Five years ago, CBS Radio’s WNEW (Blink 102.7) New York became one of programming’s most ambitious failures–a mix of Rhythmic Hot AC and celebrity news that lasted only six months and (seemingly) never gained traction. But in 2008, celebrity news is again an hourly feature on New York radio, Ryan Seacrest and Perez Hilton are in syndication (and celebrities themselves), and Toronto’s new Virgin Radio 999 is doing a Rhythmic Hot AC format with a heavy emphasis on entertainment. In “Blink And It’s Back,” Sean Ross looks at “How Entertainment News Took Over Music Radio.”
By Memorial Day weekend, it was already possible to isolate Katy Perry’s “I Kissed A Girl” and Kid Rock’s “All Summer Long” as the contenders for Summer Song of 2008. Going into Labor Day, it’s definitely “A Tight Race, But We Declare A Summer Song Winner.”
What are the worst testing songs in station music research? Some might guess that they’re the eternally polarizing songs that top the consumer press’ “worst songs of all time” articles. But the bottom rungs of a music test are just as often populated by critically respected “good music” or by perfectly harmless songs that were just forgotten by time. As stations head into their fall music research, find out “What’s At The Bottom Of The Music Test?”
Maybe the best way to look at the effect of KPLX (99.5 the Wolf) Dallas on Country radio is to look at what the format was when it debuted 10 years ago. Country had become a 35-to-54 format with little for men or younger listeners, tempo was scarce, music was increasingly geared for AC crossover, and only a few acts could sell records to listeners of all ages. For the next five years, the station would become one of the best examples of what could happen when a radio station fired on all cylinders.
So far, 2008 has been a great year for artists on the rebound – Ray J., Buckcherry, Jesse McCartney, New Kids on the Block, and even Coldplay and Madonna. Then there’s Kid Rock, now making a run at Cher’s record for sheer number of comebacks. That’s a significant change from five years ago when a misstep at Mainstream Top 40 or R&B could send an artist to Hot AC and Urban AC with slim chances for a return. In this week’s Ross On Radio, Sean Ross looks at all the changes in the industry that explain “Why 2008 Is the Year of the Comeback.”
For many years, Oldies and Classic Rock radio’s strength was their relatively glacial change. Now Oldies has become “Classic Hits,” the age and era focus continues to shift, and Motley Crue on Classic Rock is more than a lyric. In this presentation, first unveiled June 26 at Conclave, Edison Media Research VP of Programming Sean […]
Nearly eighteen months ago, Edison Media Research VP Sean Ross took a listen to five Atlanta radio stations to see how they were handling the stopsets in their Web streams. While stations were starting to sell some local spots, Web-sets were still a morass of hard-sell PSAs, bad fill music, and, often, silence. This week in Ross On Radio, we listen to those stations again and hear that the experience has gotten better, but that there’s still no avoiding McGruff, the Crime Dog, a familiar figure to streamies everywhere. Read Tackling The Streaming Stopset Problem: 18 Months Later.
The Country success of Bon Jovi’s “Who Says You Can’t Go Home” was supposed to start open the floodgates for Classic Rock artists at Country radio. But these days, it is Pop artists from the not-too-distant past [?] who are making the transition to Country radio. In this week’s Ross On Radio, Edison Media Research VP Sean Ross looks at what it means for both Country and pop radio if artists like Jewel, Jessica Simpson, and Darius Rucker are now Country artists in “Country’s Surprise Connection: The Pop Artists of the ’90s.”
Every year, just before Memorial Day weekend, Edison Media Research’s Sean Ross handicaps the candidates for the defining song of the upcoming summer. This year, the labels have teed up their uptempo warm-weather-flavored songs more obviously than ever, and are looking to summer to facilitate a comeback or two. We’re “Handicapping The Summer Song of 2008” in this week’s Ross On Radio.
One of the interesting trends to emerge from “American Idol” in recent seasons — proven again this week by David Cook’s version of “Always Be My Baby” — is that audiences are surprisingly open to hearing songs they know creatively reinterpreted, whether it was Blake Lewis’ “You Give Love A Bad Name” last season, or […]
In recent years, the consumer press notion that “tight over-researched playlists have led to radio’s declining listenership” has become so widely repeated that nobody feels the need to verify or even scrutinize it anymore. But any recent declines in listening have if anything coincided with a decline in radio research. In this week’s Ross on Radio, Edison Media Research VP of music and programming Sean Ross makes the sure-to-be-controversial assertion that research has made many stations more, not less, adventurous. Even radio’s critics, he asserts, would like radio more if stations were doing more research. Read Is Radio Suffering From Too Little Research?
Throughout the debate on the correct role of imaging in 2008, we’ve heard from supporters of the new presentational austerity that they personally love the heritage foreground stations but that those stations have no relevance to today’s listeners. But today’s stripped down stations aren’t exactly new either, or a proven cure, as anybody who lived through Top 40’s late ’70s/early ’80s doldrums can attest. Edison Media Research VP Sean Ross looks at how they failed to save one legendary station in “The Last Days of CKLW: Why the New Austerity Isn’t New.”
