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Country Radio and Hispanics: Looking Beyond The Misperceptions

The notion of a Hispanic audience for Country radio isn’t a random fancy. Rather, it’s an attempt to reactivate a coalition that has existed, in some form, since the late ’70s. As a companion piece to Edison Media Research’s recently released Hispanic/Country Report (link), Edison’s Sean Ross takes on some of the most oft-stated objections to any sort of outreach.

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Broadcasters Try To Tackle The Webstream’s Stopset Problems

For the last several years, broadcasters have gone to great lengths to make their stopsets more listenable, unless, of course, you’re listening on-line, where stopsets have been a morass of instrumental fill music, endlessly repeating promos, and lurid hard-sell PSAs. Recently, however, the care and feeding of “Web-sets” has gotten a little better. Edison Media Research’s Sean Ross recently spent a day listening to one market to hear how the various group owners were dealing with their stopsets on-line. The results are in this week’s Ross On Radio: Broadcasters Try To Tackle The Webstream’s Stopset Problems.

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What Would Radio For Teens Sound Like?First Listen: BoomBoxBaby.ca

What would Top 40 sound like if its only mission were to reach teens? That’s not a question that most programmers are eager to answer-especially when so much of the format’s current music is mother/daughter-friendly. But with younger listening an overarching issue for so many broadcasters these days, Corus Radio’s Canadian Internet station BoomBoxBaby.ca is an interesting vision of what a youth lifestyle station might sound like. Read about it in this week’s Ross On Radio.

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Winning Vs. Losing: It’s The People . . . But It’s More

What separates winning stations from losing stations? The answer you’re supposed to give-“it’s the people”-seems like a no-brainer. But even the right people almost always have a hard time in certain market situations. In this week’s Ross On Radio, Edison VP of music and programming Sean Ross modifies conventional wisdom a little. Maybe the difference between winning and losing stations is how the people involved handle the opportunity the market gives them.

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The Formats That Make Too Much Sense To Work (Until Now)Part II: The Rap/Rock Hybrid

In the late ’90s, when hip-hop began to usurp rock’s status as “the only music that matters,” even among white teens, programmers were forced to finally consider some sort of combination of rap and rock on the radio, particularly when hybrid acts like Limp Bizkit and Kid Rock became the defining flavor of Alternative radio. Nearly a decade later, rap rock seems like almost a quaint notion. But KMBY (X103.9) Monterey, Calif., is taking another swing at it, couching it in a young male-lifestyle approach that many predecessors had never really developed.

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Okay, So What Was The Summer Hit Of 2006?

You take your professional reputation in your hands when you try to predict which hit will be the song of the summer – something I did shortly before Memorial Day as a way of taking radio’s temperature, and that of Top 40 in particular. Now that the summer is officially over, it’s time to see how my predictions turned out. So, what was the song of the Summer?

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On the Starbucks Channel, Branded Entertainment, and “Quality Rock That Really Rocks”

For nearly two years, XM Satellite Radio’s channel 75, its joint venture with Starbucks’ Hear Music, has been giving us an advance listen to what the branded national channels of the future could sound like. In this week’s Ross On Radio, Edison Media Research’s Sean Ross takes a new listen to XM75-Hear Music, finding it well assembled and surprisingly low-key from a branding standpoint. Ross also asks why nobody is doing a more uptempo version of Starbuck’s eclectic but mellow mix. Is there room for “Quality Rock That Really Rocks?” More thoughts in this week’s Ross On Radio.

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