Adventure Car Hop is the Place to Go

[Matthew Osborne]

On Wednesday, May 16, 2007 11:54 PM,  David Tomm
<nostaticatall@charter.net> wrote:
> 
> > Today if a song is
> > a monster hit, stations will continue to play it,
> even for several
> > months, until it's completely burned out.  Moving
> these songs to
> > "recurrent" status gets the most life out of those
> hits as possible. In
> > AC radio, their huge hits can chart for a year or
> longer, and can hang
> > around as recurrents for at least as long after
> that.  


To which Howard Glazer <hmglaz@worldnet.att.net>
replied, on Fri, 18 May 2007 09:09:52
 
> Natasha Bedingfield's "Unwritten" is doing the same
> thing today .. released
> in 2005, still a major presence at AC radio two
> years later. I remember
> reading a story on a British media website in which
> Bedingfield expressed
> her frustration with American radio: She'd already
> had three or four singles
> after "Unwritten" that had become big hits in
> England and much of Europe,
> but her label had been unsuccessful in getting
> America's radio playlist
> consultants to let go of "Unwritten" 

I can't believe this, you guys are really bringing
back some memories from my WVHC days (things I haven't
even thought about for years now).  This is actually
something else that I addressed while there but didn't
quite realize what I was doing.  Out of pure instinct
and thinking from the point of view of a radio
listener, when I would insert songs into the library
(playlist), although I kept the playlist relatively
short (to build familiarity with the product, again
something I did out of pure instinct without knowing
what I was actually doing at the time), I would try to
rotate songs thru the system (from new to current to
recurrent) fairly quickly for a couple reasons. 
First, we had a big credo there of playing the new
stuff before everyone else does, and of playing what
other stations don't (They did not want us playing the
top hits currently on CHR radio).  I really took to
the first part of that, and would put stuff on the air
there as quickly as possible to beat everyone else. 
To still comply with the "we play what other's don't"
part, I would then rotate quickly through those songs
and onto new ones so that, in theory, once the big
hits started hitting CHR radio, they were already
recurrents with us and considered 'old news.'  I
thought this approach actually worked well for a
period of time.  Unfortunately though, about halfway
through the school year the program director and I got
into an all-out fight about various station related
business (we had a major personality conflict right
from the beginning which eventually doomed the two of
us), and from that point on everything pretty much
collapsed.  
    In retrospect, I have mixed feelings about that
experience, but man hearing some of these stories
about music programming, rotation, and whatnot is
bringing back some memories for me.  To get back to
the topic posted above, I have to agree with Natasha
Bedingfield and her people on the topic.  CHR and AC
radio in the US holds onto stuff WAY too long, as far
as I'm concerned song burnout should just not occur. 
At the first sign of burnout, in my ideal world, a
song would be rotated out of the playlist for some new
stuff.  Unfortunately, in this day and age of
corporate radio, they believe fully in the current
approach and I don't see it changing quite likely
ever...

                                  Matt Osborne
                                  Schenectady, NY


       
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