XTRA AM - HITTING THE TARGET - Playlists and Audience Research

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HITTING THE TARGET AT XTRA AM

Ever wondered how a commercial radio station plans its playlist or wondered why a particular commercial station's playlist seems to be so very limited in choice? Well this article provides an insight into the thinking behind how commerical stations choose the limited number of records that appear on their playlist. This example is for 'classic hits' station XTRA AM from an article by the IBA.

HOW CAN YOU IDENTIFY THE MUSICAL TASTES OF A SPECIFIC AGE GROUP?

In 1989 Phil Riley suggested one practical approach:

NEW commercial radio stations are springing up all around us with the introduction of incremental independent local stations and the growth of split frequency services. Many, such as XTRA AM, broadcasting across Warwickshire and the West Midlands, are aiming to target one particular section of the listening public by using specific types of music to appeal to their chosen demographic group.

But if music is the right way of reaching a particular audience, how do you know that people within your planned target group share musical tastes to such an extent that you can appeal to them with a specific mix of music, and how do you discover what that mixture is?

Certainly, in the case of XTRA-AM, our analysis of JICRAR (joint Industry Committee Radio Audience Research) and our own research suggested the 35-54 age group as the most appropriate. Accordingly, the first stage in developing a coherent music policy was to identify the musical tastes of this group.

Our first approach was a standard field survey questionnaire, in which we simply asked people between 35 and 54 to define the type of music they wanted to hear on any new station. The popular answers included 'Golden Oldies', 'Easy Listening', `60s music', 'Middle of the Road', 'Light Classical', and even 'Country'. Hardly the basis for drawing up a coherent playlist, especially when the definition of these musical types is open to such different interpretations. What constitutes a 'Golden Oldie'? Is it 'All Along the Watchtower' or 'Please Please Me'? In short, the questionnaire approach threw up more problems than it solved.

The idea behind stage two was to try to answer some of these questions with indepth song, specific research using auditorium testing. This involved inviting a representative cross-section of 35- to 54 year-olds into the Grand Hotel in Birmingham and playing them 'hooks' from 250 records which we felt accurately represented these popular genres of music, and analysing their responses.

The results were more enlightening. 'Easy Listening' meant the Carpenters but not Perry Como, 'Golden Oldies' meant 'Waterloo Sunset' by The Kinks but not their noisier 'All Day and All of the Night'. Detailed analysis showed that there was a specific type of music which was popular softer, more melodic, familiar classic pop music, with a bias towards the '60s and '70s. Even so, the feel of the music was more important than the year of release.

This first stage of auditorium testing raised an issue alluded to earlier. Standard audience research defines the 35-54 age group as one homogeneous mass of people, but do they share musical tastes? In terms of spending profiles and lifestyles there may be some justification for this grouping, but our music research threw up a specific problem with this 20 year age span. While the 50-plus group rated Sinatra and Mathis as their favourites, they did not like Eddie Cochran. The under-50s gave him positive scores, but those over 50 were negative.

This suggested that a station aiming at the 50-plus market needed to have a radically different playlist to one aiming at an under-50s audience. If you try to please both, you will end up pleasing neither. Our decision was to pull in, and focus on the 35-50 age group.

Having defined the general musical parameters of the station with our first test, the next stage in our research was to do a much more widespread set of auditorium testing to select a final station playlist. 1 drew up a list of 1,200 contenders, using the guidelines of melodic, familiar pop music developed from the first test.

Five hundred of these were, in my opinion, so obviously the right type of music that they were preselected for the playlist. The remaining 700 went through the same auditorium testing procedure. Five hundred of those passed, although some needed 'dayparting' (play restricted to certain times of the day), and 200 failed, leaving the station with a main playlist of 1,000 records. As for the records that press the buttons' so to speak, you cannot go wrong for the 35-50 age group with a steady diet of Beatles, Beach Boys, The Everly Brothers, Cliff Richard and Motown. The two most popular songs were 'If You Leave Me Now' by Chicago and 'Whiter Shade of Pale' by Procol Harum.

This kind of auditorium testing also helped us make decisions about dayparting', as some songs and artists were quite clearly popular with one sex but not the other. Englebert Humperdinck will work wonders in mid-mornings with a predominately female audience, but not in the afternoon when more men are listening!

It also proved that it is impossible to programme for a specific audience from the Guinness Book of British Hit Singles or by a slavish devotion to playing music from a particular era. Baby 1 Need Your Lovin' by The Four Tops was the 12th most popular record n our tests, with a 'turn up the volume' score of 53 %, yet it was never a British hit single. On the other hand, 41% of respondents said they would switch stations if they heard 'Paper Sun' by Traffic, despite it being a Top 5 hit from the '60s. 'Saving All My Love For You' by Whitney Houston was over four times more popular than 'For Your Love' by the Yardbirds. They were both Top 5 hits, but of course Whitney's was a hit in the '80s, and the Yardbirds was a hit in the '60s. Oldies just for the sake of oldies will not necessarily work, even if they were successful at the time of their release.*

Phil Riley was Programme Controller of XTRA-AM, the split frequency service launched in April 1989 and closed in 1998.

In late 2005 we spent a couple of months or so listening to MAGIC 105.4 in the late evenings as something tuneful to go to sleep to. Magic 105.4 is the London 'easy listening' station. At first it seemed quite pleasant, but after several weeks /months of listening it became quite apparent that their record library was extremely limited indeed. We began to notice that every single night the very SAME records kept appearing again and again and again. Magic's record library / playlist seemed more limited than even our own private record / CD collection!

Having studied the preceding article we now know the reason - it seems that a typical commercial radio station is just too scared to offer variety and may only playlist around 1000 narrowly targeted records. 1000 or so records seems incredibly limiting considering that a station will be on the air 24 hours a day 365 days a year. The same records being played over and over and over again will certainly become most boring! Indeed after a number of weeks of listening, MAGIG 105.4 became extremely tiresome indeed and we were forced to find musical entertainment elsewhere.

It is amazing to think that a major commercial station has a playlist of such meager proportions, where our own recorded music library must be well in excess of 10,000 tracks. We have therefore now converted well over 5000 tracks to mp3 files to enable them to be played out via our own 'radio station' from a computerized Media Player and into the Hi-Fi system. This is a much more satisfying musical experience than any commercial radio station we have recently heard.

BBC Radio Two is probably the best bet for the widest variety of different and un-repetitive music. Radio Two even guarantees that you won't hear the same song twice. Thank goodness for BBC Radio Two is what we say!

Oh - if you are bored with repetitive commercial radio, then you can find Radio Two between 88.0 and 91.1 FM and also on DAB Digital Radio in most places. Give it a go!

The Xtra AM presentation team, left to right:
Adrian Stewart, Dave Jamieson, Les Ross, Ted Elliott, Annie Othen, Phil Brice, Noddy Holder and Dave Hickman.

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LINKS:
Capital Gold Classic Gold 95.6 BBC Radio WM

Thanks to Alan Nicklin of TELFORD FM for providing some points of detail regarding Midlands Radio and Beacon Radio

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