By Bill Conway
KOIT, San Francisco
Program Director, 1997-2011
SAN DIEGO — The Duane Doobie column about “Golden Ears” published Monday (2/3) was terrific and I admit that in all my years as a PD, I never had “golden ears.” Instead I always had people around me who loved music, listened to a variety of styles and were always talking about it. Most DJs got into it radio either because they loved music or they wanted to be a star. I knew I needed the music junkies to complement my strengths. It was a way to learn about new music and let listeners know more too.
In recent years I have been espousing a format that doesn’t depend on only one consultant or one god-like national PD but used the music junkies and cutting edge technology to get involve the audience to reignite the role of radio in music discovery.
The All New Music Crowd Sourced Radio format. (Not a catchy name but I’m sure we can come up with one)
To keep it new, no song stays on the list for more than eight weeks.
It could handle 10-15 new adds a week.
The large air staff of music junkies will have access to everything, label releases, local non-label submissions, what we used to call album tracks and any song they can find anywhere.
The staff should all be young music junkies. With two live DJs per six-hour shift, the ideal staff would be eight full-time and eight part-timers. Weekly music meetings could be done on a go-to-meeting type service.
On air every hour will be half totally new songs alternating with most popular newer songs.
For the first two weeks, a totally new song is added it will be manually scheduled and after each play the DJ announces when it will play again. “It will play again at 2:45 pm.” This information will also be available on line. Using a service like LDR a listener could use social media to alert others to listen to a favorite new song at its next spin. The DJs can also comment about the new material.
The other cuts each hour, every other track, are the most popular songs determined in real time by social media interaction. I have talked to Daniel Anstandig and believe that LDR can compile data from Facebook, Twitter, texting, email, even the old fashioned request line and any other social media.
So the two-person on air team is scheduling the most popular songs one hour at a time. While “Mike” is on one hour, “Suzy” is scheduling the next hour when she goes live and “Mike” schedules the following hour. They can still interact with each other on air but talk should always be about music. Six-hour shifts yields the eight full-timers. Saturday and Sunday are where we have the eight part-timers.
Online streaming expands the sample base of music fans listening.
Data from this format could be of service to other stations in selecting their weekly adds.
The music industry would have to love this exposition of new product as well as give them a feel for what is trending. Local and unsigned artists could submit as well. While I consider this a top 40 concept, it could work in many current music genres.
By keeping this station a new music only format, it provides feeder data to the more traditional formats.
This concept also will do wonders for a station’s digital strategy and isn’t that important.
I think it is a game changer. I think it brings the human factor back into the music discovery process using today’s cutting edge social media.
So why don’t we do it?
Bill Conway, who programmed leading music radio stations for more than 35 years is the former program director of AC-formatted KOIT, San Francisco where he was highly successful as a strong ratings-getter from 1997-2011. He has programmed seven #1 stations in six different markets and today serves as a consultant to select friends and companies in the industry. He can be emailed at Bconway71@gmail.com.
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