The messy suicide of commercial radio series; (part 6) The Process – How songs really get on the radio

This scene takes place in a radio station programming department. Ring! Ring!

“WHNK programming. Hank here.”

“Hey, this is Beth from PoMo Promotions.”

“What’s on your mind?”

“Oh, you know. Our records. Dave and the Marshes been lighting up your nights and your phones?”

“You know it. Got that spinning 14 times a week.”

“Wow, that much? You report it to Hits?”

“Of course. R&R will verify it off my Selector feed, and so will BDS.”

“Now how about that baby band, the Booyahs?”

“We’re not going there again. That turd wouldn’t float.”

“C’mon. WTMI across town is on it.”

“That must be why our listenership is up.”

“Listen, the Booyahs are going to be on the road with Dave. I’ve got to give the banner to either you or ‘TMI.”

“Well, you know we’ve been on Dave since the first album. We broke him in this region.”

“Yeah, but this is now. ‘TMI is spinning both. They’re giving the Booyahs seven a week.”

“I’ll bet. Do the owls and bats enjoy it?”

“Okay, it is moonlight, but at least it’s on the air.”

“C’mon, Beth, I’m playing fair with you. I always have. But I need to keep the gig, and spinning stuff like the Booyahs will land on my ass pretty quick.”

“Well, who was it who told you about the ‘HNK gig to begin with?”

“Yeah, I know. I owe you that. But the Booyahs? We did call-out on that record and people started snoring.”

“Hey, I’m getting a lot of pressure from upstairs. The chairman’s grandson plays the drums in the band. Can you do a smash or trash with them? Anything? Listen, we’re going to be doing co-op with the concert promoter, but we can’t give an ad to a station that isn’t playing the record, right?”

“How much co-op?”

“Haven’t decided yet.”

Sigh. “Tell you what: I’ll give it two moonlight spins, and if it gets any phones at all, I’ll up it to three and do a smash or trash.”

“Great. Talk to you next week.”

“Oh, before I let you go. Those iPhones we gave away last week. The contest was for 10. You sent us a dozen. Should I ship them back?”

“Nah, too much paperwork to put them back in inventory. It’s easier if you keep ‘em.”

“OK.”

“OK.”

Click.

Variations on this theme go on over the phone every week between program directors and people promoting records to radio, everywhere commercial radio exists. To clarify some of the jargon:

• When Beth asks if an album has been “lighting up his phones,” she refers to both requests and people actually complaining about a song. Programmers like it either way. It means that people are actually listening. Although songs people hate may lead them to tune out the station, most won’t unless the station plays two or three songs they can’t stand in a row. The opposite of love, after all, isn’t hate; it’s indifference. What a programmer would find worse is a song that zones people out so they’re not listening, because that means that they will zone out the advertisers’ messages as well. Even worse is a record that causes the audience to – gasp! – switch stations. If that happens, a program director will have to send out a lot of résumés to find a new job. Is it any wonder that a radio programmer makes such an effort to test songs before they go on the air? Or that proven artists take precedent over even the most talented unknowns? People, like familiar things, so that’s what radio gives them, especially when losing a ratings point means potentially having to cut advertising rates or lose advertisers. “As much as people say, ‘We’d love to hear new music and local music,’ said WWDC’s Joe Bevilacqua, “whenever anybody’s attempted that in the past couple of years we’ve fallen flat on our faces in the ratings.”

• Hits and R&R (aka Radio and Records) are two trade magazines that publish charts of airplay in various musical formats and genres. R&R uses BDS, the technology that “hears” the second 30 seconds of a song to determine its airplay charts. Hits lets the station simply report adds and spins.

• “Moonlight” is moonlight rotation, scheduling a record so that it will play only between the hours of midnight and 5 A.M., when losing listeners matters least.

• The relationship between promoters and programmers is such that the promoters willingly provide a wide variety of favors, not the least of which is keeping track of job openings. Radio is a very transitory and fickle business.

• “Call-out” is call-out research, in which the station calls people in their listening audience, plays snippets of songs for them over the phone, and gets an opinion on those songs. Then often ignores the opinions. “Call-out has become dominant,” noted J Records head of promotion Richard Palmese. “Very few program directors rotate records by gut.”

• “Smash or trash” is a contest run by some radio stations to get the phones lit up and get the listeners involved in helping to “program” a station. Listeners vote whether a song is “a smash” or if it should be “trashed.”

• “Co-op” is short for cooperative advertising, which is advertising the record company “splits” with other partners like record retailers and concert promoters. Since radio sells ads on commission, the program director will take home a percentage, often between 20 and 25 percent.

• The bit with iPhones is self-explanatory, but not uncommon. Often promoters send items for contests that never happen. The general manager of a Midwestern Top 40 station cut a promotion deal and suddenly managed to take several vacations a year. “Theoretically, those trips were for promotional purposes at the station,” said a radio professional, “but the GM decides to take his family instead.”