Unfamiliarity=Tuneout. At last weeks NAB, Arbitron presented statistics from its study using People Meter in Philadelphia. It revealed something that we experienced programming veterans have known for years. Unfamiliar music is a tune out. Case in point; on Top 40 Q102, Outkast's "Hey Ya", in its first few weeks of exposure blew off 26% of Q102's cume. Should Q102 have not played this song? Of course they should have, it became the biggest hit of the year. What it brings to light is how important are the following

1) Do not play a lot of unfamiliar music in an hour

2) Rotate new songs in a fast rotation so they become familiar and so you get a quick read on what the hits are

3) You need pretesting on new music and Online research to identify the hits (callout is too SLOW) so you don't waste time on STIFFS

The Danger of Playing A lot of Unfamiliar music Zapoleon Media Strategies clients know our world famous spoke system. Spokes are songs that have GREAT appeal to core and cume, and are strategically placed at least every other song throughout the hour. A majority of your songs per hour should be SPOKES to create killer appeal for the station. The remaining songs should be good testers with strong appeal to both core and cume. This is not possible with unfamiliar music. As we've seen in the case above, these are big tuneouts for your cume. 90% of your music should be very close to 90% familiar.

Here's the scary thing. Imagine your radio station has a big playlist and takes a lot of chances on unfamiliar music. If true, then a new song you play is more likely to be a STIFF and a tuneout. What's even worse, your radio station may have a bad case of rawhide as songs are moved up & out of the system too quickly so that you have multiple positions in an hour that have high unfamiliarity. This is a clear and present danger of terrible TSL and eventually cume loss once the People Meter is in place.

The Proper Care and Feeding of New Music Every big hit is unfamiliar when it's first played at a radio station. If you are any form of contemporary format, you have to play new music. The key here is to spin them fast enough (3-4 hours for a Top 40, 4-5 for a Hot AC or Country station) so that they do become familiar to your audience.

How do you ID the hits While still important, good callout isn't enough any more. It represents the slower half of your audience. Is it the final determiner of whether a song is a hit? Yes, that and auditorium testing capture 90% of the hits EVENTUALLY. But eventually means up to 10 weeks of airplay, and most stations will not hold on to a song that long. Programmer's can't take a short cut either with Potential scores, or mean scores when a song is unfamiliar as indicators of whether a song will come through as a hit. Projecting scores based on just the people that know it isn't a real gauge. The more active half of your audience will never take a phone survey. You have the "slugs" in your phone callout, the people that have the time to sit and at home and take a phone call to do a survey. Is that what the majority of your audience does??? Are the slugs important? Of course. They are also unfortunately the same people that are home to receive a phone call to place an ARB People Meter or Diary. But they don't represent the active half, the leading edge, of your audience that has the most influence on the future of your radio station. No there's a better way to identify the FUTURE hits and not make MISTAKES playing the wrong new songs.

THE ABC Method A) Pretesting your music- Promosquad HitPredictor B) Online Callout Research C) Traditional Phone Callout

A) Pretesting - 0 Week (find the hits before you play them) Promosquad HitPredictor (Hit results in Billboard/Monitor) successfully helped record labels find big hits like "Beautiful" by Christina Aguilera, "Miss Independent" by Kelly Clarkson and Matchbox 20's "Unwell", early. This service which has a .700 batting average in picking the hits features the same weighted positive scoring that most callout companies use. This service is being expanded to local radio stations so they can get a fix on what their fans think of new music before they play it. Why make mistakes when you can get this incredible service too, today? (anyone interested contact me at GZapoleon@aol.com)

B) Online Callout Research - 1-6 weeks Several research companies like Pinnacle's Online Tracker offer online music research. The most dangerous time for a new song is during the critical first month of a song. Many hit songs have stations dropping them as programmers mistakenly try to use their callout on unfamiliar songs to determine if a song will be a hit. Callout should not be used this way. Pretesting or online research is a much more accurate way to ID the hits early. With a large healthy database, Online Research has a nearly 90% correlation in predicting the peak ranks for traditional callout research. It's the gauge of what the ACTIVE HALF of your audience wants.

C) Traditional Phone callout - 6-10 weeks Lets you know what the remaining half of your audience thinks. While traditional callout isn't the end all and be all tool it once was, I still recommend it as the final decision maker on majority of songs in rotation. However, to use this without using Online Research and Pretesting is to cast a blind eye to the active half of your audience. I recommend using both of these tools to help fill out rotations and in helping pick new songs to add to a radio station's playlist.

With ARB's new People Meter, use the A-B-C research method of identifying hits and making sure you have more hits per hour, and less tuneouts, to ensure better ratings.