Originally Posted by Steve Buck:
“Smooth London has average hours of 4 - less than 50 minutes per day even if you discount weekends. Radio listening tends to be habitual, so most listeners listen to the same daypart and probably even the same hour of output every day.
I'm basing this on London's figures because I believe Parky's strategy will be to aggressively build listening in London at the expense of Magic. But even if you look at the Smooths with the best hours, the "average listener" hears no more than an hour and 20 minutes of the station per day.
A music scheduler will move songs through hours and dayparts, so it will be perhaps 3 days before a song returns to the same daypart and probably much longer until it returns to the same hour. There will also be "Yesterday" and "Prior Day" separation that prevents a song repeating in a window of, say, two hours for 2-3 days. So how on earth will the "average listener" hear the same song 5 or more times a week?
Does anyone posting on here actually have even a basic grasp of how people listen to the radio or how music scheduling works? In a crowded market like London or Birmingham with plenty of other stations playing broadly popular songs, how do you propose you would build audience rotating 10,000 songs of which 95% are favourites of perhaps less than 2% of the audience? "Ooh, I must listen to that station that plays all those mediocre songs I've never heard of whilst driving home from work!". Great business model.
And, while I'm ranting, why do DS posters all assume that because one song by a particular artist is popular, it is the law that you must play that artist's entire back catalogue. Normal people don't have this anal, completist appreciation of music. They like a song or they don't.”
A few things to answer this "rant".
I listen to about what you said the average listener does each day, around 80 minutes or so. I also listen at a reasonably similar time frame. The fact is that I have heard the same song within the average listener confines approximately 4 or 5 times within 7 to 10 days. More than one song infact.
You asked if anyone listening and writing on here actually has any idea about how music scheduling works. Why should we? We're listeners, not controllers.
There are thousands of very well know popular hit songs, not just a few hundred! Not sure where the mediocity and unknown argument comes from.
Artists such as Elton have had countless hits that are instantly recognisable. They play 3 or 4 of his, but it is fair to assume that a large swathe of his back catalogue is popular and should feature on Smooth. A good example is Blue Eyes which is perfect for Smooth but never heard.
Which brings me to something ironic in its way. Is Cliff Richard banned from Smooth like elsewhere? Not heard him at all, yet he has plenty of popular hits worth playing on Smooth that the target audience would want to hear, from his mid 70's to mid 80's period especially.
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