A study released by Alan Burns & Associates goes hand-in-hand with what we discussed on July 28th and 29th

The study sets out to determine what a music radio station talks about between the music? Does it talk about things the audience wants to hear, or about things the station wants the audience to hear?

How much of music radio’s verbal content is driven by the station’s needs, and how much by the audience’s needs and desires?

Here are the top 5 headlines within the study:

1: Music radio dominantly talks to the audience about radio, rather than about the audience or about music.

2. Stations in larger markets send more positioning messages…but they also talk to the listener, and about music, slightly more than smaller markets.

3. There is wide variation between stations in these measures.

4. One large company is a bigger “positioner” than another.

5. AC and CHR position equally often on average.

Alan’s Commentary

The radio industry is under enormous pressure from revenue challenges, new technologies, and the fight to maintain relevance – especially among younger consumers.

In the long run, maintaining relevance is the most vital of those issues. In fact, maintaining and increasing relevance may be the solution to the other challenges – in the long run. The more relevant and important radio’s content is, the better it competes with less intimate media – such as online  – and the greater the perceived importance of the medium to the public and advertisers.

By not engaging listeners fully and intimately, radio has created a generation or two of listeners whose involvement with the medium is less than their predecessors. And we’re falling into a self-perpetuating, increasingly tight spiral: the less attention listeners pay to us, the more we have to pound home our messages – and the less attention they pay to them.

We aren’t suggesting that we stop positioning and promoting. Far from it. But music radio does need to find ways to make what we do more about the listener and the music, and less about the station. It’s a lot like trying to interest a newly-met girl when you were single: the more you bragged about yourself, the less interested she became; but the more you talked about her interests, the more interesting you became.

See the full study at http://www.burnsradio.com/articles/content_analysis.htm

Contact Alan at alan@burnsradio.com