Sunday, October 05, 2008

Blame it on the Razorbacks

Yesterday was an all time low as far as hits on this blog. Weekends are always slow but yesterday was the pits. I take full responsibility for not finding some provocative topics. There is just so much you can write about the KATV tower collapse and raccoons. Those two topics were responsible for more hits on this blog that anything else.

I think a topic well worth discussing again on this blog would be the playlist for KAAY. I guess KAAY covered 3 generations. The playlists and the programming reflected this. I find readers to this blog are from a wide age base. The Beaker Street influenced audience (which is right behind the KATV tower and raccoons)seem to have little interest in the top 40 side of KAAY. And the converse is probably true. Being involved with the programming side mostly, I find the differences in radio then and now are worth much study. I don't think I could live in a radio station environment where the playlist was determined by corporate or expensive music research. We had a music director who was responsible for determining the playlist. He used phone calls to the station, record sales and input from the jocks to determine the weekly playlist. Phone calls were a good guide for every jock.
The calls were mostly girls. If a guy called it was to request a song for a girl.
Anyone working the industry today? How is your music selected? Do you think it builds listners?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

A. J., while I'm not employed in the radio industry, I am in in a situation where a distant entity tries to control what goes on locally. They don't seem to understand that a LOCAL market, no matter if it's in Mobile, AL or St. Louis, MO, drives our business..."it" can't be driven by their think-tank in "The Ivory Tower". I believe that's the problem, and mistake, of consolidation and distant entities: they are only concerned with the bottom line they think they create, NOT what it could be if the local market was tapped and run as it should be!

So what, if a couple of songs were liked in Washington State, it doesn't mean they'd be well-liked in the South or in the Northeast! The secret is, give the customer what they WANT, not what you THINK they may want....Bud, Mobile, AL