Not An Either/Or Dillemma (Or) How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Add

For a medium based on music and personality, there's an awful lot of science involved in radio. You can take all kinds of data, calculations, and research to build spreadsheets, and then you try to fit all of it around stuff that is, at its heart, not all that scientific.

It's hard not to feel caught between the art and the science of radio. Obviously, no decision is ever that black and white; but the tension is there.

Either I open up my on-air personality, or I keep breaks short and clean. Either I trust my gut, or I trust my research. Either I play the hits, or I add fresh music.

At Life 107.1, we've spent much of 2019 addressing that last battle. The past few years, our station's pace adding new music was a slow one; but to be frank, it's been a winning formula. We have a passionate and engaged audience, and it shows in everything from ratings to funding to anecdotal stories of impact.

So when we started talking about adding more new music, I balked. The station wasn't broken, and getting more aggressive felt like direct opposition to our strategy of playing familiar songs.

And yet, seven months later, we've doubled our add total from 2018, and so far, I'm excited about the change. Here are some lessons I've learned:

Don't confuse strategy with tactics

For me, many false either/or battles begin with this mistake. Our strategy was to play familiar music, but I'd decided the tactics of our add schedule were the only way to achieve that goal. Once we asked the simple question of whether it was possible to add more music without abandoning familiar songs-if, maybe, that wasn't the either/or battle we thought it was-a light went on. It seems obvious now, but at the time, it was a real hurdle. It took some tweaking and some slaughtering of sacred cows, but we've brought in plenty of fresh music while still saving a seat for "I Can Only Imagine."

More trips to the plate = Less risk per swing

Obviously, there's a tipping point here, but the simple fact is the more conservative you are with adds, the more you need each add to be a hit. On our old schedule, we could afford for a song or two to tank and shuffle out of the playlist, but we could only miss so many times before we had stale songs in heavy with no worthy replacements. As we've started adding more songs, we have the luxury of swinging for the fences on a few risky songs, knowing we have a wider margin for error. And here's the cool thing: Not only did we double our adds in 2019, we also doubled the number of songs that became high-testers.

Less risk per swing = More surprise hits

This has been the fun part. Before, our only musical surprises were bad ones-when a "surefire" hit turned out to be a dud. Now we're able to try out an iffy song in a spot that minimizes the risk. Occasionally, that gives us a high tester on the edge of our sound formula, or a local hit without the eye-popping national chart numbers. Our sound expands, and our listeners get songs from us they won't find everywhere else.

So that's where we stand. I have no doubt there will be more changes to our new system, and I assume we'll look back on some things we're doing now and wonder what we were thinking.

But what else would you expect? We're talking art and science here.