You may not have heard of Mike Joseph, the radio consultant who recently died at age 90. If you’re in CHR, you owe a debt of gratitude to Mr. Joseph for your format’s existence, especially if 1980s CHR got you hooked on this crazy business. By the late 70s, many thought Top 40 was toast. … Continue reading Five Lessons We Can Still Learn From Mike Joseph
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In our last post, we examined why traditional burn scores can burn you in new music research. Specifically, they can give you false positives on newer songs that listeners simply don’t like yet, while giving you false negatives on highly popular, but aging, hit songs. Our dissatisfaction with the ability of traditional burn scores to … Continue reading When Should Big Hits Become Recurrents?
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“Do you like ice cream?” “Like it,” you say, “I love it!” “Are you tired of ice cream?” “How could I ever be tired of ice cream?” If your employer decided to host a day-long “team-building “ exercise that required eating copious quantities of ice cream all day long, you would likely be very tired … Continue reading How Burn Scores Can Burn You
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Here’s our October 26th, 2017 webinar about how new devices and new listening options impact radio’s role in new music discovery: Check out our related blog posts: Alexa and the Vanishing AM/FM Radio Do People Really ask Alexa to Play Local Radio? The Three Threats to Radio’s Role in New Music Discovery
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This post is the third in a series exploring how changing technology impacts radio listening, music consumption, and radio’s role at introducing listeners to new music. Our last post showed how people who own smart speakers, such as the Amazon Echo and Google Home, are indeed more likely to stream local FM stations, but are … Continue reading The Three Threats to Radio’s Role in New Music Discovery
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This post is the second in a series exploring how changing technology impacts radio listening, music consumption, and radio’s role at introducing listeners to new music. Our previous post revealed that the majority of 15- to 39-year-old radio listeners* no longer own a radio outside of their cars. Furthermore, listeners that don’t own radios are … Continue reading Do People Really Ask Alexa to Play Local Radio?
Read more » This post is the first in a series exploring how changing technology impacts radio listening, music consumption, and radio’s role in introducing listeners to new music. As clock radios, stereos, and Walkmans disappear, The Amazon Echo and Google Home have given new hope to programmers for bringing local radio back into listeners’ homes. While screen-driven … Continue reading Alexa and the Vanishing AM/FM Radio
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For a few hours on August 21st, 2017 was 1983 all over again, much to the horror of Soft AC radio veterans everywhere. That day’s total eclipse of the sun sent millions of Americans searching for the perfect song to accompany the astrological wonder—and they found it in Bonnie Tyler’s 1983 #1 hit Total Eclipse … Continue reading Context is King
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In our last post, we spotlighted four things you can only learn from callout. However, there are things even the most sophisticated and statistically reliable new music research can’t tell you. 1) Callout can’t predict which songs will become huge hits in the future For most radio programmers, there’s something deeply satisfying about discovering a … Continue reading Three Things Callout Can’t Tell You
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In past months, we’ve explored the benefits and shortcomings of various measures radio programmers use to gauge the popularity of new music, including Shazam®, sales and streaming data. It’s only fair to apply the same scrutiny to custom new music research, the tool we provide the radio industry. (Colloquially, most folks still call it “callout,” … Continue reading Four Things Only Callout Can Tell You
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