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Your policy is at risk...
Building a music policy for your station is a fundamental requirement for any good radio station. And here's why.
As I've mentioned elsewhere it's important that your station maintains a consistent sound. People will rarely have the radio on 24/7, so they need to know that when they tune back in they will get songs they enjoy. However, that consistency doesn't necessarily mean that all the songs need to sound the same; or that all songs need to be recognisable. What they have to have is they have to fit into a pre-determined definition of a suitable song - better known as a music policy.
So how do you create a music policy? Well, there are a hundred and one ways of doing it, but a good method, and a way of demonstrating how music policies work, is like this.
Everybody can probably put together a list of their favourite songs. And it's the same with a radio station - the first step to creating a workable music policy is to draw up a list of 50 or so songs that define the station. These are the "bankable" songs - if you ever get stuck for a record you can reach for one of these without it sounding out of place.
So I were drawing up the Radio 1 "bankables" I'd include things like Beyonce's Crazy in Love, Coldplay's Clocks and Red Hot Chili Pepers' Can't Stop. More recent inclusions would probably be things like The Killers' Somebody Told Me and Kasier Chiefs' Every Day I Love You Less and Less.
On your typical commercial chart station you'd expect things like Dido's Here With Me, Keane's Everybody's Changing and Cyndi Lauper's Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.
Your bankable songs can change, but it is not the same as a playlist. You should only change the number of songs each year as a proportion of the years your music policy allows you to play. So if you are restricted to only playing songs in the last five years, you just alter ten songs; for ten years it should be 5, for twenty you probably only want to change a couple each year.
Once you've got your bankable songs you effectively have a radio station. There is nothing to stop you just putting those 50 songs on rotation and repeating indefinitely. Obviously your regular listeners would get a bit fed up with hearing the same songs, so what you is replace your bankables with other songs that sound similar - be they new or other favourite older tracks. And that is effectively how you create a station sound; simply work on the basis that you are substituting a different track for the bankable you were going to play. As long as the song you play is similar in style to something off the bankable list you should be OK.
How the bankables get chosen is debatable, but getting the presenters to do it in a committee ensures that there is a better understanding of the music policy and gets a more consistent sound.
It's a similar way of choosing a playlist. Playlists are a notion of top-40 radio, a concept devised in America. The story behind top-40 radio is important in understanding why stations do what they do.
Top fourty radio was devised in America in the fifties. The story goes that Todd Storz and Bill Stewart in about 1955, who were at KOWH in Omaha, Nebraska, were sat in a bar discussing how to make their radio station different and successful. As lunch stretched into afternoon and afternoon into evening they noticed that the same few songs were being selected on the jukebox. Even after the bar had shut, the girl working behind the bar chose the same couple of records to hear time and time again.
What they realised was that people didn't like to hear hundreds of different songs - but instead they wanted to hear the songs they currently loved time and time again. So came about the idea of putting the most popular songs on high rotation. And that's effectively what happens.
It's worth noting that this necessarily isn't always going to be the case. The success of the iPod has led certain stations to revisit their music policy; realising that people like the idea of a far greater selection of music than perhaps stations have traditionally played. The problem for programmers is that every song on a iPod is self-selected by that individual, and the wider you cast your music policy the more likelihood that you'll be playing a greater number of songs that your listeners' don't like.
Different stations have different ways of defining their playlists, but a standard format is the A, B and C lists. A-listed songs are the big chart-entries and top songs of that week which will get the most airplay. B-listed songs are either songs that have just been on the A-list or songs that are good but just don't make the A-list. Stuff that has been around for a few weeks which is still popular and will still get lots of airplay, but more than likely they just don't cut it that week. C-listed songs tend to be the ones that are being introduced, so more than likely yet-to-be-released songs. They'll get fewer airplays than the A and B lists but that's because they are being introduced to the listener.
Dependent on your rotation policy will determine how many songs are on each playlist and how many playlisted songs get aired each hour. You can't play just two off your 'A' list each hour and have a list twenty long (it'd take ten hours to get through the list). Equally if you have a turnover of four hours and are playing five A list songs each hour you'll need about twenty-five to ensure they don't keep get rotated in the same order.
Playlisting is not an exact science. There's a brilliant piece in the Simon Garfield book on Radio 1, called the Nation's Favourite, which tells of the story when Pulp's Common People arrived at the station. At the playlist meeting they agreed to put it on the C-list, before Trevor Dann (head of music at Radio 1) just said "This is ridiculous, it sums up the essence of the station" and put it to the top of the A-list. Good music, which fits in exactly with the station sound shouldn't have to wait on the C list to get lots of airplay.
Working in a voluntary radio station you might find the playlists work differently. Student radio is very pro-new music, so the 'A' list might appear to be more geared towards new music rather than popular tunes. Many stations which don't have a playout list (confusing also known as a playlist) will have a "restricted list" of songs which are perhaps getting too many airplays.
I've always been surprised that Hospital radio tends not to operate playlists. This probably has a lot to do with the fact it plays predominately older tracks so there is no "top 40" or newly-released records to make up the A, B and C lists. However, it's worth looking at the example of Classic FM which uses the concept of playlists to make it's playout list
Classical music is obviously often written several hundred years ago, and whilst different orchestras will put different interpretations on the composer's score generally the type of listener tuned to Classic FM will not greatly concern themselves with the different version. (Unlike a listener to Radio 3)
So Classic FM uses playlists to bring particular pieces out in a particular week or month. There may be a timely connection - it's in an advert or the anniversary of the composer, but there doesn't have to be. What's important is that certain pieces will go into a "current" playlist and get a higher rotation than the rest of the catalogue. Then these pieces will be replaced with other songs.
The idea behind that is that it keeps the music sounding fresh but also familiarises the listener with particular songs that are associated with the station. You'll find that stations often have a similar policy with "oldie" records - they'll select a few and get played several times before being rested for six months or so and then got out again.
What I hope this demonstrates is that defining the station sound is vital - AcmeFM doesn't just play pop music - it plays a certain type of pop music. That the difference between playing a Britney record followed by a Coldplay record compared with playing a Britney followed by Celine Dion record is what seperates Radio 1 from your average ILR.