What If We Didn’t Chase The Consensus?

Spend about five minutes working in radio, and somebody will ask “why do you guys play the same songs all the time?” The question comes up whether you have 100 songs in rotation, or 800. (Actually, you’ll likely get the question more at the station with 800 songs vs. 100.) If you’ve at all been schooled in Consensus Programming, maybe you kindly explain that your station wants as many people as possible listening at any given moment. The best chance of that happening is if you play only the music most of your listeners can agree on. Consensus! Detractors might call it the Lowest Common Denominator. WordHippo.com (my favorite site to find words for promo’s) calls consensus a “happy medium,” and “the middle course.” When you put it like that, Consensus Radio loses some appeal. I don’t know about you, but “trade off” “median” radio fails to pique my interest. What if the path towards greater impact meant saying “bye Felicia” to precise consensus?

I’m not proposing that we get rid of having a focused target audience, a well defined sound/format, or a clear & specific mission/vision. But I’m wondering out loud if Consensus Programming has a ceiling. It often lacks “delight and surprise.” It can feel predictable. It’s full of the good many can agree on but leaves out a lot of what could be great because that’s where the consensus splits.

The problem with my wondering out loud, or I guess in your eyeballs (“wondering in your eyeballs” just comes off odd though) is that you might finally see me as the impostor I’ve always suspected I am. Like, you’ll finally realize I’m not nearly as smart as I pretend. Because what I’m going to share with you might already be a thing and I’ve been oblivious to it. Or it should never be a thing and you can finally write me off as a certified dummy.

If this is already a thing, maybe it has an official name. Until I learn what it is, I’m calling it Coalition Programming. The idea is that your music and everything in between has shared passion among a variety of listeners who don’t look the same on the surface. Where Consensus Programming zooms in on, let’s say a 40-year-old female’s distinct preferences, Coalition Programming might be built around values that 40-year-old woman shares with a 20-year-old guy or a 60-year-old grandmother.

When I went back to visit family in Lansing, MI this summer, I fell in love with Stacks 92.1 (named after three famous smokestacks that tower over the city).

• BTW, have you ever had a soft spot for certain frequencies in a market? Like, when I grew up, the 92.1 frequency was always the underdog Top 40 station (until it wasn’t). It’s a class A rimshot in a market where 25 & 50 kilowatters dominate. I’ve found myself rooting for almost every format that’s been on Lansing’s 92.1 since my childhood. The various formats its hosted were rarely executed with a Consensus approach.

The best way to describe Stacks is Rhythmic Oldies, or possibly Rhythmic AC. But it’s not your typical, tightly researched list built around a quintessential Rhythmic Oldies/AC P1. For example: while most in that format might play Bel Biv Devoe’s biggest hit, “Poison,” Stacks also plays BBD’s other two hits (“Do Me,” and “Thought It Was Me.”) In addition to going a bit deeper, they go a bit wider than their peers when it comes to eras. In a typical quarter hour, you’re going to get anything from the 70’s to the 2010’s. (Though they get pretty selective on the older/newer sides…in other words, their core seems to be 1990 – 2010…everything before and after is Flavor). Here’s a quarter hour from the night I typed this:

Gloria Gaynor “I Will Survive” (Disco: universal party jam, right?)

2Pac “Changes” (90’s Hip Hop: arguably one of Pac’s most mass appeal songs, thanks to the Bruce Hornsby sample)

Prince “Little Red Corvette” (80’s Pop. Really flowed nicely out of the 80’s sample in the 2Pac song.)

P. Diddy “Shake Ya Tailfeather” (Early 2k’s Pop/Hip Hop hit from Diddy)

Brandy “Best Friend” (90’s Pop: she had more hits than “The Boy is Mine” and “Sittin Up In My Room”)

From my experience with Consensus Programming and target listener profiles, I couldn’t figure out what hypothetical person could possibly LOVE all five of those songs. Consensus Programming would insist that if “she” (or “he” I guess) didn’t love all five, then whichever of those five were unloved would need to go. They’d need to be replaced with more agreed-upon songs. Maybe a Gloria Gaynor person and a Little Red Corvette person are the same, but not a Gloria person and a P. Diddy listener. A Consensus Station would need to decide: are they here for the Gloria listener, or the P. Diddy person?

