Is It Time To Rethink Your Artist Separation? Yes, It Is.

Greetings to you from the year 2019! Where the old rules don't always apply. It's probably time to update your artist separation approach, in your log rules and possibly in your Current categories. You can thank (or blame?) Spotify, PPM, and/or your listeners themselves for making old ways questionable.

One hour is the standard, right? Some of us just a tad less or tad more because the odd numbers can keep predictability at bay. For most CCM stations, one hour is now too long. We're more than 10 years into Pandora and the rest streaming your favorite songs with no regard whatsoever to artist separation. Even your most die hard P1 isn't glued to their radio with stopwatch in hand clocking how far apart your artists are spread.

There used to be fabulous reasons to make one hour our default. It helped to ensure variety, break up monotony, and possibly lengthen Time Spent Listening numbers. You don't need artist sep. to make any of that happen. Imperfect as PPM is, we've learned something most of us had a hunch about in the first place: the average listener doesn't stick with us for an hour. From the major markets on down to the medium, most stations are getting about 10-12 minutes at a time. With shorter commutes in smaller markets, there's no reason to assume those listening sessions are any longer. Setting ratings aside, the major streaming services also confirm average time spent to be much shorter than an hour. (Pandora's average session is 7 minutes. Spotify and Apple music are at 3 minutes. Data from Digital Music News.)

If I only have 10, maybe 15 minutes at a time with my listener. And if they live in a culture of instant gratification, then why wouldn't I make sure their favorite performers are on every time they listen? (Despite the mantra that we're a song based format, we also build artist brands. Our P1's crave our core artists.) If variety is why I would delay playing their favorite songs and singers, all they have to do is pull up Apple Music for personalized variety my brand can't touch. If I'm worried about TSL, the lesson above reminds me it's a moot point. (The game now is to increase the number of times people come back to you, not the length of each visit.)

Mainstream contemporary formats threw artist separation out more than a decade ago. As in, it literally doesn't exist on some outlets. For many, the sep. time has been reduced to 15 or 30 minutes. On top of that, they're playing multiple singles by the same artists in their Current categories. I'm getting ahead of myself. More on that after this 8 minute stopset.

And we're back. When we launched BOOST Radio in St. Louis almost five years ago, we made the default artist sep. 15 minutes. (GASP!) The BOOST format is young and doesn't have as many core artists as Christian AC. Any song NOT by a core artist was often filler/low testing. When you're trying to build cume out of nothing, there's no time for filler. The cume showed up, and surprisingly, so did some strong TSL. BOOST spent most of our first 2.5 years with the #1 TSL in the whole market for women 18-34 (on a translator and rimshot signal combo!). (We paused encoding in recent months, but there's no evidence to suggest things have changed.)

In the past year, we brought that line of thinking to the mothership: JOY-FM in STL. We cut artist sep. from an hour-ish down to 30-ish minutes. And it's a flexible rule. It's where the art of our science/art balance comes in. Every ratings metric grew in 2018 (we spent five months of the year as the #1 station ages 6+). We don't owe all of our ratings growth to these changes, but they clearly didn't hurt anything.

Ever since you got into radio, and maybe even before, you'd hear (or even say) things like "that song/project has been out for ____ months/years. Why is the radio station just now acting like this single is new?" Many experts in our field dismissed that as noise from the uber-bought in fans of the artist or genre. In 2019, when artists drip music out constantly to streaming platforms and those songs generate instant viral buzz, the old approach rings hollow. We sound disconnected from our own world when we call a six month old song "new."

I'm advocating for you to reduce your artist separation, and to be open to playing multiple new songs by the same artists in your Current categories.

On the scheduling side, some stations may find it simple to run with one smaller number across the board. Let's say 30 minutes for the sake of discussion. Others might like diving into the weeds a bit more. Perhaps the artists who occupy large parts of the library have lower sep., while those with just a hit or two have a higher sep. to prevent clumping. (On BOOST we split things up into primary and secondary. Primary artists have the lower separation, secondary the higher amount.)

Monotony is a big concern though, right? You don't want to be all-Tomlin or all-Mercy Me or whoever all the time. You protect your flow from monotony by using other coding options wisely. Code for tempo, energy, mood, vocal styles, music styles, etc. You can still have balanced hours and quarter hours, with fewer filler songs/artists, by being shrewd with all the tools you have. (Platooning can be useful too.)

On the Currents side, it's not hard to find room to try this. Your concern might be (if I'm reading your mind correctly. I'm no Miss Cleo though) how you could possibly have room for multiple singles from an artist? Two answers for that: 1. I'm a fan of two or even three singles at once IF the artist has a history of testing well. It goes back to the filler thing, and honestly, risk aversion (even though the concept may seem risky to some). We all want as many of our currents as possible to be high testers, yes? Vulcan logic suggests filling more of my Currents with songs by people who are sure bets. That's less risky than giving slots away to artists who aren't there yet. 2. Our format (and perhaps your station) holds onto Currents for a lonnnnnnnnnng time. Hence, back to no room. Rethink how you use your Recurrents, and create a Stay Current category if you haven't yet. (The Stay Currents on one of my stations rotate like my Medium category). You can give superstar songs a lot of rotation love without having them clog up your Currents. (There's a reason we call those categories "Current" in the first place, right?)

(BTW, glancing at the mainstream charts as of when this was written, I see two songs by Camila Cabello next to each other on mainstream AC. The same Mediabase chart also has two songs from Bebe Rexa, Selena Gomez, and Halsey. Not to mention FOUR by Ariana Grande. Head to younger skewing formats like CHR, and you'll see this play out even more. Country? Same story, different artists. Christian AC claims to be targeting listeners in similar age and gender as Country and AC. This shouldn't scare us.)

If/when you adjust your artist separation, do it quietly. Tell the boss and jocks (they deserve to be in the loop), but from there, use discretion. Observe the rest of the office, anecdotal listener feedback, and whatever measurement metrics you have. See if the change is even noticed (over time...don't knee jerk). Unless you play Daigle next to Daigle, the change probably won't be detected. Keeping it on the down low (as the kids said 20 years ago) will help limit bias in your evaluation.

How many TV shows have you binged in the past year? You don't make yourself wait for what you love. Why make your listeners wait for who they love?