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1. Great On-Air Talent
- Employ the best morning show talent you can afford
- Develop the real characters within your talent and some fun comedy characters
- Make sure you have talent on your station that shapes public opinion
2. Imaginative Music Programming
- Keep the music fresh and the listeners interested with special ‘themed weekends’
- Sprinkle the output with fun and engaging daily music features
- Highlight and reinforce your stations core sound / core artists with exclusive previews and premieres
3. Creative Promotions
- Run promotions that listeners want to get involved with and are interested in listening to… even if they don’t take part!
- Create promotions that your listeners want to tell their friends and family about
- Extend the promotion into other media and find suitable partners to maximise your impact
4. Listener Focused
- Closely define your target audience and be absolutely focused on delivering radio for them
- Get to know as much as possible about your target listeners. By truly understanding them, you can create the radio they want
- Care passionately about your listeners. Be your listener’s best friend!
5. Be Local
- Make your station an essential part of everyday life in your area. Deliver great local news and information. Being really local is immensely powerful
- Champion the area you broadcast to! Your station should be the Number 1 cheerleader for all the places it broadcasts to. Your station loves living there!
- Reflect local issues and concerns and even take on local causes being the focal point of any campaigning
6. Outstanding Benchmarks
- Create benchmarks that listeners want to come back to you for time and time again. Make unmissable radio!
- Develop some specific ‘listener appointments’ at key times across different dayparts
- Become famous for a specific benchmark, so that listeners say “I love that station, because they do… insert your own brilliant benchmark here!”
7. Be Consistent
- We live in a complicated and unpredictable world. Give listeners what they want and expect from your radio station, and they’ll trust and rely on you
- Resist the temptation to change things for the sake of change
- Brand building takes time. Be patient!
8. Be Surprising
- Consistency doesn’t have to be boring! Don’t give listeners the chance to get bored with your station or allow them to feel you are mundane
- Regularly do something different or give familiar content a little ‘spike’ or twist
- Occasionally, you should do something that makes your listeners turn up the radio to make sure they heard it correctly!
9. Be Unique
- The world is full of ‘sound-a-like’ radio stations. Make yours stand out from the crowd
- Encourage unique presenters that having something to say. Your talent should differentiate you every time
- Create radio that hasn’t been heard before in your market with new shows, features and promotions
10. Power of Emotion
- Radio is brilliant at conveying the full range of human emotions. Encourage your presenters to explore this on air. Don’t let them be boring!
- Allow listeners to show sadness or anger as well as happiness and joy
‘Contrast’ provides a far more interesting dynamic to your station. Use it and your station will stand out from the crowd
Source: http://www.nikgoodman.com/
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December 15, 2008
Arbitron has announced that it plans to expand the introduction of cell-phone-only sampling to 151 diary markets in Spring 2009 and to all markets (except Puerto Rico) by Fall 2009. The new schedule significantly accelerates the company’s previously announced plan to introduce cell-phone-only sampling to 50 diary markets in Spring 2009 and to a total of 125 diary markets in Fall 2009.
“This is a substantial enhancement in sample quality and it demonstrates our ongoing commitment to improve the diary service. The Radio Advisory Council, the Diary Market Owner/Operator Caucus and the Media Rating Council all supported the introduction of cell-phone-only sampling in diary markets,” said Pierre Bouvard, President of Sales and Marketing for Arbitron. “Arbitron has been a recognized leader in cell phone only research and we’re pleased that for the second time in three short months, we are able to speed up our plans for getting these households into our diary samples.”
Arbitron plans to use an address-based sample frame as the foundation of its cell-phone-only sample, while maintaining the random-digit-dial (RDD) sample frame for landline households. “The number of households that can be reached only by cell phone is growing rapidly and these households are more likely to include persons between the ages of 18 and 34. By including cell-phone-only homes in the sample frame we will be better able to improve young adult proportionality in diary markets,” said Owen Charlebois, President, Technology and Research & Development.
The acceleration of cell phone-only sampling to 151 markets in the spring assumes that the company is able to complete the development of software necessary to support the rollout as scheduled. If the company is not able to develop the software as expected, the planned acceleration of cell phone-only sampling could be delayed. Arbitron expects to confirm its plans for cell-phone-only sampling for the Spring 2009 survey by late February. After all metro markets have cell phone sampling, Arbitron expects to review options for expanding cell-phone-only sampling to the non-metro counties that are included in the RADAR, Nationwide and County Coverage reports.
A list of the 151 markets scheduled for cell-phone-only sampling in Spring 2009 can be found on Arbitron’s site: http://www.arbitron.com/home/cell_phone_markets_sp09.htm.
Source: http://fmqb.com
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LOS ANGELES, Nov. 30 — For the millions of Americans who listened to Top 40 radio last week, it was almost impossible to miss “Apologize,” the string-tinged elegy performed by the modern rock band OneRepublic and remixed by the eclectic producer Timbaland.
WIOQ-FM, a pop station in Philadelphia, played the song 123 times last week, letting as little as 50 minutes tick by between repeat spins. And this month, “Apologize” broke the record for the most plays of a song on the nation’s Top 40 stations in a single week since computerized tracking began in 1990. The song played more than 10,240 times in a week, reaching an estimated audience of more than 70 million listeners, according to Nielsen Broadcast Data Systems, an airplay monitoring service, and the chart-keepers at Radio & Records, a music trade magazine.
The song’s success is more than yet another sign of Timbaland’s prowess — it’s the third hit from his latest album, “Timbaland Presents Shock Value” (Interscope), a compilation of genre-bending collaborations with everyone from Elton John to Fall Out Boy.
