Simplify Your Music Scheduling

The other day, one my friends said “do you ever feel like there are way too many things to keep track of when you’re scheduling music?” If your answer is “yes,” please allow me to help you simplify!

It doesn’t matter whether you use G-Selector, Powergold, Music Master, or something else: this advice is good for almost any software in every time zone. Where PD’s and MD’s most often go wrong is by asking our scheduling apps to do things WE should be doing when we eyeball the logs. Your first step in simplifying your scheduling process is to ask yourself (or your team) which rules and sound codes are the most essential. (“It’s ALL essential” is the wrong answer! As tempting as it is to say that.)

Once you know what your essentials are, decide which of those things are easily definable in your software, and which of them have nuances best navigated by humans like you. If it’s a nuance, I likely don’t bother making a rule or a code for it, unless it’s a breakable rule I just want to have on my radar. (Making it breakable flags it while I go through the log, but minimizes unscheduled positions. BTW…having unscheduled positions can be a good thing.) The goal in identifying your essentials and nuances is to maximize using your scheduling app at what it does best. Let it handle the science and math so you can handle the art and flow.

At JOY FM and BOOST RADIO in St. Louis, our essentials are vertical and horizontal separations/rotations, plus ideal balances of tempo and texture. Powergold (our fave) is awesome at doing what we ask when it comes to stairstep and snowflake patterns. Even with a tight-ish library like we have on BOOST (130 songs), keeping track of how songs plot is best done by the computer. That frees us up to eyeball each segue and each quarter hour for the fun stuff: will these songs sound great back to back? Does this quarter hour capture the essence of my station? Is this a flow that might make somebody want to take the long way home/to work? You can’t code or rule your way to those things; they’re some of the nuances YOU should be concerned with (not Selector or whatever).

My essentials and nuances will be different than yours because you and I have different strengths/weaknesses/perspectives. Here’s a non-essential we don’t care about in our building: gender coding. We don’t have rules about how many females should play back to back or per hour. Even if we did, it would be pretty easy for us to eyeball the log and recognize two feminine names back to back. (BTW it’s 2020 and listeners haven’t cared about how many women play back to back this whole century…if they EVER did. Concern yourself with breaking up monotony of similar sounding voices/textures more than separating women. BTW part 2: the Country format recently loosened their rules on songs by ladies and their ratings are up, despite research telling them those songs don’t test.)

Another way I’ve simplified: energy/mood codes. Most of us do a 1-5 or 1-10 scale…1’s are your “I Can Only Imagine’s” and maybe 5’s/10’s are your “Still Rolling Stones.” We often think of songs as slow, medium slow, medium, medium fast, and fast…or some variation. Alternative approach: decide what your station’s tempo/energy baseline is. Songs that don’t bring the energy down, but also don’t have you twerking. Those would be my 3’s on the 1-5 scale or my 5’s on the 1-10. From there, I use only two other numbers: a 1 and a 5 or 10. The end result: I have songs that slow us down, songs that maintain our baseline, and songs that energize. Slow, medium, fast. A lot of nuance gets stripped away when you do that, and you end up scheduling in line with how listeners listen and feel.

Consider stripping every code and rule away and rebuild as if you were launching your station today. Shot out to Doug Hannah who gave me and many of our peers foundational music scheduling knowledge back in the day. A lot of what I shared here was inspired by his investment into CCM radio years ago.

Give your software a break and you’ll also be giving yourself a break.