Crazy But Able

A new radio format is becoming popular:

Boasting they’re “like an iPod on shuffle,” the new stations typically dump their disc jockeys in favor of huge song playlists that mimic a well-stocked portable music player.

The Jack format, which is already spawning imitators, could be a key to FM’s survival as an alternative to satellite radio, internet radio and MP3 players.

My thoughts:

We were specifically banned from doing this when I was a DJ at my college radio station. “You have to have a unifying theme and cannot switch formats from song to song,” they said, implying it was a huge FCC offense, WMTU would lose their license, frogs would rain from the sky, etc. Given that my show was on early Sunday mornings, I probably could have gotten away with anything I wanted, as the students in charge of radio programming were still in bed nursing their hangovers that early in the A.M. Also, it bothered me that WMTU switched formats every few hours (the guy before me did classic rock†, I did jazz some shows and blues others, the folks after me played some random crap I hated, I don’t remember what exactly, etc) yet we were dicouraged from switching formats in our own radio shows. (My old housemate Mike Bedy characterized WMTU’s shifting formats perfectly: “It’s like playing radio roulette. Only with five bullets in the gun instead of 1.”)

Here’s the big problem with Jack FM. I love listening to my music on shuffle. I like every song that comes up! I also like listening to my friends’ music on shuffle, even when they play a bunch of stuff from genres I don’t like, because I know that my friends have good taste. But your music on shuffle sucks. I only tend to like it to the extent that you play songs that I already like, or are similar to ones I already like.

Listen carefully radio station operators: if you want to increase your audience, the most important thing to understand is the concept of venn diagrams.

For argument’s sake, we’ll say that your radio station is WXMPL, it plays classic rock, the best of the 60’s and 70’s. You’re considering switching to this new Jack format that everyone is talking about, because there might be big money in it, but you just aren’t sure. Don’t do it! Here’s why:

Get out a piece of paper. Now draw a big circle. That’s the music you play. Listeners and potential listeners have musical tastes that are like circles intersecting with your circle. Let’s look at three typical listeners (and potential listeners):

Alice:

This is Alice. She likes punk and emo. Nothing you say or do short of switching formats to punk and emo will get her to listen to and like your station. Accept it and move on.

Bob:

Bob is a die-hard classic rock fan. He watches Nascar on the weekends and spends much of his free time working on fixing up his 1971 Dodge Charger in the garage while blasting WXMPL. He also likes country, that’s that chunk of his circle that’s not in your playlist. Every classic rock station needs more of these guys. This is your base. You can’t get too weird or else you alienate them.

Carol:

Carol just turned 22 years old last month. That means she was in high school during the age of boy bands and Britney Spears. Being a sensible girl she recognized that all that stuff was crap and so she started digging through her parents’ record collection instead. She has also found quite a bit of interesting music on the internet and through recommendations from her friends. Most of the time when she is in her car she listens to her ipod, but she’ll occasionally flip on the radio just to see what’s on.

The problem with being a classic rock station is that nobody makes classic rock anymore. There’s a limited supply, and it becomes worth less and less as time goes on and increasing numbers of classic songs are turned into commercial jingles. This is why you’re losing listeners. Promotions won’t help in the long term. You need to bring more Carols into the fold, or at least get them to listen longer when they do tune in.

Your job is to find more music that fits in with what you already play. Try to find new music that most closely fits in with your format, and then mix it in. If you do it right, chances are that people who like things you already play will like the new stuff. And by expanding *your* circle, you can bring more Carols into the fold. In other words: just play a bigger variety of music, don’t repeat the same crap over and over again! (Which is what us radio fans have been begging for years).

And the variety can’t mean that you just shift the B songs around and keep playing all of the A songs (although shifting the B songs around is a good idea too.) No, cut back on the Stones and take a chance on The Black Keys.

But just throwing a bunch of crap on an ipod and setting it to shuffle won’t cut it. For one thing, look at those circles. Expanding too far outside a given genre means you’re going to start playing more stuff that Alice likes and less stuff that Bob likes, and it’s pretty much hit and miss with Carol. But this is exactly opposite from what you should be doing to build and keep market share!

