The Best of FTC 2010

The disconnect is with the audience, not the music!

I have read everything Sean Ross has written in the many years he has been at the forefront of trade journal communications. In his recent ROSS ON RADIO on the popular RADIO-INFO site, he recently wrote about a disconnect with morning shows and music, then all day parts and music. My personal belief in Country Music Radio, there is too much of a music connection. I have always felt the talent talk about mundane music information way too much. I have never been a fan of the morning show focusing on longer than T&A breaks as part of their back sells in mornings. Long music breaks are a lazy way for CMR morning shows to get through a break. 



Most poor CMR morning shows play music, talk about it and read liners for remotes they are doing and promotions and call it content. There needs to be a mid-ground between over the top music breaks and not doing them at all. My favorite pet peeve (oxy moron) which I am: "Here's the latest from" (some artist that has never had a song out until this one). 

Sean really was talking about contemporary radio and not CMR in his article. Top-40 rarely plugs songs and artists. I guess they think it's cool to play music and not tell you who sang them. In our format, the dependence on title and artist, music information and the premise of a COUNTRY WEEKLY magazine in some breaks is too much. Our disconnect is with the audience. We play music that is 18-34 geared today for a 25-54 audience. We have a format that releases and plays more new music than any other format, other than Top-40. Sean says this in his article:

"So much of music radio’s future is now hinging on some variant of “music plus content,” whether it’s “hits plus companionship” or “hits plus DJ endorsement/curation.” If a morning show treats a station’s music as if it’s something that just happened to be playing while they were in the break room, it waives all of these opportunities. And it deprives them of one more thing to talk about, just in case “how to tell if your boyfriend is cheating” doesn’t always trump every other potential topic."