Arun Katiyar: Killer vs filler

TUNING IN/ What defines good music on a radio station?

All music is good, it doesn't matter that you don't like it. Someone, somewhere likes it. Sure, there is bad music as well. But over a period of time, even that can become good music.

Conversely, good music can one day come to be classified as bad. Sounds confusing? It is. Remember music and songs are largely contextual: they define the mood, the thoughts, the hope and despair of a period. That's how people identify with songs.

Many will not remember an ancient hit, "Mera piya gaye hain Rangoon....kiya hai telephoone...tumhari yaad satati hai..." Today, if you hear it, the song brings on a smile, nothing else. A hit hasn't become a flop, but has become irrelevant. The context has vanished.

In other cases, there is burnout. The song is a monster hit, but it has played so often that people are sick of it. One such example is "Tum tho thehre pardesi." It's a great song, but audiences have overdosed on it. So how does a radio station decide what song to play?

One way is to get a great programme director who has an intuitive feel for what is good and what is not, what is a hit and what is a miss, what is killer and what is filler.

Chances are that for some time, the station will be aligned with listener expectations and slowly that fact will change. The audience taste will morph faster than that of the programme director and the station will quickly be out of sync with its audience.

Unless programmers can rapidly re-calibrate their thinking, the radio station will be playing music for a smaller audience than it should.

There are three ways to work around this problem: pay attention to music sales, to movies that are big hits and research the audience.

Paying attention to music sales will bring about the obvious "� tell you what people are listening to. And it may not be a bad idea to play exactly what they are buying. Paying attention to the movies that are turning into big hits is a way of saying what music the audience will be listening to shortly. But the safest way is to test all the music before it is played. If the audience sample size "� and, as with all market research, the sampling "� is right, the results will be spot on.

Audiences know what they want to listen to "� and it is not difficult to see the obvious verdicts in a large audience. Which is why you can immediately tell at a concert which songs the audience loved and which it didn't.

So when listeners send in their requests or page in saying they didn't like a particular song, should that be factored into music selection? Certainly not. There is the very real danger of the feedback representing a skewed sample.

The difference between a rock concert audience and the one responding to you on air is that in the first case we can observe the entire audience and in the second we can never be sure.

The simplest way is to research the market. Know exactly what your audience wants and how badly it does so. Know exactly what part of your audience wants a particular kind of music and which part of the audience doesn't.

Given that Bollywood drives the Indian music scene, especially the Hindi music scene, changes in taste are bound to be rapid. So a period of several new releases will mean shorter gaps between the research. Fewer hits in the movie business could make a difference to the frequency of the research.

Radio is like any other consumer product "� it needs to stay completely aligned with the demands of the audience. The closer it gets, the bigger the audience a station will command.

The next time you want to buy time on a radio station for your product, one of the questions you could ask is: when was the last time the station tested its music with your audience?

(Arun Katiyar has spent over two decades working in the print, internet and radio media. He can be contacted at katiyararun@yahoo.com).