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Preaching to the choir
Jan. 23rd, 2015 10:53 amI have a client who offers his radio listeners a mix of rock, country, jazz, covers of popular songs, traditional Irish stuff, buegrass, 1960's protest songs, some local singers/songwriters, etc. It doesn't sell well; he has almost no audience according to Neilsen, in three (four, until last year, when his affiliate in Springfield went off the air) radio markets. The sound can best be described as roast beef and peanut butter, things that taste good by themselves but don't go very well together.
For the longest time I found this perplexing. Why spend so much time and money producing, distributing, and promoting programming that clearly isn't reaching an audience? Why not find out what listeners want and tailor the programming to better suit their tastes? While these are not questions I have been hired to answer, I can't be successful in my work unless my clients succeed. I have to be prepared for this one to fail, and to replace the lost income if he does. It saddens me to see any broadcaster fail, particularly now when so many pundits, who see the whole medium of radio as obsolete, will proclaim my client's demise as just another nail in radio's coffin. But that is bullshit; there's nothing wrong with radio that good programming and good community service can't cure.
My client's problem is that he's paying too much attention to the musicians whose songs he plays; he's programming for them, not for the average listener. Musicians are not typical radio listeners; they hear music differently than you or I do. They will hear three different renditions of the same song and be bowled over by the differences in performance style, while the average listener will say only, "didn't I just hear this song?" and switch to another station. Musicians tend to have broader tastes, to want to hear new songs and new styles of music, while most people tune to radio to hear their favorite songs, or at best a particular genre of music that suits their mood. My client is preaching to the choir, leaving most of the congregation baffled, unsatisfied, and unlikely to come back.
As the Cylons would say, all of this has happened before, and all of it will happen again. WCRB was like this in the 1980's, when advertisers like Raytheon and GTE would sponsor Boston Symphony broadcasts to promote their images as good corporate neighbors, and it didn't matter whether anyone actually heard the music. When advertisers started demanding results, the programming was changed to appeal to a broad audience, and the musicians complained loudly about our "dumbing down" the radio station. But the ratings went through the roof, and isn't it better to play Mozart to a hundred people than Schoenberg or Stockhausen to one or two?
Sigh,
For the longest time I found this perplexing. Why spend so much time and money producing, distributing, and promoting programming that clearly isn't reaching an audience? Why not find out what listeners want and tailor the programming to better suit their tastes? While these are not questions I have been hired to answer, I can't be successful in my work unless my clients succeed. I have to be prepared for this one to fail, and to replace the lost income if he does. It saddens me to see any broadcaster fail, particularly now when so many pundits, who see the whole medium of radio as obsolete, will proclaim my client's demise as just another nail in radio's coffin. But that is bullshit; there's nothing wrong with radio that good programming and good community service can't cure.
My client's problem is that he's paying too much attention to the musicians whose songs he plays; he's programming for them, not for the average listener. Musicians are not typical radio listeners; they hear music differently than you or I do. They will hear three different renditions of the same song and be bowled over by the differences in performance style, while the average listener will say only, "didn't I just hear this song?" and switch to another station. Musicians tend to have broader tastes, to want to hear new songs and new styles of music, while most people tune to radio to hear their favorite songs, or at best a particular genre of music that suits their mood. My client is preaching to the choir, leaving most of the congregation baffled, unsatisfied, and unlikely to come back.
As the Cylons would say, all of this has happened before, and all of it will happen again. WCRB was like this in the 1980's, when advertisers like Raytheon and GTE would sponsor Boston Symphony broadcasts to promote their images as good corporate neighbors, and it didn't matter whether anyone actually heard the music. When advertisers started demanding results, the programming was changed to appeal to a broad audience, and the musicians complained loudly about our "dumbing down" the radio station. But the ratings went through the roof, and isn't it better to play Mozart to a hundred people than Schoenberg or Stockhausen to one or two?
Sigh,
