- Tight, highly researched playlist.
- Proper rotations so your songs are bouncing through the dayparts and to the normal listener it sounds like you’re playing way more than you actually are.
- Proper sound coding so you’re spreading out different textures and song content.
Philosophy:
To explain my music scheduling philosophy, I’m going to use some statements my old friend and mentor, Larry Kent, said to me.
“Mr. Scott, it’s not our job to make the hits… it’s our job to play them”.
Larry first said that to me over 28 years ago. This was back when people still mostly looked to radio to get their new music. IMO, those words are more true now than they were back then. Radio has lost the “new music first” battle. Radio cannot add new music fast enough to keep up with online sources. This became apparent to me around 2008 when kids at dances I was DJ’ing were asking for songs they had heard online and I had no idea what they were talking about. Songs that I had just ripped in to my laptop from the latest “Hit Disc”. they thought were “old”. I knew then, radio had lost the new music battle… and it wasn’t even a fight.
Radio should be hyper focused on playing the tried and true hits and not worried about breaking new music. As another friend and consultant, Phil Hunt, once said to me: “I have a new music category.. it’s called a B”. I’m not worried at all if station X plays a new song before me… people are listening to me for the comfort food I’m giving them, not the latest entre from a chef they’ve never heard of..
“It’s not what you don’t play that hurts you, it’s what you do play…”
I saw someone in a radio group on Facebook lately bragging how he could help stations beef up their libraries… He would go through your library and help you find all of those missing jewels that stations didn’t play anymore.
That is not me… I would do the opposite. I would go through and get rid of all of the stuff that should be retired…
Music lists should be tight, laser focused and mega hit oriented. People, even in smaller markets, are not sitting there listening to the radio all day as much as we’d like them to. They’re listening in short time frames throughout the day… and they want to hear songs they like!
“People are creatures of habit… use that to your advantage”
Most people listen to the radio at the same times.. every day… they wake up to it, or they listen on their way to take the kids to school or during their lunch hour…
You can take 200 hit songs and make it sound like you’re playing a thousand to the normal listener if you schedule your music properly… keeping the same songs/artists from repeating in the same hours and dayparts… or days of the week… using your sound codes properly… Radio is theater of the mind. I can claim variety all day long playing a tight playlist and get away with it, because to the normal listener.. I have a HUGE library of hits… because they’re hearing different songs every time they tune in.
- Database cleanup and maintenance.
- Complete database builds (If no database currently available).
- Weekly scheduling sent by a certain time each week.
- Weekly music adds.
- MusicMaster database (if station does not currently have scheduler).