It’s also a sign of how radio stations are responding to the competition for listeners as radio’s audience fragments and rival entertainment choices abound. While the overwhelming majority of Americans still tune into traditional broadcast radio each week, they are listening less. And they are increasingly drawn to the dizzying choices of music and other programming available on iPods and satellite and Internet radio.
But many pop radio programmers appear keen to repeat the biggest hits as much as — or more than — ever. “Apologize” surpassed a record that had been set only in July by Fergie’s “Big Girls Don’t Cry,” according to the data. Of the 10 songs that have notched the most plays in one week, 8 joined the list in the last three years. And the oldest of the 10, Avril Lavigne’s “Complicated,” dates only to 2002. (The all-time most-played song across all radio formats is Santana’s “Smooth,” with more than 1.1 million total plays since it was released in 1999.)
Tom Owens, the executive vice president of content for Clear Channel Communications, which is the nation’s largest owner of radio stations and a big influence in the Top 40 format, said that “Apologize” deserved such heavy airplay because it had received “off the charts” results in listener research testing, and added that the song is devoid of content that might prompt more conservative pop stations to limit its airplay. Mr. Owens also said that Radio & Records and tracking services are counting slightly more stations than they used to, making it easier for big songs to break the record.
Even so, executives at some individual stations say they are playing hits more heavily than they did even two years ago. That is not so much out of concern over digital competition as it is a desire to respond to listeners’ busy lives, said Kat Jensen, music director for KKMG-FM in Colorado Springs, which played “Apologize” 78 times last week. “There’s a very limited window. If they’re going to listen 15 minutes a day, you want to make sure they hear their favorite song in that 15 minutes. It’s really the fast-paced life style that we all live.”
Many stations are also trying to keep up with listeners — and trying to draw new ones — by integrating their over-the-air broadcasts with social networks on their Web sites and other online features. But that comes against a backdrop of an eroding audience. The amount of time people tune into radio during the course of a week has fallen by about 13 percent during the last decade, according to data from Arbitron, which measures ratings for the radio industry.
Some analysts say that responding to the decline by repeating the big hits even more will set broadcasters on a path to losing listeners.
“What most of these folks do is retreat to a more safe position, and in radio, the safer position is to play fewer songs more often,” said Mike Henry, chief executive of Paragon Media Strategies, a consulting firm in Denver. Mr. Henry, whose firm helped develop a wide-ranging radio format known as Jack FM in the United States three years ago, added that the increase in plays of songs reflected “a fear-based response. That will only take you so far.”
While, “there will always be people who are just fine taking what they’re given,” Mr. Henry said, more and more people will be enticed by “programming their own media.”
For now, however, radio is regarded as the most powerful promotional tool when it comes to exposing new music — even if the connection between popularity on the airwaves and popularity in record shops is not as direct as it once was. OneRepublic’s album, “Dreaming Out Loud” (Interscope), sold roughly 75,000 copies in its first week on sale, a solid if less than remarkable debut. But the “Apologize” remix, which is included as a hidden track on the album, brought in sales of more than 140,000 copies on digital services like iTunes for the week that ended Nov. 25, for a total of almost 1.6 million copies of the song.
Not a bad comeback for OneRepublic, which was formed by high school friends in Colorado Springs and suffered through a near-miss with fame — including losing its previous record deal with Columbia Records — before the band’s popularity on MySpace helped it land a new contract with Timbaland’s imprint, Mosley Music Group, which is distributed through Interscope. “Even though radio does seem like it’s kind of an archaic behemoth, in terms of actually being able to pay the bills, it’s still one of the best ways,” said Greg Wells, the longtime producer who oversaw “Dreaming Out Loud.” “I’m aware of how fickle this kind of attention can be. Songs like that are rare for anybody.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/01/arts/music/01one.html?_r=3
http://www.q102.com/main.html
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Persbericht van www.radioszene.de
Seit Anfang Dezember verstärkt radio NRW seine Musikreaktion durch Thijs Bakker. Als Inhouse-Consultant ist der 41-Jährige vor allem für die Musik-Strategieplanung zuständig und arbeitet in dieser Funktion eng mit dem Musikchef Thorsten Sutter zusammen, der Anfang November 2008 die Leitung der Abteilung übernommen hat.
„Thijs Bakker verfügt neben umfangreichem Expertenwissen über den deutschen auch über Erfahrung im internationalen Radiomarkt. Wir freuen uns, mit ihm einen ausgewiesenen Fachmann im Bereich der Musikstrategie für radio NRW gewinnen zu können“, so Elke Schneiderbanger, Geschäftsführerin und Programmdirektorin von radio NRW.
„Ich bin sehr gespannt auf die Aufgabe, die bei radio NRW auf mich wartet. Hier in Nordrhein-Westfalen gibt es den größten Radiomarkt Deutschlands. Als jemand, der landesweite Privatradiosender sehr gut kennt, freue ich mich besonders auf die Herausforderungen, die radio NRW und das NRW-Lokalfunksystem mit seinen 45 Lokalradios mir bieten“, so Thijs Bakker.
Von 2002 bis 2004 war der gebürtige Niederländer als Musik Direktor für Sky Radio in Dänemark, den Niederlanden und Deutschland tätig. Bis 2008 zeichnete er dann als Musikchef für den hessischen Privatsender Hit Radio FFH verantwortlich. Zuletzt arbeitete Thijs Bakker als Berater für das australische Research- und Beratungsunternehmen BP&R.
