Radio Listeners Don’t Get Tired Of Music, Only PDs And Music Directors Do

Well, if that blog headline doesn’t get music radio’s attention, nothing will.

And it’s not meant for just practitioners of commercial radio’s music stations.  It applies 100% to Christian radio and public radio stations that play music, including jazz, classical, Triple A, Americana, and yes, your urban alternative stations that have been springing up during the last five years.

So, where do I get off making this claim and why do I think I’m right?

First and foremost, some qualifications.  Today’s blog post was inspired by an article that appeared in Marketing Week earlier this month, written not by a music programmer, a record company executive, a music researcher, or even a musician.

The author is Mark Ritson who holds a PhD in Marketing and has taught at business schools, including MIT.  And full disclosure, the title of his column was:

“Consumers don’t get tired of ads, only marketers do”

I can tell you it’s one of the best marketing articles I’ve read in some time, largely because I agree with almost all of it, and it has a certain logic that should resonate with both marketers and radio programmers.

Now, you can tell me – and some of you most certainly will – that you cannot compare the wear and tear of an advertising campaign with that of a current (or classic) song.  But after reading Ritson’s theories, I’m not sure why you can’t, at least to a degree.

Why does this matter?  Because CMOs often walk away from an inherently effective campaign because they’re tired of it and because “Look how long we’ve been running it” paradigms.

Radio music directors and PDs aren’t all that different.  It’s been said – and I think rightfully so – that people who work for stations listen to their own stations much more than normal people do (or that is healthy).

In ad world, Ritson calls it “wear-in,” the degree to which a campaign or ad has stayed too long at the party.  In radio it’s “burn-out.”  Same thing.

The more pragmatic among us may say, “But what about all that ad/music research we do? ”

Isn’t that the great leveler?  Isn’t there some sanity in all those Scantron sheets?  After all, measuring “wear-in/burn-out” ought to provide the best metric for facilitating good decision-making.

Except that both research regimens are flawed.  In the former, ad research teams often use college tests as their guinea pigs.  Ritson shoots holes in both methodology and the idea that campaigns tend to follow the same cycles of exposure, repetition, and wear and tear.  And of course, campaigns (er…songs) are going to hold up or fry at different rates.

Exposure may be the most important variable.  Back in the pre-Internet days when yours truly last programmed, the only places consumers could hear a song was on a radio station or two, MTV (if it was newish), and on their own turntables and CD players.

Today’s cross-platform exposure – especially streaming because it is on-demand rather than linear – is a literal game-changer.  And yet, radio is testing for so-called fatigue essentially the same way we did when Bob Pittman was a long-haired PD.

“And are you tired of it?” is no way to measure a song’s continued contribution to your playlist any more than learning the CHR down the dial just added the song you “broke” and have been banging into a hit.

But let’s look at the research – at least the ad stuff.  Ritson points to research by Analytic Partners’ 2022 ROI Genome report as the first data point that indicates most marketers (I’ll let you fill in the radio analogy) have no idea what they’re doing.

They measured wear-out among 50,000+ ads and they learned this;

Most aren’t suffering from wear-out.

In fact, only 14 of the 51,000+ ads tested turned out to be fried.  The rest?  Still lots of tread on the tires.

And yet, most marketers are inclined to move on and create something new.  Or in the words of the great philosopher Amplifi Media’s Steve Goldstein:

“It was working so well, we stopped doing it.”

In the radio world where audience research has become something of a rarity, there’s preciously even less data justifying dropping a song down to recurrent or putting it “on hold,” a limbo state where it will only enjoy millions of streams but won’t be heard on the radio.

As Ritson concludes, “The problem of wearout is one of the marketer, not the market.”

A little creative editing and we’re talking radio, songs, and bored programmers.

In another demonstration of research fallacies, Ritson turns to a study by System1 measuring the same ad and its ratings over time – when it first comes out and more than two years later:

That’s right – the scores are statistically the same over a relatively long period of time for a new ad campaign – or a new song.

Ritson ends his articles with several well-crafted “takeaways for marketers,” several of which don’t directly apply to the art of programming radio stations, picking and retaining songs.

But his first admonition – “Learn patience” – is spot on.  Whether you’re a marketer or a designer handbag brand or you program a country station in Jacksonville, Florida, slowing things down and “learning the patience of the market” is key.

Ritson nods that we get too close to the product – in this case, the music.  All that focus and passion can burn us out before the audience even remembers a song (or an ad) in the first place.

He also reminds “new marketers should resist new campaigns.”  And to that, I wholeheartedly suggest stations whose position it is to play new music should still pump the brakes.

That’s not to say that if you’re a mainstream rock station and a new Foo Fighters lands on your credenza, you should sit on it and give it a think.  But something new, bubbling under, unproven, streaming a good amount, and trying to break out deserves a degree of patience – especially to make sure you have enough rotational resources to adequately expose the playlist you submitted last week, much less a brand new song by an unknown artist.

Ritson also suggests “Looking backwards before you head forward.”  Your gold library may hold more firepower than you think, especially these days when your audience will scarf down any comfort food you put in front of them.

And finally, a piece of free advice from your friendly consultant (so you know what that’s worth):  “You are not the center of the universe.”

The only people who know you just added a song are you, your MD (maybe that’s also you), the label, and the trades. Listeners don’t treat your station like a “one stop shop” where they use you exclusively to hear what’s new and what’s next.  In fact, you now may be one of the last stops on the new music express.  All in all, another brick in the wall.

That’s OK.  Know your place in the hierarchy, and program accordingly.  You don’t have to first in order to win, but you have to be great without getting too far out in front of the field.