Company News · July 17, 2008

Recommendations For “Recommending” New Music

By Edison Research

In recent years, many programmers have come to believe that music radio will maintain its place in listeners’ lives as a curator of their music collection. The logic suggests that if radio is no longer the only place to discover music, and can’t compete for the deepest offerings, it will still have the role of digging through that dizzying array of now available music and bringing the best of it to the listeners who aren’t as seduced by infinite choice.
What radio has the power to do under this scenario is to recommend new music. And in this day and age, the concept of recommending music makes a lot of sense. It’s the thing listeners still wish DJs would do (although most of them haven’t actually heard jocks pick the music in their radio lifetimes). It’s the power of Amazon.com’s recommendations that made a surprise success out of Eva Cassidy without radio and Norah Jones before radio.
And the power of the recommendation is also a lot of the sexiness of Pandora, which had hit an all-time high in listenership on the first weekend of its new iPhone app. With the new iPhone bringing The Infinite Dial into more listeners’ pockets Pandora is one of a relative handful of stations with the advantage of prime real estate and ease-of-use – something we’ve warned broadcasters about recently. But if radio has any interest in fighting for the “recommending new music” franchise, the time is now.
That challenge isn’t just complicated by the sexiness of the new competition, but by a decade of radio being imaged as a gatekeeper, not a curator. Radio itself has played into that with the diminished role of the Music Director and the smaller number of stations that were actually willing to go off the menu of songs being promoted to them and indeed find new music that listeners might enjoy. Pandora can still guess wrong – yesterday it somehow thought I wanted to hear a cut from Charlene’s “I’ve Never Been To Me” album! But a musicologist classifying songs somehow comes off as far less restrictive than asking 100 listeners with similar tastes what they like – something that radio can never get P.R. credit for, no matter how predictive it might be.
So with all of that, how would radio get credit for curating and recommending music?
First of all, by using the word “recommended”–the word often associated with an Amazon or Pandora. The stager that merely identifies “new music” is, at this point, just as lost on listeners as promising “another long set of songs in a row.” And now it runs the risk of being used to stage a song that the listener does not think of as new. (Somewhere this week, there’s a Top 40 station identifying “Viva La Vida” by Coldplay as new music and a sneering listener who’s heard it for two months already.)
But recommending music doesn’t just flag it as new. It does touch on the “jocks pick the music” aspect of radio that strikes a chord with some listeners. It suggests more of a relationship between station and listener. And something doesn’t have to be brand new to the listener for a station’s endorsement to matter – throughout the election process, the Presidential candidates will seek out endorsements in hopes of swaying voters who are already well familiar with them.
If a station is still lucky enough to have an off-air music director, it’s time to make that person a more visible part of the radio station. In fact, in the same way that “program director” has given way to “listener advocate” on many a signature bloc, it’s probably time for “MDs” to become “curators” The MD should be part of the on-air process for introducing new music – popping in at various times when there’s an important new song: not just a superstar release but a heartstrings song or a different sounding song that needs to be staged properly anyway.
Part of letting the MD function as a curator is letting listeners see that there’s actually a process taking place on their behalf. Three years ago, we suggested making the playlist process transparent on the air or on the Website – having a blog that talks about why a station is playing a song, for instance. But it’s also letting listeners know when the station went and found another cut off an album, or a song that wasn’t yet being promoted to it. (For that to work, of course, stations would actually have to start doing that again on a larger scale.)
Stations should also use listeners as curators. If the 17-year-old who cares enough to complain that a station isn’t playing his or her favorite band still exists, that person should be put-to-work helping stage their new song for listeners when it finally does hit the air.
An Urban or Top 40 station’s mixers are curators, too. The new music they bring to a station (usually despite a PD’s best efforts) often plays for 73 seconds, barely gets identified, and is often heard and forgotten before making it in to regular programming. Despite this, mix shows remain such an important part of so many stations; that’s clearly another vote for the DJ as curator, and one that stations could much better utilize.
No matter who introduces it, there’s the overarching need to make sure that when listeners do discover great new music through radio that there are vivid memories created. “This is for everybody who’s going through a problem in their relationship now,” or “I want you to look around you and remember where you were the first time you heard this song” is still potentially very powerful. Hearing a song for the first time on “Grey’s Anatomy,” for instance, comes with its own visual. But tagging new music is a function that many programmers have been willing to relinquish to a produced sweeper, or to a display on the Website and streaming media player.
Even if these were mere suggestions for more effectively staging new music, that would still be something radio could stand to do a better job at. As it happens, there is something larger at stake, and programmers shouldn’t be lulled into any false sense of security if radio’s fragment of the music discovery market is still larger than anybody else’s. The job here isn’t just to be acknowledged for playing new music, it’s to be actively appreciated for finding it. In that, radio has to deal with being taken for granted by listeners, but also its own benign self-neglect.

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