We forget now that when Bill Drake brought “more music” to Top 40 radio, he
did it with stations that were playing two or three songs in a row between stopsets—and sometimes just one song. But even with six stopsets an hour, those stations sounded far more streamlined than competitors who always stopped down after every song. Eventually, of course, broadcasters rearranged their hours to play even longer sweeps and what had registered as “more music” through the mid-‘60s and ‘70s never sounded right again.

At the RAIN Summit North, held March 12 at Canadian Music Week, Slacker VP of strategic development Jim Rondenelli told the audience that his Internet radio service has “not had a month since second quarter of last year when we did not sell out our inventory.” I thought of the morass of PSAs and fill music that still typify the streaming experience of listeners to terrestrial stations and thought “well, he would never be able to fill up 14 minutes an hour.” (Yesterday morning, I heard Slacker run two stopsets of two minutes each, including a station promo, in an hour’s time.)

But Slacker and Pandora will never have to fill 14 minutes of inventory. And it’s clear now that terrestrial radio is on the verge of its own Drake moment where the expectation of an acceptable spotload is forever redefined—particularly as streaming radio continues its march to the dashboard. Commercial FM music broadcasters must come to the realization today that the present 12-14 minutes of spots an hour will not be tenable much longer. And for many listeners they are untenable already.

In the ‘60s, the changes were readily apparent to broadcasters who could see one station in a market post instant results. Today, when “Commercial Free Mondays” can give broadcasters a nice boost on the day itself, but can’t single handedly win a market battle, the change in acceptable spot load is taking place in pieces. For Sirius XM subscribers, a typical terrestrial spotload has been unacceptable for years. For the younger listeners who have not learned the same loyalty to radio in the same proportion, that spotload has probably never been acceptable.

Broadcasters have long understood the ability of new platforms and their lower spotloads to undermine the 12-14 minutes paradigm, but they have rarely made the leap to “so we must do something differently on our own stations.” As somebody who has sat in plenty of station meetings where even a modest suggested reduction in spotload provokes the comment, “Well, that’s not going to happen,” it’s not hard to imagine GMs and group owners saying that in unison as they read this. Then again, there are undoubtedly General Sales Managers whose stations are now running the increasingly common “Commercial Free Mondays” who once said “that’s not going to happen” in a boardroom somewhere.

A drastically reduced spotload is going to become the new paradigm. And the only question is whether it’s going to be current commercial operators who offer it. To get there, they will have to revisit the notion of selling sponsorships instead of spots – a notion that pioneers like TMO’s Eastern Long Island stations and KZPS (Lonestar 92.5) Dallas tried, but quickly had to back away from. And on the Web where there are so many competitors with much lighter spotloads already, we must immediately ask why stations that are typically selling only a few minutes of inventory per hour are still asking listeners to sit through another 10-14 minutes of fill content that doesn’t entertain, pay the bills, or even truly reinforce a station’s community service mission.

Some broadcasters are reading this and thinking that it’s taken them a year to get to the point where they can sell those 12-14 units at an adequate rate again. Others are going to be typically defensive about anything that seems like pessimism about radio’s future. But I believe strongly in the competitiveness of radio’s content on all platforms. And I believe that most listeners still regard listening to commercials as a fair trade for entertainment. Pandora’s successful introduction of commercials has shown that. What has changed is what represents a good deal. In a decade, if anybody is still selling that many minutes of inventory on a music service, it’s going to be because somebody else has used a low spotload to force today’s commercial broadcasters out, then upped the commercial load again.

