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...at certain times?
R1 are playing a lot of older* Lizzo at the minute - do record companies offer "25% off all Lizzo tracks in June" type of deals? I often notice certain artists randomly get a lot of air-play - and Pink Pony Club is back on repeat after a few months off. 🐴
I assume there isn't a fixed rate for radio plays of songs or local commericial radio wouldn't have most of their output over 25 years old! 😀 And I guess plays at 3am don't cost as much as plays on the breakfast show.
(*old being relative!)
EDIT - edit added now! 🤣
Hmmm - post editing not working - I was adding...
...and Pink Pony Club is back on repeat after a few months off. 🐴
Certainly 6Music will pick an artist to promote for a week or so, someone who is liked by the station and maybe hasn’t released anything much for a while, or is maybe new on their radar.
I don’t listen to much radio these days, so I’m not familiar with who’s getting played on 6, except if I’m in the car, but I do hear a few artists I’m not familiar with, and try to make a mental note to check them out later. CarPlay needs to have a Shazam button I can tap while driving…
As i understand it, it's a standard rate per radio station, regardless of time of day.
The radio station would just pay a blanket licence once a year and that would cover everything, so it wouldn't make any difference, money wise, what they played.
For the big radio stations, every song play is tracked. For a lot of smaller, local and commercial stations, they just take a sample a few times a year and extrapolate from there.
So if they're hammering the golden oldies, it's probably because the suits have decided that this is what keeps people listening!
With bbc stuff, and R6 particular, I've a suspicion that there's a list of recently played stuff that the hosts can browse for ideas. Because sometimes you don't hear a track for years and then it gets played on 3 different shows in a week.
Lizzo
Is that an abbreviation of King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard? I might return to R1 after a thirty year absence if they're playing more stuff like that!
Don't record companies ask/give incentives to radio stations to promote artists when they have something new coming out soon?
Payola is illegal (in radio anyway, Spotify are merrily rebranding it for the 2020s), but yes, labels will do whatever they can to get their tunes on radio. This includes general promotion (sending the tracks to all the DJs and their staff), paying radio pluggers (who will target/speak to DJs directly) and do stuff like 'offering access to the artist' ie suggesting that the artist might be up for an interview or live session or what have you. Or even just offer competition prizes etc.
As festival season is here, I wouldn't be surprised if there is some connection with whatever big festival is coming up or just been. So the headliners get ramped up a bit.
Lizzo must be part of a very small crossover between Radio 1 and 6 Music?
Not that I’d know as I abandoned the former for the latter after a mark and Lard left
You can’t beat a bit of Lizzo though…
Older tracks will sometimes reappear on playlists if they’ve been used on a show or film and then boosted by lots of streaming so they reappear in the charts (Kate Bush - Running up that Hill, after being used in Stranger Things, being a good example).
On Radio Caroline the DJs play whatever they want without having to run it past advertising execs.
They mentioned a fellow DJ on a 70s station who can't play Slade anymore as they are too loud.
Clyde Wan, the station of choice for many weegies, plays the same few tracks every sodding day. Pink Pony Club, Messy and a couple of Benson Boone tracks feature heavily. They also have a bizarre daily urge to play Human by the Killers, first released in 2008. Can't believe they don't have some kind of financial incentive. Still, the traffic reports are pretty accurate.
I would have thought the whole thing is 'rigged' ie there will be record promoters who promote their artists on to Radio Organisations, and its all very much corporate dealings rather than anything to do with who likes what music. A DJ will turn up and be told they are playing a particular type of music.
Id imagine John Peel was the last DJ to have any real influence on what got played.
What does annoy me is how Radio 2 goes on so much about smart speakers. Its as though a well know smart speaker company is sponsoring them 😡
I was surprised to see that Radio Pluggers were still a thing when I looked them up a few weeks ago. They have some influence on what gets played.
I'd suggest the deal is different between commercial stations and the BBC. The BBC obviously has to pay for tracks, but they'll also balance that against a 'public interest' or educate/ informate/ irritate (whatever the Reithian values are) remit. So 6Music selects key musicians they believe are important to promote (Sports Team, Kae Tempest, Antony Shmerick) and will ensure they're on solid rotation among the others.
Commercial stations will be more focused on the bottom line I suspect; and I reckon they get special deals from labels. The entirety of ELO's singles output seems to be on a bulk buy on Greatest Hits Radio, for example; sadly they also seem to have got Robbie Williams' catalogue for free as part of that deal
What does annoy me is how Radio 2 goes on so much about smart speakers. Its as though a well know smart speaker company is sponsoring them
R6M is the same - I don't quite understand what's in it for them promoting the things. Everyone that's listening to the station is doing so on a digital device by default already and as such it almost certainly sounds better than on any "smart speaker" is likely to. They're built more for convenience and compactness than their audiophile qualities.
