Nearly eighteen months ago, with most major broadcasters finally streaming the bulk of their stations again, we took a look at how they were handling the next challenge – Web stream stopset insertion. At the time, Web-stops were a morass of hard-sell PSAs, fill music that would be unbearable for 30 seconds on a hold button, and, sometimes, just silence. One might choose the stream from the ‘station that picks you up and makes you feel good’, but it would be punctuated with frequent visits from McGruff the Crime Dog and reminders that your pre-teen might already have a drinking problem.
In February, 2007, Edison monitored an hour of programming from five of Atlanta’s major group broadcasters, with an ear on how well they were filling their Web-stops. The good news then was that you could hear a certain number of Web units filled with either paid spots or full-length songs (as opposed to looped fill music). In a fairly sophisticated market for streaming, none of the stopsets were entirely untended. But there were also repeating spots, plenty of PSAs, long stopsets in which the repetition became particularly noticeable, and a lot of clunky transitions.
What inspired a return to Atlanta’s Web-stops was, as it happens, a good streaming experience with a non-group broadcaster. A few weeks ago, I heard a particularly well-assembled hour of WBEB (B101) Philadelphia in which the Web-stops were covered with fill songs; the only hint that one was hearing Web-only songs was a lack of the song tags that B101 uses at the end of its over-the-air music. Fill songs aren’t the ideal solution for Web insertion. That would be either resolving the AFTRA issues or selling enough Web-only spots to avoid gaping holes. But it was still devoid of the clunkiness of so much else that is encountered in Web streaming. (It was also a particularly good sounding stream as well.)
This time, we ended up listening to seven Atlanta radio stations over the course of several days. And we can report genuine progress on some stations, although no seamless experiences on the order of our B101 listening. There are more spots in evidence this time, and more of them coordinated with display ads on the streaming media player; none of the stations we listened to is without any paid advertising on the stream. But there are still plenty of PSAs and lots of repetition. And some of the sync issues we heard nearly a year-and-a-half ago are still very much in evidence.
Here’s a rundown of the stations and the progress they’ve made since February, 2007:
WVEE (V103) (CBS)
Then: The R&B market powerhouse was a decent on-line experience in 2007 with several local spots that ran in each of its two stopsets. But the stopsets themselves were long and there were, among other things, back-to-back PSAs for the same charity and some dead air.
Now: As with many of the CBS stations, the stopsets, once very much McGruff’s playground sound a lot better, thanks to the involvement of TargetSpot – which runs ads for itself here as well. There were no PSAs here, although I did hear a few seconds of fill music at the end of a stopset. There were spots in every stopset, including one heard on many CBS stations for HearPhilly.com, as well as promos for CBS’s on-line station AllNumberOneRadio.com. That said, many sponsors repeated from stopset-to-stopset, and a few even repeated within the stopset. Also, given their mission to sell on-line advertising, Target Spot would itself be well-advised to start rotating a second commercial (as opposed to always playing the one about how Web advertising will make your employees start grumbling about all the extra business they have to deal with).
WWWQ (Q100) (Cumulus)
Then: This Top 40 station had the most actual spots, including some apparent agency production. But every Web spot could be heard cutting off its over-the-air counterpart.
Now: Once again, lots of spots including AT&T, Jared Jewelers, and Coca-Cola. There were some house ads for CumulusJobs.com and a few seemingly paid PSAs. There was also an ad for the band Green Eyed Stare that would be heard on rocker WKLS as well. You could still hear Web spots cutting off on-air spots at the beginning of stopsets, and some barely perceptible clunkiness between spots within the set, but a big improvement from last time.
WSB-FM (B98.5) (Cox)
Then: Smooth transitions from main feed to stopset, relatively short breaks (which is to say only five minutes). Already running a few spots among the PSAs.
Now: About 50% spots, 50% PSAs and fill promos. As with Q100 (also a StreamAudio client), you could hear a few seconds of the first over-the-air ad before each of the two Web-stops kicked in. There was also one “thanks for listening” promo that actually ran three times consecutively at the end of the hour’s second stopset — and the third time, it was sped up. Unlike most of the stations we heard, the paid spots weren’t always in the first positions; spots and PSAs alternated here.
