't get me wrong, I find social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook useful and it's good to see radio stations using them as an additional way to interact with their listeners - in some cases using Twitter to let followers know of interesting things happening on the station. A few months ago I wrote about Jack FM Oxfordshire's use of Twitter to provide traffic updates and photos of the aftermath of a major incident on the M40.

The problem, as John Landecker points out, is that by concentrating their efforts into engaging with listeners via websites, Facebook, Twitter, iPhone apps etc. some stations are in danger of overlooking their actual content. You can be at the forefront of new media and social networking but if what comes out of the speakers is below par then you're only shooting yourself in the foot.

On the subject of Twitter I don't (or won't) follow those people on who seem to want to give their followers a minute-by-minute running commentary on their day-to-day life.

Earlier this week I was invited to follow a station that may be small but punches well above its weight - and deservedly so, I should add. However, getting 8 tweets in 5 minutes from them was, for me, simply overkill. I no longer follow them and have also unsubscribed to their Facebook feed (which was linked to Twitter) as a result. Someone else I used to follow once sent out 20+ tweets in a single hour - I no longer follow them either.

As David Cameron famously said of Twitter in a live radio interview recently "...too many tweets might make a tw*t". In some cases he was right.

On a personal note - and maybe I'm missing something here - I still don't understand how anybody is able to follow hundreds of people on Twitter and remain sane. I've pruned the list of people I follow to those I personally know and/or those people who I think have usually something interesting to say - and who don't bombard me with tweets. Even then I can sometimes find it hard to keep up - especially if I've been away from my computer for a while - so God knows how anybody copes with following over 1,000.