More Clear Channel/Radio....

[John Macy]

LOS ANGELES, July 10 — Few executives better reflect the changes in the music
industry these days than Tom Poleman, program director for Z-100 (WHTZ-FM),
the top pop radio station in New York City and one of 1,200 stations owned
by the conglomerate Clear Channel Communications.

Mr. Poleman rarely plays his favorites. Instead, he spends each day
crunching numbers in his office in Jersey City, reviewing spreadsheets and
computer-generated data chronicling what listeners will want to hear.

The loss of even one rating percentage point, Mr. Poleman said, could cost
his station as much as $10 million a year. "I feel the pressure day to day,"
he said. "There is too much at stake."
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Long gone are the days when radio programmers simply played pop songs
requested by listeners or bet on a band discovered at a hometown club. As
the world of radio hardens into an industry dominated by three or four major
chains, the use of research is accelerating and has become far more
sophisticated, leading to mounting criticism that the quest for ratings is
homogenizing music radio and making it harder for a different sound to break
through.

Researchers rely mainly on telephone polls, playing eight-second sound bites
from songs, called hooks, to decide what is played. Recording executives
have taken to pretesting songs with listeners, in some cases rerecording
them to meet their critiques.

And a division of Clear Channel, the largest chain of radio stations, has
begun charging record labels as much as $20,000 a song to test unreleased
music on its nationwide network of programmers (information record labels
use to gauge a band's promise), altering what once had been largely informal
discussion about taste among colleagues.

The use of research is having a huge effect on the relationship between
record labels and radio stations. Blockbuster acts benefit. The star rapper
Eminem's "Without Me," for instance, has played on radio stations nationwide
more than 125,000 times since it made a debut more than a month ago, a
spectacular amount for that length of time.

"You could make the case that doing research is better than some program
director on the take, spinning discs," said Craig Marks, editor of Blender,
a music magazine based in New York. "But if a song does not test well it is
dead even before it hits the streets. The coldness of it all is a new
phenomenon. And bands think that is demoralizing."

Radio executives defend their research, saying that it creates the most
democratic form of programming, because it is a direct response to
listeners' tastes. But critics warn that the number of songs tested is
limited, making the outcome biased. "If your band is not among the 30 songs
a radio station tests each week, you effectively do not exist," said Titus
Levi, an assistant professor who studies the music business at the
University of Southern California. "If it's not on the menu you are not
going to order it. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy."

It could also explain why music sounds so similar across the country.
Country music stations, Mr. Marks of Blender said, are known for having the
most restrictive formats, dependent on big-name stars like Trisha Yearwood
and the Dixie Chicks. "I would think it has impacted culture," he said. That
is because programmers in different markets, particularly smaller ones,
often share the same data even though listeners can have markedly different
tastes.

Since the 1960's, independent promoters, paid by record labels to hawk their
music to radio stations, have influenced much of what is played, and at
times have offered disc jockeys cash and gifts despite laws making payola a
punishable crime. Polling was unsophisticated, and because ownership was
fractured, research was done locally and the results were not spread
nationwide.

That changed in 1996 when the federal government increased the number of
radio stations a single entity could own and the industry shifted almost
overnight. Five years after the ruling, in March 2001, the number of radio
stations, federal records show, increased 7 percent while the number of
owners dropped 25 percent. The biggest acquirer was Clear Channel, based in
San Antonio, which has doubled its stations, to more than 1,200 since 1999.

Today, a growing number of artists, consumers and legislators are concerned
that radio conglomerates wield too much power. Senator Russell D. Feingold,
Democrat of Wisconsin, introduced legislation on June 27 that would give
federal regulators the authority to revoke radio licenses if a conglomerate
forces musicians to play at station-sponsored concerts or buy advertising as
a condition of playing their songs.

If there is anything driving the use of research in radio programming it is
the search for new sources of revenue. In the last decade, listeners spent
10 percent fewer hours listening to radio, according to Arbitron, which
tracks listening habits. "We are trying to monetize everything we do," said
Mr. Gerry Kagle, an executive at Premiere Radio Networks, a division of
Clear Channel.

Like its network of radio stations, Clear Channel's research empire is vast,
stretching from a nondescript office tower in Burbank, Calif., where a
roomful of computers monitor stations in 140 major markets, to an office
park in Cincinnati, where workers huddle over telephones playing sound bites
and interviewing radio listeners.

In simplified terms, here is how it works. In the Burbank tower, a
sophisticated computer network records thousands of eight-second sound bites
of songs, called hooks, from more than 1,000 radio stations, most of them
Clear Channel's, across the country. Then a team of 150 workers listen to
the hooks and identify them by name, the station and time of day they
played. That information is sold to record companies, which use it to track
the popularity of their songs, and to radio stations that want to follow
trends and know what other stations are playing.

Clear Channel also conducts another type of research, call-out research,
where telephone operators poll listeners weekly about songs its program
directors are playing. In a test, listeners are asked to rate 25 to 30
hooks, answering questions about whether they like it, recognize it or are
tired of hearing it.

This, analysts say, is the most influential information. Clear Channel
shares this data throughout the chain so a programmer in one market can tell
what it is hot in a similar market.

Randy Michaels, chief executive of Clear Channel Radio, said this data is
used in many ways, including how to arrange the order of songs.

"Research is almost essential because if you focused on your personal
tastes, you'd only make yourself happy," he said. "If you focus on the
audience, you see the ratings go up."

But a lot of stations are overdependent on research, said Scott Sands, a
program director at WZPL, an independent pop alternative station in
Indianapolis. "I'd like to think I'm a strong enough programmer that
wherever I worked I could program the way I see fit," he said.

Take for instance the most recent single from the Dave Matthews Band, "Where
Are You Going."

"It is not testing well among listeners online," Mr. Sands said, but he is
not ready to pull it off the air. "This is an artist that takes time to
test," he said. "It may take 400 spins."

John Dickey, an executive vice president at Cumulus Media, which owns more
than 250 radio stations, said he did not understand the criticism. Music
listeners, he said, are getting exactly what research shows they want. And
that, he adds, is not likely to change anytime soon.

"It's just like the fast food industry being blamed for the fattening up of
America," he said. "If America didn't want it, we wouldn't serve it."

[Bob Hoffnar]

Interesting article. The thing that needs to be looked into is the fee Clearchannel charges for testing. And there is no mention of the money Clearchannel charges per play once a tune makes it past the testing procedure.

Being as overall radio listenership is going down I would say that the testing/marketing system of Clearchannel is not concerned with what people want to hear at all. It is a scam to justify increased ad rates and get as much money as possible from record labels.

Bob

[John Macy]

Yep, music is just the lines that connect the dots of advertising together to them, nothing more...