WKLS (Project 9-6-1) (Clear Channel)
WUBL (the Bull) (Clear Channel)
Then: Project 9-6-1 had clearly given some thought to the streaming experience, with some more customized Web content and several fill songs. Unfortunately, those fill songs weren’t very well coordinated with the rest of the hour – cutting off other songs in some cases instead of filling stopsets.
Now: It’s a good thing we were determined to listen to this station, since multiple attempts ended when the pre-roll ad for the streaming player’s sponsor refused to stop playing over-and-over. We eventually managed to get a working stream by going in through the stream aggregator RadioTime.com.
Once we finally heard WKLS, there were a decent number of local spots, followed by a fill song in each Web-stop and only one PSA in each unit. There was one brief “thanks for listening on-line” promo with deliberately campy fill music. Interestingly, the Web breaks were timed to skip the final on-air promo/stager/etc., and segue back into music. That sounded OK when the station was playing a fill song online, a little less so when the segue was from a PSA directly back into a song.
We also ended up listening to sister station WUBL (the Bull) whose Web-stops were about 35% ads, 65% PSAs (including a few hard-sells) and several of those advertisers repeated within a stopset (albeit with different spots). The good news is that there were some agency-quality spots in evidence. And the nice programming touch here was that the HD Radio spot that ended the second stopset had been recut locally to promote WUBL-HD-2.
WKHX (Kicks 101.5) (then ABC, now Citadel)

Then: It was a great sounding Country station during the sweeps, but WKHX’s Web-stops were the most challenging for the listener. There was a five minute break and an eight minute break with no custom content, just PSAs and instrumental fill music, and a lot of clunky transitions between them.
Now: This time, there was an eight minute stop and a seven minute stop. The good news was that there were two web sponsors this time (one of which audibly cut off the over-the-air ad). The rest of the break, however, were the same PSAs that have long been ubiquitous on Web stream, including McGruff and many other perennials. (To be fair, they didn’t repeat within the stopsets this time.) There was a minute of dead air between one of the paid spots and the PSAs. And, as with WKLS, the Web-stops covered over whatever rejoin was taking place on the air, so that the PSAs segued immediately into music.
WHTA (Hot 107.9) (Radio One)
We didn’t include Radio One last time, but they’ve been heard aggressively pursuing local retail on their streams around the country in other recent listening. Here, the good news was that there were three spots–one of them an agency-quality spot for an upcoming Tyler Perry play that kicked off the stopset. The same spots played in each of the two stopsets and were, in each case, followed by two minutes of generic fill music. The Web-stops also cut off the station promo that began each stopset and an over-the-air spot was rejoined in progress each time.
Again, the good news here is that since we last looked at this issue, the major broadcast owners have clearly been paying a lot more attention to the on-line streaming experience. They’ve put more content on their players and made it easier to jump among commonly owned stations. They have been more aggressive in ensuring their stations’ place among the on-line content aggregators. And there are indeed more spots than we encountered – if you can’t hear the Brinks truck pulling up yet, you don’t quite hear the crickets chirping either during Web stops.
As with the little details on any radio station, some of the minutiae we’ve cited here is more likely to drive program directors crazy than to be picked up on by listeners. But it all figures into a listening experience that has gotten better, but could still stand to be improved in most cases. The at-work streaming audience is the one that is both less positioned to switch stations looking for music and the one that has the most commercial free choices. Their stopset experience should, if anything, be better than that of the over-the-air audience.

Three years ago, it was painful, even for radio boosters, to listen to most stations’ stopsets. Then broadcasters made a concerted effort to fix their clutter issues and stopsets got a lot better–unless, that is, you were listening to your favorite station on-line.
Anybody who spends any amount of time listening to terrestrial stations on-line will tell you that their solution to being effectively unable to run spots with AFTRA talent has been to load up the breaks with instrumental fill songs, morning show promos, and hard-sell PSAs–some of them as lurid as any teaser for the 11 p.m. news. After all, until recently, it was all many broadcasters could do just to get their Web streams relaunched.