Slacker’s Rondenelli told RAIN attendees that they constantly research the “threshold of annoyance.” In the mid-‘00s, when radio’s bulging stopsets could no longer be ignored, broadcasters briefly turned their attention to researching stopset length—although the question asked was usually whether listeners would prefer two or three per hour. Then PPM came along and two stopsets won out, even if that meant going back to six-minute breaks, or longer. Over the next few years, the “threshold of annoyance” is going to be one of the most important things that terrestrial broadcasters can research. And the discussions about retrofitting our stations to accommodate what we know about changing listener expectations need to start this afternoon.
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Also at Friday’s RAIN session, Vision Critical
VP/managing director Jeff Vidler unveiled “Radio Futures 2010,” a study of just over 3,000 adult “engaged online consumers in the U.S., U.K., and Canada.” Among the study’s findings: a question on whether various media behaviors were playing a bigger or smaller part in respondents’ lives found radio flat, compared to a 42% gain for listening to an iPod or MP3 player, 22% for streaming music on demand, 22% for podcasts and 16% for Internet-only radio.

Respondents were also asked which online radio stations or music streaming services they had listened to in the last year. In the U.S., Pandora was easily the most-named entity (42%), followed by Rhapsody (6%), Last.fm (5%), Yahoo (5%), AOL (4%), iTunes (4%), Slacker (3%), YouTube (3%), and Live 365 (3%). In the U.K., the leader was the not-yet-available-here Spotify (20%). In Canada, with neither Spotify nor Pandora available, the leader was YouTube (9%).
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First Listen
The New Jake FM; The Old King Country

Ready for markets with four Country stations again? That’s the scenario in Oklahoma City where KKNG (King Country), most recently running a yesterday-and-today mix against Clear Channel’s contemporary KTST (The Twister) and Classic Country KXXY has just switched to “Jake FM” under consultant (and former OKC programmer) Joel Folger, emphasizing “more new Country music than any station has ever played in Oklahoma City,” while KKNG has migrated to outlying sister signal KOJK under new PD Lynn Waggoner and returned to the Classic Country format that put the station on the map more than a decade ago.

Here’s Jake FM at 7:00 Monday morning (15). The station is also using song tags, of the sort familiar to AC listeners.

• Easton Corbin, “A Little More Country Than That”
• Carrie Underwood, “All American Girl”
• Keith Urban, “Who Wouldn’t Want To Be Me”
• Lady Antebellum, “Need You Now”
• Trace Adkins, “You’re Gonna Miss This”
• Justin Moore, “Backwoods”
• Rascal Flatts, “Bless This Broken Road”
• Miranda Lambert, “White Liar”
• Josh Turner, “Why Don’t We Just Dance”
• Darius Rucker, “Don’t Think I Don’t Think About It”

And here’s King Country on Sunday (14) at 4:35 p.m.:

• Kenny Rogers, “Daytime Friends”
• Randy Travis, “Deeper Than The Holler”
• Willie Nelson, “Forgiving You Was Easy”
• Alan Jackson, “Little Bitty”
• Desert Rose Band, “One Step Forward”
• George Strait & Alan Jackson, “Murder On Music Row”
• Waylon Jennings, “T For Texas”
• Waylon Jennings & Willie Nelson, “Mammas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Cowboys”
• Sammy Kershaw, “Matches”
• Don Williams, “Amanda”
• George Strait, “Unwound”
• Eddie Rabbitt, “You Can’t Run From Love”
• Vern Gosdin, “Chiseled In Stone”
• Wynonna, “No One Else On Earth”

Have a great week. We’re back on Thursday with more Ross On Radio.
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From Love Fest to Fan Fest

CHUM-FM Toronto morning hosts Darren Lamb (left), Marilyn Denis, and Roger Ashby host the station’s “Fan Fest 2010” concert, held to coincide with Canadian Music Week and starring Daughtry, Hedley, Ke$ha, Faber Drive, the Stereos, Girlicious, Danny Fernandes, and Karl Wolf. The night before, Ashby was inducted into the Canadian Music & Broadcast Industry Hall of Fame.

Strong Night Of The Collective Soul

Rock AC WMMO Orlando, Fla., drew 13,000 to the latest installment of its long-running Downtown Concert Series starring Collective Soul.

Sean Ross is Executive Editor of Music and Programming for Radio-Info.com. He is also a consultant to the radio and music industries, and VP of music and programming for Edison Research. He can be reached at 973.763.1306. Stations he has recently worked with in his Edison capacity are asterisked.