“Radio has to innovate to remain relevant as a source of music discovery.” That’s a line from a well done research report that came across my desk this summer titled “Paradigm Shift: Why Radio Must Adapt to the Rise of Digital”. Coming from where I come from, there’s a whole bunch of directions I could … Read more
> For a country station, how many currents would you rotate? 30 to 35, depending on the flow of product. (i hate calling records ‘product’) > For a country station, how many recurrents would you rotate and how far back on those recurrents would you go? > ……either 19, if i’m scheduling 1 an hour … Read more
A station owner recently asked for and received my Country library playlists; Recurrent, Gold, Classics and Legends. He’d had some uneasiness about many of the songs he was hearing on his station; some of them just didn’t seem ‘right’. As he began updating and adjusting the library and was immediately pleased with the result, he … Read more
One of the many mistakes corporate radio has made is the elimination of the live, human element from much of their broadcast day. And no, happy-talk voice-tracking is not a proper substitute. Most announcers lose something when they are voice tracking; the immediacy is gone, they’re talking “professionally” to a microphone rather than to their … Read more
Here’s a Nielsen graph tracking Country listening trends. Looks like BroCountry peaked in 2014. But, it didn’t do much for the Country’s historical prime demo, 25-54. This suggests to me the mix I’ve put together for the New Country Tradition format on target for today’s marketplace.
In the early years of Top 40 Radio, song rotations and music formatting were way different than what we know today. It was common for a station to play the #1 song of the week every hour. WABC in New York, the biggest Rock ‘n Roll station in the whole wide world at the time … Read more
Following my post about playing Goldfinger a few minutes after the Bond movie let out so’s some folks would hear it on the way home and, we hoped, be getting an extra little shot of feel-good juice from our station. Here’s how such a thing can be done today. Take The Sopranos. Season Five, in … Read more
Before I started my 7 to 10:30 pm airshift one Saturday night in early ’65, my program director, the guy who’d hired me told me to play “Goldfinger” by Shirley Bassey at a specific time that evening. This was a surprise because he was the same guy who’d already schooled me that successful radio stations … Read more
My hand-tooled Country music formatting and scheduling service is now available for broadcast stations in the U. S. Working with The Talent Farm syndication service, I provide my personally curated hour-by-hour music schedule to subscribing stations. The daily playlist is delivered directly into the station’s playout/automation using the services of Syncronicity. The full library is … Read more
Advertising copywriters, Please. The ten syllables in your ad copy are no longer relevant. “da bul you, da bul you, da bul you dot” …is pointless now. we don’t have to type it in to get anywhere anymore. Like for this site. No need to type www.stevewarren.net, just stevewarren.net gets you here. And program directors … Read more