RELENTLESS RADIO

 

Author:	Jerry Williams
Published:	February, 1999

 

With the first PD Plus of the new year, I thought we'd take a look at some basics. What's the basic unit of your on air day? You could answer, "a song", "a spot", "a jock bit", "an ID". All of these elements are basic units (non-coms can substitute "promo" or "psa" for "spot"). But these are the smallest elements, much like atoms, and of little use for the purpose of this discussion in and of themselves. They have to be combined with other elements to give us a unit that's big enough to manipulate and repeat. Arbitron's basic unit is the quarter hour. We're getting closer, but not quite there. You can usually squeeze about 3 songs, one stop set, a jock bit and a liner into a quarter hour. And while you can repeat a quarter hour, with 96 of them in a day we're still looking for something that affords a little more variety. (But don't under estimate the importance of the quarter hour. We'll come back to them in a minute.) What we're really looking for is a unit that's big enough to accommodate a number of different elements within it for the sake of variety, but that's also small enough to repeat multiple times through the day. Of course we're talking about the hot clock, which determines the elements that make up a single hour. The beauty of the hot clock is that it allows you to strategically place elements within your hour and then repeat that hour throughout the day. It's big enough to contain all of the smaller elements we've already mentioned, and small enough that you can have several versions of your clock for use in different dayparts. Yeah, I know, pretty basic. Hot clocks have been around nearly as long as music formats. And whether you call it a hot clock or a shot clock, draw it as a circle or plug elements into your music scheduling software in a linear fashion, you're probably using a clock to schedule your music and non-music elements (no one is still stacking cds in the air studio and having jocks play through the pile in the order they're stacked, are they?). So if these clocks are so basic and so universally used in one form or another, why bother spending valuable time and bandwidth on the topic? Simply to get you to give them a little thought, maybe even to inspire you to re-evaluate your clocks and make sure they're working effectively for you. One of the dangers we face is that after the initial set up it's real easy to not give our clocks another thought. But since they are the basic framework for the sound of your radio station, you ought to pull them out on a regular basis and ask yourself why you placed each element in your clock where you did. It may turn out that your reasoning is still sound, or you may decide that a little tweaking of the clocks is all you need to significantly freshen your sound. The first area you want to look at is how quickly your library is turning over. You probably don't want your secondary gold category turning over as often your power golds or heavy currents. So you must determine an ideal turn over window for each category in the library (2.5 to 3 days for some gold categories, maybe 4.5 to 6 hours for currents), count the number of titles in that category, and then figure how many titles in that category have to air each hour to hit your window. Let's say you want your secondary golds to turn over every 2.5 to 3 days and you have 100 titles in that category. That means you'll need to play 33 to 40 of those songs each day, or about 1.33 per hour (based on a 24 hour music day). The simplest way to arrive at an average like that is to have different clocks for different dayparts. (More importantly than helping your average songs per hour work out, individual daypart clocks allow you to make alterations in your sound to keep up with different usage patterns for different dayparts.) Most music scheduling software will provide you with detailed reports on how often your library is turning over, category by category. If you find that a certain category is rotating too slowly you can do one of two things; schedule more titles from that category each hour, or delete some of the titles from the category. Now that you know how many songs per hour for each music category you want to play, you need to plug those categories into your clock, along with all your non-music elements; spot breaks, liners, IDs, jock talk, etc. Here's where you want to be aware of the importance of those quarter hours. We mentioned earlier that the quarter hour is Arbitron's basic unit of measurement. They give you credit for a full quarter hour if a listener records listening for any 5 minutes within the same quarter hour. So if Jane Listener has a diary and writes down that she listened to your station from 8:00 to 8:05, Arbitron tallies Jane as listening from 8:00 to 8:15. And, if Jane had started listening at 7:55 and listened through to 8:05, Arbitron would have credited you with 2 quarter hours. A full 30 minutes of credit for only 10 minutes of listening. Given this information, you want to take advantage of those 5 minute segments at the beginning and end of each quarter hour, placing your potential tune-out (read "non-music") elements in those 5 minute segments in the middle of each quarter hour. It's advantageous then to schedule your spot breaks each hour within the following windows: :05 to :10, :20 to :25, :35 to :40, and :50 to :55. Conversely, you want to not only have music sweeping from one quarter hour to the next, but power categories at those times. In more music intensive or lighter spot load dayparts (mid days, evenings, overnights) you may be able to get away with running only two or three spot breaks. Which quarter hours will you leave spot free? Again, we go back to usage. Traditionally the highest listened to quarter hour is the first quarter hour, so you may want to consider scheduling music sweeps there. The goal is to keep people listening longer and tuning back in more often. Your hot clock, if structured properly, can be a tremendous aid in reaching that goal.

 

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