Maybe they'll become a web only service rather than DAB and this is a way towards that?
The Beeb was behind the curve when it came to digital audio - it refused for years to call podcasts podcasts, instead referring to them as 'downloads' (because they reckoned podcasts was a brand-related term...), and I think hindering the adoption of podcasts in the UK.
The whole "tell your smart speaker..." schtick, and the now ridiculous extent to which it devotes efforts to podcasts ("what happened when Man City played Liverpool in game week 27 of the 2019 Premier League season? Our new 17-part podcast series delves into it..."), are probably an over-correction to that.
R6M is the same - I don't quite understand what's in it for them promoting the things. Everyone that's listening to the station is doing so on a digital device by default already and as such it almost certainly sounds better than on any "smart speaker" is likely to. They're built more for convenience and compactness than their audiophile qualities.
Maybe they'll become a web only service rather than DAB and this is a way towards that?
Presumably it's due to Sounds/streaming being easily monitored for actual listening data about the audience. Not in a tin-foil hat way, just in terms of being able to tailor the stations towards what seems to work. Or not.
That and radio infrastructure costs money.
With bbc stuff, and R6 particular, I've a suspicion that there's a list of recently played stuff that the hosts can browse for ideas. Because sometimes you don't hear a track for years and then it gets played on 3 different shows in a week.
They have A-list and B-list playlists, the A list is played on every show, the b-list is played every day. I don't know if it's still there but you used to be able to find them online. We used to use it in the Student Halls bar, just download the track lists off limewire iTunes* and hit shuffle.
*in those days there was a plugin that let you browse the entire university WAN/LAN network, so even without resorting to limewire you could find someone who had it
They also have a bizarre daily urge to play Human by the Killers, first released in 2008. Can't believe they don't have some kind of financial incentive.
I wondered it it was a payment per day or something so if you played it on every show it was cheaper than playing one killers song every show.
Used to have a local pop station on where I worked and you could actually learn what song was coming next as they didn't even shuffle the playlists, it just played out the same every ~6hours 😂
The whole "tell your smart speaker..." schtick, and the now ridiculous extent to which it devotes efforts to podcasts ("what happened when Man City played Liverpool in game week 27 of the 2019 Premier League season? Our new 17-part podcast series delves into it..."), are probably an over-correction to that.
The BBC Sport podcasts are becoming more Partidge-esque by the day in a ‘Youth Hostelling with Chris Eubank’ sort of way
Download the 25 part story to re-live Leicester’s glorious 2016 Premier League victory, narrated by Michael Gove…
Maybe they'll become a web only service rather than DAB and this is a way towards that?
Given that TV broadcast is likely* to be switched off within a decade then that's not beyond the realms of probability.
Even in the car I tend to stream via my phone.
*2034 is the current cliff edge, and the BBC is fairly apathetic about extending it because their dwindling budget means they can't fill a liner schedule anymore.
While we are on the subject people could be forgiven for thinking Steve Harley only made Come Up And See Me and The Eagles Hotel California 🙄
Id imagine John Peel was the last DJ to have any real influence on what got played.
You'd imagine wrong. But there is a big difference between commercial radio (DJ probably doesn't choose anything), BBC daytime (DJ gets some freedom but still has to play the playlisted tracks) and BBC evenings and weekends.
With 6music in particular, I know that Jamz Supernova, Tom Ravenscroft and Mary Ann Hobbes read emails from musicians and play stuff they've been sent, because I and some of my friends have chatted to them over the years, sent tracks to them etc. The same goes for the late night DJs on R1. And if you think Gilles Peterson is only playing 12 minute Venezualan nose-flute solos because he's taking instructions from the woke lefty cabal that rule the beeb I don't know what to tell you!
Then there are the DJs like, say, Don Letts, who choose their own tunes but are somewhat out of the scene these days, so with new stuff they'll spend a lot of time chatting to pluggers to help them find the stuff they like and make sure they're comfortable with it.
>>>> With bbc stuff, and R6 particular, I've a suspicion that there's a list of recently played stuff that the hosts can browse for ideas. >>>>Because sometimes you don't hear a track for years and then it gets played on 3 different shows in a week.
They have A-list and B-list playlists, the A list is played on every show, the b-list is played every day. I don't know if it's still there but you used to be able to find them online.
Yeah but I mean the old stuff! One example that springs to mind was that Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood 'Velvet Morning' track. Suddenly there was a month where every 6music DJ seemed to rediscover it all at once. Maybe there was a policy of occasionally sticking one from the vaults on the B list? Seemed a bit weird though.