EXTRA CLOCKS

A ByrnesMedia Guest Article

Daryl Holien

I read with interest the article from Greg Diamond regarding Variety. I couldn’t agree any stronger with his statement of, “More is not better”. Proper rotation, proper platooning, and proper shuffling of your categories are all important to achieving the “perception of variety.” Narrow focus gives broad results. The more “fringe” songs you play, the more opportunities you provide your audience to hit the scan button.

One area I thought that could have been included in Greg’s article that is critical to how your library is perceived by your audience is “Clocks”.

Every hour of every day, these control what and when everything is heard on the radio station. Clocks represent what your radio station will sound like, the clocks contain all the musical elements that make up your station, i.e.: era balance, tempo, core artists, etc.

It’s my experience in listening to various radio stations, that a great number of them build a couple of clocks and put them on the air and that’s it… then for the next number of months until you change them, your Power Current (for example) is at the :06 position day after day after day after day. Depending on your format, that could mean 1 of between 5 and 7 songs will play in that same position. In A/C radio, where we’ll hang on to songs for 20+ weeks, that’s a lot of days. You tend to become somewhat predictable by what song is on the air. Yes, there are some minor alterations to the categories, but you get my point.

Although not anything new, we put together three different, strong clocks for each hour of each day, and then place them on the clock assignment grids. Yeah, okay so we’re nuts and it’s a painstaking process; however, it allows you to take all the elements of your radio station and rearrange them, keeping your era balance, tempo, core artist’s etc. and move them around the clock. When you look at our grids, the same clock, with the same order of songs, will not come up in the same hour on the same day of the week for 3 weeks. You get a real “musical wash” and I have had little or no e-mails, or calls or complaints about, “You play the same songs over and over,” for who knows how long.

By no means is this the only answer, but added to the other suggestions this is something else you can do to keep your radio station sounding different all the time.

Anytime you’ve got a couple of weeks with nothing to do, give it a try.

Daryl Holien

Director of FM Programming

Lite 92fm / 104.9 The Wolf

Regina, Saskatchewan

You’re bang on with your use of multiple clocks, Daryl. I was especially glad to see you used the term “strong,” because that’s the key. To achieve “consistency of hour,” you should create clocks that give an accurate, “strong” representation of your station every 20 minutes (some would say every 15 minutes, but in most formats that does not allow for enough songs to properly showcase your positioning). This makes the job much more difficult since you will still want your primary categories in more or less the same places, and you will still want to “couch” lesser records between more familiar, mass-appeal songs, etc. With that in mind, rearranging category placement then becomes much less a matter of what you want to change as opposed to what you can change to allow for less predictability, while still portraying the desired “essence” and consistency of the station – a tricky balancing act. If you are able to do this as many times as Daryl, then good on you! If not, at least try for one alternate for all your existing clocks. If you like, ByrnesMedia Consultants can help.

 

One final note, I was taken aback slightly while at Canadian Music Week when asked why I didn’t like depth tracks or “spice” records. I asked the person why he thought that and it was his impression drawn from the series of stories Daryl mentions above. I went back and reread them and understood how he may have arrived at that conclusion.

 

For the record, then – I feel a “spice” component is not only beneficial for most stations (depending on format and competitive situation), but even essential. This is another important factor in achieving “perceived variety.”

 

The point I was making is that stations will often dilute their databases by spreading these lesser-testing records throughout their library. That, in turn, lessens the overall appeal of the universe. Instead, these tracks should be placed in their own category and loaded (sparingly) into the clocks and surrounded by more mass-appeal songs. Further, these records should be highlighted in some manner through imaging. Doing this “keeps the hits coming,” but also allows for a certain “oh wow!” factor.

 

I hope that clears things up. – Greg Diamond

[ Email this article | Return to ByrnesMedia Main Page ]