In recent months, however, there’s been a lot more discussion of the need to fix on-line stopsets. For one thing, an increasing number of any station’s P1s are now telling us that they listen via a Web stream at work–25 to 30% in some cases. With numbers like that, making a Web stream a good listening experience isn’t only for the benefit of listeners in Sweden, it’s for diary keepers and advertisers, too. While the ideal solution, particularly in a world where Arbitron is rating non-simulcast Webstreams separately, would be to resolve the AFTRA issue once and for all, I’ve heard some stations filling a few more of those PSA slots with local retail recently, a positive step.
To get a handle on just how much things are improving, I spent Tuesday (Feb. 13) listening to five different Atlanta radio stations, each owned by a different major group. Atlanta was chosen because of the variety of owners, and because it was one of Webcasting’s earliest strongholds, thanks to Modern Rock WNNX (99X). I always listened through the embedded Web player on the station site, even when I had the opportunity to open the Web stream from my own player–because I wanted to replicate the listener experience.
Atlanta remains relatively sophisticated among markets for streaming. Every station I listened to had a player that gave song titles. (One station, which will remain nameless, had an interface that showed you not just title and artist but the log notes for sweepers and promos, a problem that many broadcasters still haven’t worked out in the several years since title/artist displays became common.) And there were several sponsors, including some heard on more than one cluster, who clearly understood the power of streaming radio. I also heard a few agency quality spots that were still somehow cleared for stream insertion.
That said, this was also a market of relatively long stopsets–many of which sounded longer on the Web. If no station represented the worst of streaming insertion–all looped announcements and new age music–there was still no single station with quite enough content or completely seamless transitions between the regular signal and their Web-sets.
Here was my day of listening in chronological order:
WVEE (V103) Atlanta (CBS) 10-11 a.m.
The market-leading R&B outlet was easy to punch up, thanks to the Stream The World player that most CBS stations have adopted. V103′s Web-set strategy was initially impressive. The first three units at 10:19 were local spots, two of them voiced by local personalities, including market veteran Ryan Cameron for BellSouth. That was followed, however, by four PSAs, then by about 15 seconds of dead air before rejoining the main feed. Total stopset length, not including a Black History vignette was seven minutes.
The second Web-set at 10:52, also seven units, was slightly awkward in both its beginning and ending transition–cutting off the calls at the end of a promo for a station concert. Again, the stopset was the same three spots, followed by four PSAs, including two consecutive ones for the same charity. But the overall Webcast experience was decent. And there were few buffering problems, which wouldn’t be the case all day.
Best little programming touch heard in the course of an hour’s listening: two different promos congratulating hometown hero Ludacris on his Grammy Award wins.
WKLS (Project 9-6-1) (Clear Channel) 11 a.m-Noon
Here’s the good news: the three stopsets on this Active Rocker were covered primarily by four fill songs that a programmer would have recognized as not part of the format, but a listener would likely not have, (particularly since most of those songs flashed artist and title on the station’s media player as well). No PSAs. Only one extra stager used for fill. Only three commercials–one of them a 10-second spot.
Here’s the problem: two of those commercials ran, bafflingly, not in place of a stopset but while the station was running a song, which was then joined in progress. Earlier that hour, I’d already heard the station let the second of two Web fill songs finish playing, even though it meant joining the song from the main feed in progress. The Web-only song was “Big Me” by the Foo Fighters. The truncated song was “Rock & Roll” by Led Zeppelin. There were also a few smaller clunky moments–e.g., regular feed spots starting before the fill song cut them off.
Overall experience: There was some clear forethought put into this, but it was still disjointed. And there was far more buffering than I encountered on any other station.
Best programming touch: A stager that identified people as “part of the project” (usually core artists) or “part of the problem” (e.g., Nicole Richie).
WSB-FM (B98.5) (Cox) 1-2 p.m.
A longtime Stream Audio client, Cox’s stations were a lot more present on the Web than most during that first bleak year after the AFTRA problems arose. Transitions from main feed to Web set were accordingly smooth. (I heard one slightly clipped stager, but only that.) I also heard at least two actual spots during the Mainstream AC’s two five-minute spot breaks. Cox’s typical “50 minute music hours” aren’t as much of a novelty these days, but they still stood out in this market–B98.5 had the most music of the five stations I listened to.
