I first wrote about my scorn for call-out research in a 1979 article for Radio & Records, then the industry’s primary weekly trade sheet. Even as it went to print, I knew my points wouldn’t count for much. There is just too much comfort in a stack of numbers next to a song list. Looking for something else this morning, I happened across this three-page letter to Lon Helton, the long-time editor of the Country column in R&R (Anti-CallOut Article 17-Jan-2000). This was the last thing I wrote on the subject. Call-out is still around, of course, and it is still more for support than illumination.
Lon didn’t print this one; at three pages it was way too long and it was just me to him. Plus, research companies bought a lot of ad space in R&R so it wouldn’t be smart business to run a column saying this very profitable ‘product’ was all crap. Reading it again this morning, I don’t recall what it was that set me off that time. But I do know that mass-consolidation was in full swing by 2000 and unqualified people were being installed as Format Chiefs and enforcing Group Playlists. There were many instances of the “best” PD in an acquired market being given additional duties overseeing all of the company’s other stations in his market. Listen, you can’t develop and maintain a great radio station without giving it your full attention, all the time. Put another way: You can’t have two great marriages going at the same time. I saw my beloved Country format was being trashed by people who may have been fine CHR or A/C or even Classic Rock program directors, but Country had never been their format-of-choice. They didn’t much like Country music so the fallback, the ‘safe’ thing to do was to select and format songs based on research numbers. If it all goes south, you could say to the bosses: “well, it ain’t because we weren’t playing the Right songs!”
I had a problem with call-out research from the git-go. It came into wide use in the middle 70’s. You’d edit the hooks of 20 or 30 songs, random dial and find a person in your targeted age group. You’d play the song snips for them one by one and ask three questions. 1) Are you familiar with the song? 2) How do you rate the song on a scale of 1 to 7, one being the lowest and seven being the highest? 3) Would you like to hear it on the radio more often or less often? There were variations on the question phrasing but what radio program directors wanted to know if the song was familiar, to get some relative measurement of the song’s popularity and to learn when people were getting tired of hearing it. All that’s well and good and aspirational, but then you’ve heard the phrase “garbage in, garbage out”. The sample was forever and always too small. And/or the interviewers cheated. It’s a lousy job doing telephone solicitation. You’re hired to do it in a four-hour stretch. You have to complete four sample per hour, sixteen in the shift. Each interview takes ten minutes, and first you have to random-dial ten or twenty calls to find an 18-34 year-old who listens to your format. Going into the final hour of your shift, you find you are six short of quota, so you fake a few pages. The sample size is already tiny, so ask some statistician what the bogus data does to the reliability of the numbers that emerge.
