The Name of the Game...

For years the research has been telling us that listeners want to hear the name of the artist and title of the song they just heard on the radio. For years we have been ignoring this simple request. From a station’s point of view, not dispensing the artist and song title is a way to clean up the clutter and reduce the chatter. From a listeners perspective it’s a point of frustration when they want to know the name of a new song they really like, or maybe its one they haven’t heard in years- and forgot the name of it. For music stations it’s ironic that we avoid talking about the one thing we are most famous for. Rather than helping our listeners delve deeper into our product, we shut the door on them. Some stations have addressed this concern with RDS software that scrolls the song and title and artist on the car radio, and some stations post the last ten songs played on their website. RDS is great if you are listening in the car, but unfortunately it falls short of the advantage radio has in the first place and that is immediacy. The odd station does a great job of it such as B-101 in Philadelphia. They run an unobtrusive song tag after each song that gives the title of the song and artist. No doubt it takes a lot of work and detail to set this up- but it’s proven to be a great addition to their toolkit and another reason why listeners love the station, and have made it a ratings success. This little public service that makes so much sense ( and can bring in big rewards) has been left to slide for most of us. It appears however that someone has taken notice. Music related new media outlets are making sure the music experience for their listeners is a complete one. Hey shouldn’t we be doing this too? Check out a few of these sites. Maybe they will inspire you to reevaluate a new way to incorporate this simple request into your programming mix.