With so much emphasis in recent years on tweeting as a low-cost marketing strategy, how are stations engaging with their Twitter followers? Mostly, stations are trying to drive followers to the station Website. Beyond that, their objectives are far more diffuse, and not even as directly marketing-focused as one might think. The 2013 Edison Research/Arbitron [...]
Perspectives, News & Opinions From The Researchers At Edison
Station Tweets: Prolific, But Not So Engaged
The Songs Country Listeners Love, And Can’t Hear
Edison Research’s ethnographic study, “Country Radio’s Heartbeat: The Lives Of Your Listeners,” took Edison’s Megan Lazovick and Steve Lemma into the daily routines of nearly 20 Country radio P1s nationwide. From those visits and interviews, they observed that: • Country music had a personal relationship — a friendship — with its listeners. Yet, Country radio [...]
“My Two Songs”: When Listeners Agree To Disagree
Here’s an observation that began in an unusual way–with a Washington Post article about likely candidates for the 2014 mayoral election. One entrant, who has already established an exploratory committee, is the city councilman for my old neighborhood. So I followed the links on Tommy Wells and ended up at a Post article from 2011–giving [...]
First Listen: Atlanta’s “The Walk”
Last week, Myrtle Beach, S.C., got a new Country/Southern Rock hybrid, WJXY (Outlaw 93.9), on a frequency that had already attempted the format in the mid-‘90s. The ongoing attempts at finally merging the two styles sent us back to a 2006 article on “The Formats That Make Too Much Sense to Work (Until Now?)” And the industry [...]
First Listen – NASH FM
There was never all that much mystery about whether Cumulus would take its newly acquired WFME New York to Country. Cumulus clearly likes the format, which is enjoying its biggest boom in twenty years. Success stories in Boston and Philadelphia have proven Country’s mettle in the northeast. The only other realistic choice would have been [...]
Radio’s Bad Ideas That Won’t Die
“Why Don’t Bad Ideas Ever Die?” That was a question posed recently by Washington Post financial columnist Barry Ritholtz. “This time of year is filled with retrospectives and ‘best of’ lists,” Ritholtz wrote. He opted instead to take on “zombie ideas: the memes, theories and policies that refuse to die, despite their obvious failings.” Ritholtz’s [...]
Happy Holidays, Watch Out For Sleigh-Wrecks
Even though all-Christmas programming has become the province of a few formats (AC, Oldies, Christian AC), holiday songs remain a programming challenge for others. Stations with a five-year spread or 15-year spread in their libraries are suddenly playing Carpenters and Andy Williams songs that are forty years old, or more. If you try to surround [...]
What We Learned From Testing Christmas Music In 2012
When Edison Research did its last national test of holiday music in 2007, nearly half of the best songs–those making up the top sixth of the songs tested–came from 1967 or before. In any other radio genre, time marches on, songs lose their currency, and new listeners age into the target demo and bring a [...]
The Least Liked Holiday Songs Of 2012
When it comes to holiday music, one particular novelty song is still a total dog. “Jingle Bells” by the Singing Dogs—the 1955 version of the holiday standard that is actually barked, not sung, is still the most-disliked holiday song, according to a new holiday music test by Edison Research. The Singing Dogs are joined in [...]
The End Of R&R: Some Personal Thoughts
Radio & Records’ closing yesterday was a sad day for its staffers and the industry overall. And it was a poignant day for Edison Research’s Sean Ross whose industry career began at R&R more than 25 years ago. In this week’s Ross On Radio muses on what R&R meant to the industry and offers “Some Personal Thoughts.”