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Once radio programming was tight lists, tight libraries, and tight jock talk. Now, for programmers and music directors, a new wave of reality has struck the industry. In 2010 the reality is that what radio listeners mean by "variety" is not the literal meaning of the word those of us in programming perceive it to be.
When it comes to making comments about liking variety, there tends to be two types of radio listeners who make comments about variety. The first tends are those who scan up and down the dial, click onto an internet stream station, or drop in and out of sites like YouTube. They scatter their listening among all types of radio formats and music types. They are light listeners of radio ( both commercial, public and community). They don't contribute high numbers of quarter hours to any one station, let alone any one music genre. When you ask them what music they like, their general response is " I like all types of music - not any particular one over the other."
The second type looking for variety, is the listener who in reality means " the daily routine of life for me is quite boring." They use radio to provide the panacea and relief for their day to monotony of life. They're also radio junkies. Ask them about your station, what others are saying about radio in the media, on line or on TV and they will provide a virtual laundry list of what's going on. They know who has moved from one station to the other, what the personality did last week and more.
Interpreting "variety" literally is dangerous. These radio "variety" listeners are not asking your station to play a "true variety of music" in the literal sense. Music variety is only one dimension of a multi dimension solution of achieving "variety" on a radio station.
The roots of music variety formats on radio can be traced back to the 1940’s and 50’s. The advent of Top 40 radio was one of the catalysts for the various types of music variety formats we know today.
In the years before rock and roll, radio was constructed in a very different way than it is today. Both Australian and American radio programming through the late 1940’s and into the early 1950’s was built out on blocks of entertainment. Radio stations would broadcast block segments of drama, mystery, soap opera, news, and music, both live and recorded. It stands in stark contrast to what emerged around 1950 and became known as formula or long form radio programming.
The blue print for Top 40 radio is a story unto itself. In 1949 a US radio guy named Todd was visiting an Omaha bar *. He reportedly noticed that jukebox selections would repeatedly be selected again and again. Deciding that since most jukeboxes of that time accommodated 40 single-play records, Storz instituted “Top 40 radio”.
With Storz on that history making night was another radio friend Bill Stewart, whose version goes something like this:
“We were sitting there and the jukebox was playing, and it kept coming up [with] the same song. And I can’t remember what the song was, but it was a rock ‘n’ roll type song. We must have sat there four or five hours talking and various things, and they [the bar] got ready to close...they were kinda giving us motions like we were supposed to leave, and the waitress went over and put a quarter into the jukebox, and lo and behold...played the same record three times in a row...it was in both our minds.”
Although Todd Storz is widely credited with being “the father of Top 40 radio,” another radio luminary in Gordon McLendon used his chain of radio stations in the early 1950s to become nationally prominent by using a formulated mixture of music, news, and spirited station promotion.
The successful radio format consisted essentially of music and news, but as McLendon typified in his description of it, there was as much a feeling for keeping listeners interested in the station.
Ironically, the reasons why McLendon and others of the 1950’s had to pioneer radio was because of television. When radio broadcasters noticed their listeners forsaking radio dramas, big band shows, and so on, for television programming, there came about an almost immediate sense of urgency to do something to save radio.
It was not long before Australian stations like 2UE, 2SM and 3UZ took note of what was happening in the USA. Their forward thinking management realised that with the advent of TV in Australia, they too had to start evolving their formats. The birth of Top 40 radio in Australia began.
Top 40 was the real variety format. Not just by virtue of it playing a variety of music artists, but also by blending high profile personalities with contesting, news and getting involved with listeners beyond the four walls of the station’s studios.
Putting the history lesson on hold, let’s fast forward back to 2010. From the buzz around the industry now, it seems to me that today we have interpreted “variety” from a radio programmer’s point of view. ie variety = variety of artists; variety = variety of song titles from a range of differing formats.
Listeners however express variety in far different ways for radio than those interpreted by programmers. Listeners want something that gives different emotive responses, and gets away from the “norm.” It’s more than just music. In the many research focus groups I’ve been involved with it’s not uncommon for listeners to draw wavy lines in the air using their hands. They use their hands to show what they mean by the sound they want and variety they require. In interpreting what it is they are actually meaning, it’s my observation that it comes down to a requirement for “aural variety”.
While listeners don’t actually label it as “aural variety” in these explicit terms, what they complain about is repetition, the same songs over and over, same news clips over and over, jocks that use the same verbal crutches over and over; similar sounding contests over and over, the same client ad at the same time every day.
Listeners see the repetition solution as “aural variety” ie don’t give me the same things all the time – vary things around. Radio programmers perceive this need to vary things in a very literal manner.
As radio programmers we interpret the listener’s requirements to vary things to mean an increased quantitative requirement for variety. Programmers look at trying to solve the effect rather than the cause. Unlike those early Top 40 pioneers who recognised that it was more than just the same 40 songs coming around that provided variety, we tend to interpret the solution for varying the elements on our station as “add more songs to the library.”
In some, but very few markets this may work. We decide to get out a load of songs from various formats or music genres and put them together on air or decide not to give cash away using the secret sound contest, by now changing it to the instant cash giveaway. In other words our response is to solve the effect by saying – “get some variety on air, because this will solve the listener’s need to vary things.” To listeners these are just subtleties. These quantitative solutions do not necessarily solve the cause of the lack of variety. If they did, then ABC Classic FM could possibly be number one in every market it competes. Now there’s a library with some quantitative variety!
What we really should be doing is paying more attention to how we put the entire programming mix on air from music to news, personalities, contests and so on rather than just taking music in isolation and using it as the variety solution.
On a day to day basis, it means jumping into the music computer and taking a close look at the total product before it is sent to the studio. A Britney song followed by a Jessica Mauboy song, followed by a (you name the current pop female artist) song reduces aural variety in the listener’s mind.
However, in the minds of some Music Directors these are all different artists and that means his or her station is meeting the listener’s variety requirements. Further more, the rationale is that we’re now playing 5 Britney songs in the library, we’ve added a couple of past Jessica hits – that’s a lot more than we used to play. Unfortunately, this is not aural variety.
If time spent listening is the barometer of program quality, the aural variety solution is simple – use a blend of varying styles of music, with varying production values and quality across the broadcast hour. Contrast them with contests that meet the station’s goals, while resisting the temptation to run the same old concepts the market is used to. Vary the news intro’s, freshen the voice clips regularly, add a new dimension to a story. Freshen up the preferred time spot that runs every morning into the 7.30 news (you know, the one that features a client with a script that's not had a script update for several months.)
In the end it comes down to one key point when meeting the listener’s needs for variety: Being wary of viewing and interpreting listener variety through the PD variety microscope.
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