My whole radio programming career I dreamed of a day when we could know exactly what music our audience was into so we wouldn’t have to spend so much time and energy trying to guess. I went to great lengths to come up with ways to get just a smidgen of this info. I did online surveys, focus groups, call out, tracked every single request and asked everyone on our staff within the demo their opinions. Plus, I talked to many other programmers to see how they collected this information. One innovative programmer I worked with, Billy Thorman, used to go around to every establishment in his market that had a jukebox and pay them a couple bucks to find out what their most played songs were. Now, using the market level song data I look at daily I can tell within seconds exactly what everyone in a market is listening to on their own. Literally ALL of them because we all listen to music on at least one of our devices every single week. Yet, when I share the insights from this data with programmers many of them ignore it and just do what they’ve done for the past twenty years, look at Mediabase and listen to the songs everyone else added and pick the one they think fits. Why? Because it’s the fun part of the job and radio programmers really love the idea that we are the tastemakers. But that’s a fundamental misunderstanding of our role and the way music is consumed today.

Radio’s role isn’t to decide what songs are worthy of airplay. Our role is to determine our audience’s favorite songs and play them. It’s a blessing, not a curse, that making that determination now is incredibly easy. Because there are too many other things on our plates now and there aren’t enough hours in the day to spend half of them listening to music.

Yes, there was a time when radio programmers, and some individual on-air personalities, were the gatekeepers deciding which songs people got to hear and which ones they didn’t. Now, not only is that not the case it’s completely flipped. In most formats radio is the LAST to get new songs because songs are released to the public well before they’re released to radio. That’s why I constantly tell programmers to ignore the radio release date.

However, I’ll admit that taking a data driven approach is an adjustment. When you’re looking at real song consumption data most songs don’t go in a perfectly linear fashion slowly getting more and more popular, like we’re used to seeing on traditional charts. Some songs start off hot and immediately taper off while others blow up years after release because they got played in a popular show. Many songs stay popular for considerably longer than we’re accustomed to as well. So, every programmer, myself included at times, has the urge to argue with the data and just go back to how we’ve always done it. One thing that helps immensely is getting comfortable adding and resting songs more quickly. As well as getting comfortable adding a new song that’s doing really well locally right into heavy. If a song that just came out is already the most listened to song in your format within your area, why bury it in light currents for a week, slowly move it into medium and then put it into heavy several weeks later?

In truth radio programmers, record executives, booking agents and venue owners were never really the tastemakers. The real tastemakers have always been the audience themselves. No matter how much we like a song we cannot make the audience like it just because we play it every couple hours. Either it connects with them or it doesn’t.

That being said, there is a value in developing the skill of being able to hear a song and tell whether it’s likely to be a hit with our audience. But, that skill shouldn’t be used to go against the data. Instead, it should be paired with the data and backed up by that data. Because all of us eventually age out of demos and get to the point where new music doesn’t sound as appealing or make a lot of sense to us. In the past that meant handing the programming reins to someone else. Now though, if we’re willing to use the data available to us we can program as long as we want and in any genre we want.

What do you think? Who are today’s tastemakers? Comment below or email me at Andy@RadioStationConsultant.com.

Pic designed by wayhomestudio for freepik.com.