Scenario

You have a great morning show that performs exceedingly well in the market.  The show places top 5, 18-34 and annihilates the competition in the super core demo of 25 -34 persons.  The rest of the station, the one that plays the music is close to tumbleweed mode.

Your station overall is ranked top 20 or so, 12+ and isn’t in the top 5 18-34 persons.

You just implemented the new AMT where you took out 21 titles out of the 200 or so you play and put in 22 titles that used to be in the mix until the AMT from last year told you to take them out.

You play two currents and one recurrent an hour and you’re still depending on Smells Like Team Spirit, Even Flow, What I Got and Machinehead to carry your efforts.  In effect you’re doing all the right things that make you a competent manager in your managers eyes.  Being competent in your managers eyes and not prevailing in your ratings objective is just like scoring impeccably in the station perceptual and then continuing to do poorly in the ratings. 

So here’s my question…  what’s the worst that could happen?

If you stopped depending so heavily on the past to construct your future.

If you went from 2 currents and 2 recurrents and hour to double that in both categories and depended less on the music from the last alternative music generation for your subsistence.

There are several stations I can think of that have been depending heavily on there AMTs for the majority of the sounds on their respective stations.  One station I know of has been living religiously on AMT fumes for years and getting the same lack luster results in the ratings.  How many years do you get bopped on the head with the heavy Arbitron rating stick before you lose enough blood and drop to your knees in pain? 

Again, like I always say… having an AMT to work from is great.  But it’s not going to gather an audience for you.  It only tells you who and what you are and what are the biggest hits. It doesn’t tell you what you strive to be in your community!  In the Alternative genre, success occurs through a solid station culture, creating a community listeners can gather around, having a station purpose larger that just your music, intriguing, endearing talent and a focused music position that matches all that other stuff I just wrote.

So again, what’s the worst that could happen if changed the station focus?  You could go down .1 12+ or maybe go down a rank or so 18-34 persons.  Neither which would be disastrous considering you already don’t qualify for a top 5 buy in the key demo.

But what could happen is that musically your station could become more relevant with the core demos, 18 -34 persons.  Your on-air staff could have a renewed focus and feeling of pertinent worth instead of trying to find a new way to make No Rain by Blind Melon sound interesting…which it isn’t.  Yes, there is something to be said about playing music that listeners can hum to.  My question is why would you lean on this premise long after the humming has stopped?

sd