Article of faith among commercial radio programmers No. 26: new music is more likely to chase listeners away than it is to attract them. Country radio stations add one or two songs per week, and they go through mystifyingly tortured analysis before trepidaciously playing (gasp) records their audience hasn't heard before. Arbitron, of all people, is telling them to relax. Arbitron is of course the powerful monopoly broker of vital ratings information in the radio industry, and it is doing research with its long-promised breakthrough in radio ratings, the Portable People Meter. Briefly, the PPM is a device like a pager that Arbitron will loan to thousands of people in a radio market to track what they're listening to or watching and when. It's gradually starting to replace the arcane and flawed diary system.
Anyway, in a new PPM study, Arbitron finds conventional wisdom about new songs wrong, specifically at country radio. By measuring audience in the minute before a new song dropped and two minutes after it began playing, they found an average increase in audience of nearly two percent. New songs ATTRACTED listners on balance. Now on one hand this is creepy because before long radio stations will be watching thousands of citizens around the clock to monitor second-to-second twitches in total audience. But it's nice to begin to have facts instead of myths about something this important to artists.
Just wondering if the QUALITY of the song matters, or if people just like ANY new song. So the new magic formula is drop all old songs and only play new. Get rid of all that Willie and Merle, because the audience wants new.
Posted by: George | March 22, 2007 at 09:18 PM