“They’re only talking about nuts and bolts,” my friend Shawn (not-his-real-name) said to me. “Don’t they know there is more to programming than clocks and music rotations?”
“Perhaps not,” I reply. I know that all too well because I was once that kind of PD. Clocks. Rotations. Sweepers and liners. Games and gimmicks.
Then I learned a totally new way of thinking.
Over the years I’ve learned that there are basically three different levels of discussions about programming.
Continue readingIf you listen to the air staff, way too many stations nowadays have what I call “a boulder in the lobby.”
“The PD has no power, so we can’t do things we want to do.”
“The wrong people DO have power, so the best ideas can’t even get heard.”
“The GM is just a Sales Guy, and doesn’t understand Programming.”
“The new owner is just a financial guy, and doesn’t know anything about radio.”
In one station I worked at, a person they hired to fill a key position lived on a houseboat, and bathed in a lake. He always smelled like catfish dung. It got so bad that several coworkers left various deodorants on his DESK, and many complained to the boss – who did nothing about it. Slowly but surely, people left the station. I know that sounds kind of gross, but it happened.
So here’s the deal: as a Talent, when you come into the station every day, you have a decision to make. You can walk around whatever the “boulder” is and give it your best effort to do radio that’s worth listening to. Or you can go work somewhere else.
What you should NOT do is stick around, but have a grousing or negative attitude.
New York Yankee great Joe DiMaggio, in his last season, once ran hard on painful bone spurs to make a difficult catch. Mickey Mantle (who was in right field as a rookie) told Joe that he needn’t have done it because Mickey had it in his sights. But DiMaggio answered, “There’s always some kid who may be seeing me for the first or last time; I owe him my best.”
So do you.
Have you ever missed something that was right before you? A changing traffic light? A quickly moving thunderstorm? A Labor Day sale at the 24-hour dental floss store?
“Life has a peculiar feel when you look back on it that it doesn’t have when you’re actually living it. It’s as though the whole thing were designed to be understood in hindsight, as though you’ll never know the meaning of your experiences until you’ve had enough of them to provide reference.”
Donald Miller
524 weeks ago I penned Frost Advisory #1, a fairly presumptuous title considering I had no idea if I could come up with #2, much less 524 of them.
In case you missed it, writing every week for 52 weeks over the span of 10 years is 520. This is Frost Advisory #524.
For years my pal and mentor Alan Mason had insisted that I start writing. I’m not sure whether he thought I had something worth saying or he figured that would keep me quiet for a few hours. Frankly, after reading Alan’s stuff for years I was just flat out intimidated. It felt like Robert Frost telling me, “You should write poetry!,” or Donald Trump saying, “You should tweet!”
The process of writing every week for over ten years has challenged me to think through strategic concepts, consider new ideas, and to look for real life applications. It has forced me to challenge my own biases and experiences, and to attempt to communicate, whether to the novice or the expert, how these ideas can transform a radio station.
In other words, it has forced me to think about what I really think.
Continue reading“I never know what I think about something until I read what I’ve written on it.”
William Faulkner, winner of the Nobel Prize
In the movie world, a lot rests on the Film Editor’s “eye.”
“Errors of continuity” – like a shirt tucked in one moment, then untucked in the next shot, then a moment later it’s tucked in again – can ruin the film. The Editor is always on the lookout for things that, somewhere in the brain, just don’t “add up.” Those little things destroy credibility.
I hear the same type of things all the time in radio, but of course, they’re spoken rather than pictured. For example:
An air talent refers to something that I wouldn’t have a clue about unless I was listening 15 minutes ago.
Or a jock goes to a contestant or a caller and says “Hi, Marsha…” How did you already know her name? Not logical.
The jock says “Jennifer tripped over it…” Who’s Jennifer? Your wife? Your daughter? Your dog?
Keep in mind that my timeline (as a listener) isn’t the same as yours. Don’t assume that I know what you’re referencing.
There’s a pandemic going on. Perhaps you’ve heard about it.
It’s affected almost every area of our lives, from what we wear and where we go, to our work, to school, to church, to getting together with Fred and Ethel for a game of Pinocle, to attending sporting events.
While it’s true that the pandemic has forced the major league baseball season to be played in front of NO living, breathing fans that does NOT mean there are no fans.
“Every medium carries within itself inherent limitations, and every artist also comes with limitations. True creativity is not the outflow of a world without boundaries. The creative act is the genius of unleashing untapped potential and unseen beauty with the constraints and boundaries of the medium from which we choose to create. Creativity not only happens within boundaries and limitations, but in fact it is dependent on those limitations.”
Erwin McManus, “The Artisan Soul”
If you watch a major league game, you’ll see the stands littered with cardboard cutouts. There are season ticket holders, there are celebrities, and at Petco Park in San Diego, true to their brand identity, there is a section of cardboard cutouts made up of strictly pets.
Continue readingYou may have noticed a lot of passionate talk in CCM regarding the music lately. In some circles, it seems “Worship” music is now the bane of programmers and armchair programmers’ existence.
Well… that sound code is dominating playlists and music testing, and our listeners for one… aren’t sick of it. It’s also the sound code that typically has the most emotional connection for our listeners.
The role of Worship music in CCM is a great debate starter. Let’s just talk about addressing tempo issues that can come along with slower Worship hits.
Continue readingWhat really works in any field isn’t much about finding something completely new as it is about finding a way to build on something old, but making it better. We’ve had phones forever, for instance. But the Blackberry, then the iPhone, changed what we can do with them – and what we now EXPECT from them.
The point is, there’s a tendency to categorically reject “old” ideas, and that’s often the biggest mistake. Radio is making one now. With all the technology we have available, and all the “sabermetric” data we now use, we’ve largely lost one thing that used to be the core of every great station – the connection to the music we play. Simply put, I rarely hear a station anymore that respects the music at ALL. Continue reading
Wow!
That’s how most people react when I show them this photo. Particularly women.
So, you may ask, what does this have to do with a moving company?
Well, nothing… if that moving company sees itself as only a bunch of sweaty guys who lug people’s stuff from here to there… if it sees itself as nothing more than having a functional relationship with its customers.
“Chopped” – the TV show on The Food Network – wasn’t in my sphere of awareness until just a couple of years ago. My wife is addicted to watching people compete in this cooking competition where contestants are asked to take “basket ingredients” like yak thighs, pine cones, elderberry stems, and the bumper from a 1964 Buick, and make a meal out of them.
It’s fun, and the competition is serious, presented in a “steel cage gladiator death match” format. But since I’m always looking for ways to help people sound better, what resonates with me is the “Chopped” criteria: Presentation, Taste, and Creativity.
In radio terms, you can always work on Presentation – even when the goal is to avoid sounding “presentational.”
Taste is any easy one. It’s mirroring the taste of your listener. You’re “cooking” for her or him.
And Creativity is simply the biggest dividing line in radio. If you haven’t found your creative “muscle” yet, listen to great stations, read great books, watch great movies. Soak it up. Just like you would that redeye gravy that girl from Louisiana just made on Chopped. Yum.
We’re living in unprecedented times. COVID-19. Lockdowns. Racial unrest. Will our kids be going back to school?
If you simply look at each isolated event you could reason that your station isn’t about those things. Not if you think of your station as just unfamiliar music by artists people don’t know.
It depends on your perspective.
Continue reading
