Calling it a "redefinition" of its alternative rock music format, WKQX-FM (101.1) is expanding its playlist from 200 to nearly 1,000 songs and reaching back over 25 years in the genre...the Emmis Communications station will declare that its music is "on shuffle" -- evoking the jargon of iPods embraced by its primary target audience of listeners between the ages of 25 and 34.
So, we’ve come full circle in a sense. We’ve gone from the early DJs who played whatever they wanted from whatever they had to decades of radio stations droning out the same small library of songs over and over again to a new attitude of “we play whatever we want” or we’re “on shuffle mode" because JACK or DOUG or HANK like it that way.
The big question I have is: who was right and who was wrong? As long as I have been in Radio, listeners have complained that stations play the same songs over and over again. And, for just as long, Program Directors, Music Directors, and consultants have assured me the research said that’s what the listeners wanted. Oh really? Then how does that explain the new JACK format?
Sure, there were the occasional Program Directors or renegade Music Directors who were convinced everyone in the business needed to stop bowing down to the charts in the trade papers, use the research as simply one of many tools, and go more with their guts. But, they were pariahs and their blasphemy usually led them to being tied down to the nearest bedposts to have whatever demon possessed them excorcised by the nearest consultant.
"The Power of Todd Storz compells You! The Power of Todd Storz compells You!"
Well, I think it’s obvious who was right all along: The listeners.
They just couldn’t prove it until technology gave them iPods and other mp3 players so they could finally program their own portable stations and turn off the ones that refused to play the variety they really wanted to hear.
Maybe music research can't test one thing and never could: the dynamics of the completely individual experience each person has every single time he or she hears a song. Maybe the act of listening to music and one's reaction to it depends on a momentary fusion of ever changing factors: the listener's current emotional state, what day of the week it is, what they just ate, who they just broke up with, is it sunny or raining, is the phone ringing, does their foot hurt, does the news suck, etc.
Maybe listeners are not so crazy about a song one day and don't dislike it as much the next for a myriad of reasons we can't possibly track because the human condition is too complicated. If a picture says a thousand words, maybe a song is heard in one hundred thousand ways. This may explain why people like the fact that their iPod can store thousands of songs: their lives are made up of thousands of days - and they feel differently on each one.
Now commercial radio stations are playing catch-up.
JACK be nimble, JACK be quick,
JACK’s the new format listeners may pick.
That is, unless they’ve begun to like being the Program Director of their own iPod a little too much.