Custom Web content? One of those two spots featured one of the station’s jocks and was actually tied to the remote cut-in that we’d just heard. There were also several “here’s what’s happening” omnibus PSAs that had seemingly been designed for the Web feed. But the work of the Ad Council was pretty prominent here–there were a couple of hardsell PSAs, including one that I labelled “toxins in your child’s room.” (To be fair, none of the PSAs repeated over the course of an hour.)
At 13 units an hour, this mix of PSAs and a few spots might have felt clunkier. At 10 units, and with relatively smooth transitions, it was just fine.
Best programming touch: Remember how every ’80s CHR in America used to play a “jock name shout” jingle at :08, at which point the jock then came in over the intro of the record? B98.5 is the first station I’ve heard do it in years, and while you have to be a fan of programming minutiae to know what I’m talking about–much less muster any sort of excitement–it was novel to hear this again.
WWWQ (Q100) (Cumulus) 3-4 p.m.
Former owner Susquehanna was a pioneer in Webcasting. Modern Rock sister WNNX (99X) has streamed for more than a decade and Q100 has been available since it launched in the early ’00s. Of the five stations I heard, Q100 had the highest sheer number of actual spots, including some BellSouth spots that sounded like agency production. Over the course of two stopsets–seven and six minutes respectively–I heard 11 ads, only a few promos and no PSAs, unless you count the station spot promoting an upcoming local marathon.
That said, I heard several sponsors twice within the same Web-set, albeit with different spots. And almost every Web spot could be heard cutting off the first second (or more) of a terrestrial spot. And if that sounds like nitpicking, it became a noticeable distraction from the listening experience after the first few times.
Best programming touch: PD/p.m. driver Dylan gave away tickets for a Hinder meet-and-greet by challenging his contest winner to actually name a member of the band. “I can’t Google that fast,” she replied. “That’s why we’re giving away these tickets,” he said (or something to that effect).
WKHX (Kicks 101.5) (ABC) 5-6 p.m.
From a programming standpoint, I hadn’t listened to this heritage Country station in a few years and was pleasantly surprised by its tempo and energy. Hearing WKHX didn’t just make me wish I had a Country station in New York; it made me wish I had this station.
But Kicks 101.5′s Web breaks were the hardest to sit through of any station I heard–no custom content, just a mix of PSAs, including several hard-sells, and instrumental fill music of the sort that usually announces that the host of a conference call is not yet signed-in. There was a lot of clunkiness in the transitions from main feed to Web-set and between the elements themselves. And WKHX’s Web feed seemed to be running about four minutes behind its actual on-air signal.
WKHX also runs 10-songs-in-a-row and then loaded the last 20 minutes of the hour with a five-minute break and an eight-minute break, thus making it particularly noticeable when two different PSAs for the same cause ran in succession, then ran again in succession several minutes later. Or when a PSA gave way to fill music–which ran for about 20 seconds, then gave way to another PSA.
The WKHX experience made me wonder if what’s best for the listeners to a terrestrial feed is still best when you take Web listening into consideration. Playing 10-in-a-row, then two long stopsets with only one song in between may be the right thing to do when you’re in a battle with a new Country contender, which Kicks is. But I certainly emerged from my day of listening as a proponent of more-and-shorter stopsets (e.g., 3 breaks of four units) as opposed to two longer ones. You really notice those longer sets on the Web when the content isn’t there.
Okay, so here’s the good news overall. The experience I had with WKHX’s stopsets is the experience that, as recently as 4-6 months ago, I would have had with almost any station on the Web. ABC is no likely less cognizant of the need to deal with Web-sets than any other broadcaster; it’s just that everybody is still playing catch-up to some degree. It’s hard for anybody these days to provide 60 minutes of compelling radio per hour, much less 75 minutes across two platforms. But as radio usage continues to evolve, Web-sets are a challenge everybody is going to have to deal with, particularly when other media are offering more chances to forego interruptions altogether.