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All play and no time

How should you succesfully order your tracks so they work across the hour. And how to backtime up to the news.

We've looked at the way music is selected and then how it should be chosen and how to get from one record to another. So you've now got your fourteen tracks and you need to schedule them into an hour of airtime. Pretty easy, just pile them up and play them as they come.

Except that whilst that will probably do the job, it'll be pretty mediocre. Spending a couple of minutes before your show planning exactly where each record goes will actually make your show sound more polished and ultimately better. Thus listeners are more likely spend longer tuned in.

Let's work on the convention that most stations work too - that the news goes at the top of the hour. Quite often that's followed with weather or adverts. It's a bit of an info overload and the end of that three minutes get straight back into the music. You don't need to welcome the listener or promote anything on your show straight away - let them listen to a song.

Elsewhere I explained how you can divide your show into twenty minute segments. You can do a similar thing with music, assuming you are going to get through 4 or 5 records every twenty minutes and ensure there is a similar ratio throughout each of the segments. I've always worked on the notion that the first three records out of the news must be "strong" songs; upbeat, those with bite and rhythm. As you get towards the bottom of the hour you can start putting a couple of ballads or slower songs in. But whenever you have something that takes your listener away from the music, whether it's a feature, ad break or simply taking a listener call make sure you follow it with a good "strong" song.

So identify which are your strong songs and don't use them all up in the first 40 minutes. If you find that the play-out list you have leaves you with too many ballad and slow-down tunes, you might want to consider altering it, depending on the tempo of your station. Even a hospital radio station should be restricting the number of ballads that it outputs; patients want to be inspired not depressed.

Backtiming

One of my biggest bugbears is the way that some jocks like to create an impression that the news is something that is forced on them, and that it cuts across what they are doing. So they are quite happy to cut tunes in the middle of the second chorus to go straight to the hourly news. This is not only incredibly pathetic, it also smacks of a lazy presenter who can't even do a couple of sums.

You should be thinking about your news service at about 12 minutes to. Work out what the last song will be (try and find one with a nice end to it) and work out the start-time. To get an extact start time you need the following equation:

S = 60:00 - n - (t - e)

Where:

S is the Start Time

n is the length of the news jingle

t is the total track length

e is the difference between the total track length and the point where the songs ends.

Once you know the Start Time, you can then roughly work out how you are going to fit the songs into the previous 8 minutes or so. You might have two four minute songs which you can segue, or you might have three three-minute songs which you can play and just mix over the last 20 seconds of each.

If that all seems far too complicated, then use the Rad10 Backtime-o-matic which will calculate this all for you.