Interesting video. A couple of the guys I respect most in the biz absolutely love platooning. I can't disagree with their success. I've never understood, though, why it is better to burn a short list, then swap out another short list and burn it, and then go back to the first one, rather than making one longer list to reduce burn. Is the theory that a listener is going to hear 100% of your library? I would think listeners tuning in and out means that they would miss plays of various songs, and so if you had a slower rotation, those songs would "surprise" them the next time they came up. It would be "platooning by absence," I suppose. 🙂They stop listening at the end of the work day, they have to get out of the car, they go to bed, it's the weekend, etc. Can you explain further why platooning with short lists is better than putting them all in and slowing down the rotation of all of them? I heard you say it's to prevent "sameness" but if your category is big enough won't people be missing songs as they shut off the radio, and create their own "surprises" as songs come back around?
With computers, you could program 5,000 songs and rate them 1-10 in how often they come up. A 1 could be once a year or a 10 could be twice a day. No need for index cards. If a listener hears a pattern, that's not good.
Thanks Gene. It's great when you're careful and do it right. Otherwise.....not so much. Sorry, at first I couldn't see the second part of your writing. Let me answer that. Like it or not, most average people only listen a little while a day....not hours at a time. Currently the number is 20 minutes. Personally I think it's somewhat higher than that but..... So you need a reasonably (that's debatable what's reasonable. I lean towards larger than most.) small live library. People need to hear what they like and is familiar. It's just the way it is. But you can throw in pops of different music here and there to keep it more interesting. That's the platooning. I'm talking like 14 songs in an hour and 1 is out of the ordinary. Maybe only .5, hour after hour. It's still pretty tight. If you try and put in 1000 songs all at once a few things happen. 1. The math gets really tough to program songs in any sort of rotation that matches up to their 'likes' by the audience. Great ones rotate too slow. Weak ones rotate too much--beyond what they're supposed to. But what if they're equal? Well, 14 songs an hour times 18 hours in a day (6-midnight), means each song comes around once every 4 days. Knowing that an average person is there for maybe 1 hour a day, and that's generous, the odds of missing that song are gigantic. If it's a new song, no one will even hear it unless it's been played for probably 4 or 6 months. And even then I doubt that it'd be familiar. It's like a roulette wheel with 1 green slot and 251 other slots. How many spins to hit that green? It might easily be 1000 or 1500 spins, or more. So a LOT of all this isn't the overall concept that so many think of or even 'feel' that's right. They probably are generally correct. It's that it is incredibly hard to make it all work with a much larger library with many categories/rotations/clocks/etc/research/etc versus a tighter one with a small group of songs coming in and out. It's mostly a function of scheduling software or even trying to do it all manually. It's just easier physically platooning. Because you don't really have to concentrate on the main library much. Only the 20 or so songs you're putting in or taking out at a time.
I'm vehemently opposed to platooning but am in favor of the larger rotation. It's just laziness from a programming perspective to usher songs in and usher them out at whim. The platooners don't have a big rotation and want to micro-manage and see just how favorable those odd songs are. Frankie Crocker didn't do music research; he went to Paradise Garage and heard what Larry Levan was playing and he watched people's feet. You have a set of ears so there's little need for music research.
I can think of a platoon that many stations do ... and then abandon by noon like it never existed ... Christmas music!
Yes.... Try that manually......ahead of time.
My apologies for the irrelevant questions, but I'm curious when you were an on air talent, did you ever use the Koss Pro-4AA headphones?
Boring is the definition of the classic rock and classic hits format in most top 20 markets like here in Detroit.
Interesting video. A couple of the guys I respect most in the biz absolutely love platooning. I can't disagree with their success.
I've never understood, though, why it is better to burn a short list, then swap out another short list and burn it, and then go back to the first one, rather than making one longer list to reduce burn. Is the theory that a listener is going to hear 100% of your library?
I would think listeners tuning in and out means that they would miss plays of various songs, and so if you had a slower rotation, those songs would "surprise" them the next time they came up. It would be "platooning by absence," I suppose. 🙂They stop listening at the end of the work day, they have to get out of the car, they go to bed, it's the weekend, etc.
Can you explain further why platooning with short lists is better than putting them all in and slowing down the rotation of all of them? I heard you say it's to prevent "sameness" but if your category is big enough won't people be missing songs as they shut off the radio, and create their own "surprises" as songs come back around?
With computers, you could program 5,000 songs and rate them 1-10 in how often they come up. A 1 could be once a year or a 10 could be twice a day. No need for index cards. If a listener hears a pattern, that's not good.
Thanks Gene. It's great when you're careful and do it right. Otherwise.....not so much. Sorry, at first I couldn't see the second part of your writing. Let me answer that. Like it or not, most average people only listen a little while a day....not hours at a time. Currently the number is 20 minutes. Personally I think it's somewhat higher than that but..... So you need a reasonably (that's debatable what's reasonable. I lean towards larger than most.) small live library.
People need to hear what they like and is familiar. It's just the way it is. But you can throw in pops of different music here and there to keep it more interesting. That's the platooning. I'm talking like 14 songs in an hour and 1 is out of the ordinary. Maybe only .5, hour after hour. It's still pretty tight. If you try and put in 1000 songs all at once a few things happen. 1. The math gets really tough to program songs in any sort of rotation that matches up to their 'likes' by the audience. Great ones rotate too slow. Weak ones rotate too much--beyond what they're supposed to. But what if they're equal? Well, 14 songs an hour times 18 hours in a day (6-midnight), means each song comes around once every 4 days. Knowing that an average person is there for maybe 1 hour a day, and that's generous, the odds of missing that song are gigantic. If it's a new song, no one will even hear it unless it's been played for probably 4 or 6 months. And even then I doubt that it'd be familiar. It's like a roulette wheel with 1 green slot and 251 other slots. How many spins to hit that green? It might easily be 1000 or 1500 spins, or more. So a LOT of all this isn't the overall concept that so many think of or even 'feel' that's right. They probably are generally correct. It's that it is incredibly hard to make it all work with a much larger library with many categories/rotations/clocks/etc/research/etc versus a tighter one with a small group of songs coming in and out. It's mostly a function of scheduling software or even trying to do it all manually. It's just easier physically platooning. Because you don't really have to concentrate on the main library much. Only the 20 or so songs you're putting in or taking out at a time.
I'm vehemently opposed to platooning but am in favor of the larger rotation. It's just laziness from a programming perspective to usher songs in and usher them out at whim. The platooners don't have a big rotation and want to micro-manage and see just how favorable those odd songs are. Frankie Crocker didn't do music research; he went to Paradise Garage and heard what Larry Levan was playing and he watched people's feet. You have a set of ears so there's little need for music research.
Just keep playing walk this way and crazy train ad infinitum programmers and you wonder why sat radio subs are up??? Terrestrial is dead imho.