Here’s my theory as to why this Jack stuff is getting popular. Have you heard of a concept called The Long Tail? The idea is “that products that are in low demand or have low sales volume can collectively make up a market share that rivals or exceeds the relatively few current bestsellers and blockbusters, if the store or distribution channel is large enough.” (to quote from the Wikipedia article).

Something interesting I noticed from hanging around on Audioscrobbler for a while is that people’s taste in music also tends to organize around a long tail distribution. Even with my obsessive musical listening habits, the top 10 bands I listen to according to audioscrobbler do not make up even a quarter of the music that I play.

The upshot of this is that a very diverse, random Jack station is going to tend to tickle everyone’s long tail. Nobody gets their long tail tickled from FM radio these days, so this is something relatively new and exciting.

I used to listen to Radio Paradise, a listener supported online radio station that is basically the same format as Jack FM. It was really new and exciting at first, after all, I was listening to radio on the internet! It’s the internet, of course it will be good! I was always writing down songs that I heard that I wanted to hear more of. But after a while, I realized that I really only liked about 20 percent of what they played. The other 80 percent I was either indifferent to or I hated. 20 percent? That’s not a good average, in fact, it’s rather like playing radio roulette with 5 bullets in the gun instead of 1.

Another example: I suffered some humiliation a few months ago, as my mom introduced me to some really, really good music she heard on “that new radio station” that I had never heard of. So I enthusiastically listened to 89.3 The Current here in Minneapolis for about a week. Their format is a whole mess of quirky, non-mainstream music on shuffle steriods. After about a week I realized that I was indifferent to about 75 percent of what they played, 10 percent was good, 5 percent ruled, and 10 percent was so bad it was, quite frankly, enraging. I quickly realized that I can get all of the benefits of The Current by letting my mom (and other friends who like the format) listen to it and recommend albums to me. (Although this benefit comes at the (not inconsiderable!) cost of realizing that my mother is finding out about cool music way before I am.)

So while this Jack FM thing is popular now, I predict it won’t last. In an effort to please everyone and keep tickling those tails, radio stations will keep cramming more and more weird songs into their playlists. Number of unique songs that a radio station plays in a given week will become very important as an advertising metric.

But even my music on shuffle is distracting and annoying when it spans genres too much. As much as I love Bach, James Taylor, and Eminem, I don’t really like them all smashed together. I never put all my music on shuffle at once because it’s just too weird. But I do have a playlist that contains all of my favorite songs, ever, and it’s pretty diverse. Country, blues, folk, German techno polka-pop, you name it. Shuffling my playlist of favorite songs is a big win, despite the genre skipping, because all of the songs have a unified theme. Unfortunately, my playlist of favorite songs doesn’t scale.

So what should radio stations do? Take a look at this picture. That red chunk is your average radio station. I think that what radio stations should do is keep their normal genre intact, but chop off a portion of that top red chunk, and then graft an equivalent length of long tail onto their short little stubby tail. Maybe reserve a modest sized chunk of time (maybe 2-3 songs a day) that rotates through the *entire* long tail of their genre. Then, bring back the DJs! I want local content and news, dammit. Local content and news is the only way broadcast stations will survive once satellite radio becomes really popular.

Here’s a good rule of thumb: if someone can replace your entire business with an ipod and a radio transmitter, then you probably don’t have a good business.

†: I don’t remember the guy’s name, but he gave me the best piece of advice on how to be a solo d.j. without anyone else in the booth. Find a song or a couple of songs on the same CD that last for at least 13 or 14 minutes. Hold that song or songs in reserve for when you need it, because if you put it on, you’ll have time to run to the bathroom if you need to. Technically against the rules but it saved my butt a couple of times. Theoretically one could bring in a gallon jug and pee into that, but WMTU had a webcam in the DJ booth, so that was right out.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 6th, 2005 at 1:38 pm and is filed under general foofiness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.