Our last post examined how the usage patterns of contemporary music on Spotify look at lot more like record store sales than radio spin counts: Songs are most likely to achieve their biggest number of streams the week the song is released. However, not every song follows this pattern. Today, we take a deeper look … Continue reading The Three Types of Hits on Spotify
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This post is the second in the series “What Radio Can Learn From Spotify.” Now that Spotify lets us see which songs listeners are playing for themselves, many who examine Spotify’s usage have expressed concern that radio is too late to the party on too many new hit songs. Anecdotal examples are easy to find … Continue reading Is Spotify replacing Record Stores or Radio Stations?
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For decades, radio programmers have dreamed of crawling inside their listeners’ cars, bedrooms and earbuds to hear exactly how they consume music. Are there new songs listeners have discovered? When exactly do listeners stop playing songs they used to love? That dream has finally come true. Spotify has emerged as the leading platform for listeners … Continue reading What Radio Can Learn From Spotify
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Radio is in grave danger of losing its position as the new music discovery leader. As we noted in our study The Alexa Effect, teenagers are already more likely to think first of Spotify and YouTube than radio as the place to hear new music first—and young adults aren’t far behind. The problem isn’t that … Continue reading The Co-worker Who Can Save Your New Music Image
Read more »In our previous call out summer school class, we outlined how to select the songs you’ll test in your callout research. Today’s class tackles the one song you should never, ever test in your new music research. Don’t test a song your station shouldn’t play. “Amazing grasp of the obvious over there at Integr8 Research.” … Continue reading Callout Summer School: The One Song You Should Never Test
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Your callout hooks are due in a few hours. You’ve got 30 slots. How can you know the songs you choose to test will have the greatest impact on your station? It’s not a question you should take lightly. Consider that for a typical CHR station: Your six most-played currents account for 25% of your … Continue reading Callout Summer School: Which songs should I test?
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In our last Callout Summer School class, we examined how to use Burn to determine when a song has reached the end of its life as a current hit. In today’s class, we tackle the other end of a song’s life as a hit—it’s beginning—and how to use Familiarity to judge when a song’s appeal … Continue reading Callout Summer School: BFFs (Benchmarks For Familiarity)
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In our last Callout Summer School class, we examined how listeners’ reactions to songs translate into the five most common scores used to rate how much listeners love or hate a song. Now, we’ll tackle one of the most misunderstood and debated dimensions of how listeners fell about your music: Burn. What question is Burn … Continue reading Callout Summer School: Don’t Get Burned by Burn
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While going full-on Marie Kondo on my radio career box, I unearthed the very first music test I ever implemented back in 1999. It was a hand-me-down AMT from a large-market Soft AC. The format captain of our new owners had graciously shared it with me—and with it started my journey with music research. What … Continue reading Callout Summer School: The Five Most Popular Song Scores
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Part four of a four-part series on music consumption trends There are clear signs of a split in musical tastes that radio consulting legend Guy Zapoleon coined The Extremes, a predictable phase during which listeners’ tastes move away from broadly-appealing mainstream Pop songs towards the extremes of R&B, Rock and Country that don’t appeal to … Continue reading Should You Program 2019 Like It’s 1989?
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