What Does Music Radio Communicate When It’s Not Playing Music?
Is it talking to its audience?

by Alan Burns

When a music radio station talks, does it talk about things the audience wants to hear, or about things the station wants the audience to hear?

How much of music radio’s verbal content is driven by the station’s needs, and how much by the audience’s needs and desires?

We have felt for some time that music radio has come to be dominated by talk about the station, rather than talk that is driven by a focus on the audience. So we set out to discover whether our opinion was accurate.

Alan Burns and Associates conducted a content analysis of AC and CHR stations across the U.S. designed to answer these three questions:

• How often do these stations address the listener with a comment or message about the listener?
• How often do music radio stations talk about music?
• What does music radio talk about when it’s not playing music?

To address those questions, we monitored twenty AC and CHR stations in markets between 10 and 100, and coded the content of each break. A summary table of results is included at the end of this report, as is a discussion of the methodology of the study.

Headlines

1. Music radio dominantly talks to the audience about radio, rather than about the audience or about music.

On radio, the most intimate of all media, what would be most-common topic be? Wouldn't you think it would be the listener, or something important to the listener?
And on music radio, would you think perhaps the #1 or #2 most-common topic would be music?

The answer in both cases is a resounding “No.” Instead, radio stations dominantly talk to their audiences about the radio station.

The typical music radio station in the U.S. has 14 breaks an hour (think of it as 12 songs, 2 stopsets, and a transition into each as a "break").  The results of our analysis indicate that:

• 10 of those will contain station positioning language, either live or recorded.
• 7 of them will contain contest, promotional, sales merchandising, website and/or text program information.
• ONE of them, on average, will contain something said/designed solely because a listener might be interested in it, having nothing to do with the station.

However, that's an average. On 8 of the 20 stations we monitored, there were NO statements targeted solely to the listener’s interests or needs.

And on a typical music station, a song (or multiple songs) are identified 4 times an hour. Other than that, on average there are NO comments about music.

Even when combined, listener-focused and music-based comments (total 9.5%) are so far down the priority ranks that web/text liners (21%) or contest liners (20%) are much more common topics.

Other notes from the data:

2. Stations in larger markets send more positioning messages…but they also talk to the listener, and about music, slightly more than smaller markets.

It may be that while larger and arguably more crowded markets feel a greater need to constantly position themselves to the audience, their (also arguably) more highly-trained and directed air personalities may better understand how to incorporate more of a listener focus.

3. There is wide variation between stations in these measures.

The table below shows the average, and the numbers for the highest and lowest stations in each content area. Note how far from the average those extremes can be:

There are stations that talk about their web sites, text messages, or contests in half or more of their breaks.  One station had a combined web/text plus contest/promotion total of 114% - meaning that the station averaged having slightly more than one of those mentioned in every single break.

 4. CBS is a bigger “positioner” than Clear Channel.

This may reflect different conclusions by the two companies re how to behave in a PPM world.

5. AC and CHR position equally often on average.

Within those genres, Mainstream AC positions a bit more frequently than Hot AC (72% to 60%) but Hot AC is more contest-prone than Mainstream AC.

In CHR, Rhythmic stations broadcast positioning messages twice as much (100% to 49%) as Mainstream CHRs.

Commentary

The radio industry is under enormous pressure from revenue challenges, new technologies, and the fight to maintain relevance – especially among younger consumers.

In the long run, maintaining relevance is the most vital of those issues. In fact, maintaining and increasing relevance may be the solution to the other challenges – in the long run. The more relevant and important radio’s content is, the better it competes with less intimate media – such as online  – and the greater the perceived importance of the medium to the public and advertisers.

By not engaging listeners fully and intimately, radio has created a generation or two of listeners whose involvement with the medium is less than their predecessors. And we’re falling into a self-perpetuating, increasingly tight spiral: the less attention listeners pay to us, the more we have to pound home our messages – and the less attention they pay to them.

We aren’t suggesting that we stop positioning and promoting. Far from it. But music radio does need to find ways to make what we do more about the listener and the music, and less about the station. It’s a lot like trying to interest a newly-met girl when you were single: the more you bragged about yourself, the less interested she became; but the more you talked about her interests, the more interesting you became.

How Did We Get to This, and What Can We Do About It?

Radio stations have valid needs they’re taking care of – particularly the “Three Ps”: Positioning, Promotion, and Platforms. That doesn’t leave a lot of time for talking about music or the audience.

In addition, most air personalities are...

• not trained to think about the audience
• not taught how to talk to the audience about the audience’s world efficiently
• easier to shut up than to teach.

All that being said, we feel there needs to be greater focus on and inclusion of listeners’ interests. Program Directors can...

• be aware of the need to leave room for listener addresses in clocks
• encourage and require it
• show their air personalities how to build lists of what the audience is doing, thinking, and dealing with in their lives, even down to hour-by-hour during the jock’s show.
• use, and encourage their air staffs to use, every opportunity to talk to listeners about their lives and their interests. Those opportunities can come via focus groups, informal listener advisory panels, and one on one conversations.

Many smart programmers do try to craft station messages in listener benefit terms, and that can increase the listener’s interest level. But that’s still talking about the radio station rather than the audience or the music.

General Managers and owners play a crucial role as well, since they set priorities, incentivize behavior, and frequently decide how much “business” has to be built into the air personalities’ content slots. Those who plan to be in the radio industry for the long-term stand the most to gain, or lose, from music radio’s battle to remain relevant.

Notes on the Conduct of the Study

The station selections were designed to accomplish these goals:

1. Half in the Top 50 markets, half in 51 to 100.
2. Half AC, half CHR
3. Within AC, a combination of Mainstream and Hot AC; within CHR, a mix of Mainstream and Rhythmic stations.
4. Representation of the largest group owners without domination by any one owner

For each station, a representative hour of midday or afternoon drive was selected and every element of each break coded with the symbols shown on this page.

The results were expressed as percentages of breaks and percentages of elements.

A word about “breaks” and “elements.”  For this study, a break is defined as a verbal transition between songs and/or stopsets.  “Elements” are the components of breaks; for example, a transition from a song to a stopset could include a live positioning liner, a song/artist ID, and a contest mention. That would be one break and three different elements.  A station that played 12 songs and two stopsets in an hour would have 14 total breaks.

Finally, a word about several of the codes. “TA” denotes simply back or front-selling a song with title/artist information. “M”, for music, denotes an air personality or recorded element that communicates something else or something more about a song or artist, or about the music industry. And the “L”, for listener, code, was reserved for anything else said on a radio station that was to or about the listener that was not tied to a station message. An “L” break could be as simple a comment as “how are you doing today?” or more involved, such as telling the audience how the weather might affect her plans or her wardrobe. A simple weather forecast, though, would be coded as just “weather.”