Here's where that can fall short: given my age, values, and compatible artist tastes, I’d profile as a P. Diddy person. Yet I would be bored out of my mind with a station who catered that narrowly to me: I know and love most of what fits around his biggest hits, but I’m also still a bit burned out on them. This is why Stacks 92.1 had me superglued. (Cue up the “rip of the knob” sweeper, completely with big 1980’s reverb!) They gave me healthy amounts of the music I loved from my personal nostalgia years, and the outlier songs were still familiar to me. They were a refreshing change of pace.

This station did what few dare to anymore: trust that your core listener might be as big a fan of the music and lifestyle as the people behind the mics. Maybe Stacks has a dialed in “Becky” profile for their format and I couldn’t sniff it out. It felt like they were going for a wedding party vibe, as evidenced by their branding “The Hits That Power the Party.” Think about who’s at a wedding: EVERYONE! From the cute kiddos to their great grandparents. The music you hear at weddings? A little bit of EVERYTHING. But all of it filtered through one lens (according to my wedding DJ friends): get the dancefloor packed.

From the outside listening in, that’s what Stacks 92.1 does. Much more focused than a wedding reception, but creating an atmosphere that I imagine appealed to people 15 years younger or older than me who may or may not share my skin color or gender. A radio-sized wedding reception.

So what’s the application for CCM radio? Most of us have a target audience of Women 25-54. To achieve success in that demographic, we aim at a bullseye listener. Maybe she’s 40, has a name and a family situation that many others would find relatable. The original hope was that if we had the right target listener and won with her, we’d also win with everyone around her. Better to aim for the bullseye and hit the target, rather than aim for the wider target and not even land your dart on the wall, goes the thinking. As many in our format have observed in recent years: we’ve done excellent work at hitting our bullseye with laser-like accuracy. But in doing so, we narrowed our appeal. We might win with that 40-year-old woman and those older than her who’ve already passed through our filter, but we’re nowhere with listeners who don’t live her life. Be they 25-year-old women, or our 40-year-old’s husband and family.

An important caveat (in addition to how I admitted at the top of this that I might be clueless): We’re obviously not comparing apples to apples. Stacks 92.1 looks to be a flanker station for its cluster. With a Class A signal 20 minutes north of town, the chances it can dominate the market are small (but not none…it had an amazing run as Alternative in the 90’s). Done well, Stacks can shave points off the market’s leading Urban, Pop, and AC stations. Most of us Christian AC folks aren’t trying to flank. So this is apples to whatever other fruits you might enjoy. (Do banana splits count?)

I’m not daring you to throw the baby and bathwater out. “She,” whatever name you might have for her, is still a vital member of our audience and mission. What if “she” was part of a coalition that included WE? What if what we knew about Becky was used to bring more people to the party, instead using her profile to filter them out?

Programming CCM with a Coalition-first mindset would require a whole new approach to how we do research, how we market…how we do everything. Research would be more critical than ever, as there could be potentially a lot of other listeners to know, serve and love well. I don’t know how to program this way, I admit. I’ve spent most of my career finessing my Consensus approach. To do radio any other way, at this point, might be a bit like feeling around a dark room for the light switch.

Our culture is becoming more tribal. You’re in or you’re out. Us vs. them. The enemy is doing amazing work at slicing our tribes thinner and thinner, especially within the American Church. Christian radio has proven we can do the tribal thing better than almost any other format. And the more we’ve excelled at it, the more narrow our appeal has become. The Gospel is not tribal. It’s not consensus. It’s coalition. It’s Jew. It’s Gentile. Black. White. Me. Us. The Gospel is counter-cultural.

The Cambridge dictionary describes coalition like this: “a group of people or organizations working together to achieve something.” I don’t know about you, but that grabs me at a much deeper level than “middle course” “trade off” Consensus Radio. As our culture follows the dark lies that divide us, maybe a new approach to programming is how we shine the light of Christ brighter than ever.