TV vs Radio

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

I was going to post this as a comment on the Aly and AJ thread but I thought I'd give it its own post. I have to admit this is founded not at all in any kind of fact! Anyway here is my theory:

If yr a radio playlister or researcher your main desire is to stop people switching over: a lot of people stick to a single radio station and don't channel hop much so if someone switches over or off you might not get them back for a while. Video channels are far more accepting of switching, because TV users channel hop more.

So imagine songs being scored on a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 meaning "awful, would switch off/over", 5 meaning "terrific, would stop channel-hopping if I found it", and 2-4 being various degrees of like/dislike which cause no immediate behavioural reaction. Obviously you want the songs on your playlist to have as high an average score among your listeners as possible. But on radio you want to minimise the 1-scorers, and on video channels you want to maximise the 5 scorers. If a song like Aly and AJ has 2/3 "5" and 1/3 "1" reactions, it will have a higher average score than a song with all "3"s but will be a much bigger risk for a radio station.

And I think Aly & AJ IS that kind of song - the way it starts so breathlessly, it's in-yr-face with its poppiness and if you dislike teenpop in general I'd guess you'll find that less palatable than "Gimme More" or "About You Now". So even beyond the demographics there's a reason why it might hit on video and not radio.

Speaking of demographics, I guess Radio 1 and other stations must have a very firm idea about what age people start listening to radio regularly, and I would imagine that average age is getting nearer and nearer to the age they start driving. I get the impression that Radio 1 has basically given up on yr actual kids, which makes them much less likely to take a chance on something with kid appeal.

Comments

[koganbot]

Although the video is very successful, at least online (in the U.S. is number 8 on Launch Yahoo and number 5 on AOL music), it's all about the girls as song creators and exemplars and not at all about the relationship problems described in the lyrics. And the "Chemicals React" video was all about the girls performing, not about the boy-girl sexual chemistry that was the song's subject. Curious what you thought of "Blush," the song where Aly is telling the guy that she won't go all the way but she very much wants to be touched, even wants him to try to cross that boundary. (Could one describe Aly as a sex-positive virgin? This would make more sense in a culture with more traditionalist sexual mores: e.g., good-Catholic Shakira remaining a virgin for so long while shaking her tush wherever possible.) So the relative absence of boys in the Aly & A.J. videos may be a way of avoiding some of the tensions in their lyrics, but also might take those videos outside the male-female mating dance that's so much of pop music, so keeping those videos farther from supposedly grownup or even teen concerns. (Taylor Swift's "Tim McGraw" implies very much that the relationship between the narrator and the boy included intercourse. And of course Tim McGraw, the singer after whom the song is named, had a song where early love and intercourse leads to an abortion.)

[koganbot]

Those vid numbers are especially impressive since the vid's been around for something like three months.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

This is another specific problem with Aly and AJ - the whole religious virgin thing can sit as part of their biography in the US, and will appeal to some and not appeal to others. But in the UK, even to the teen audience, I'm sure that stuff still codes as "weird". Fine, leave it out. But that kind of leaves a gap where a Big Fact might be.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

It may be left out but it's also the automatic assumption and the kneejerk instinctive reason people will give for being turned off them - I think they've actually gone out of their way NOT to mention religion, and I doubt they're any more religious than most US pop stars, but together with their blondeness and Disneyness and the one quote about evolution which gets recycled (though not so often that it's become the Big Aly & AJ Fact)...

(have they ever said anything about virginity? I'm not aware of any of their pronouncements on the subject - the fact that you assumed that, that's an indication that there's a whole weird stereotype which it's v easy for people to chuck A&A into whether or not it's accurate.)

(plus, the whole Xtian virgin thing was done nearly a decade ago; acceptance of Britney then was predicated on the fact that she said those things while dressing/singing like someone who wasn't a virgin. A&A don't do that. At all.)

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

My mention of virginity was replying to Frank's "sex-positive virgin" mention, so I assumed it was an established part of the story, but re-reading of course he's only talking about Aly's persona in "Blush".

[koganbot]

I don't follow what's written about their lives closely enough to know, but they are more religious than the average pop singers, at least in that they sell to the contemporary Christian music (CCM) market, had a single "Never Far Behind" released specifically for it (according to Wiki, at any rate), and were "nominated for 'Contemporary Inspirational Artist of the Year' (also known as Christian Artist of the Year) for the 2006 American Music Awards, which were held on November 21, 2006."

Of course, "Blush" can be interpreted as her being merely not yet ready for sex, or not yet ready for sex with this particular guy (without any implications about past or future behavior or moral imperatives), but it makes more sense, and is more poignant, if you think she thinks there's a moral rule that forbids her to have intercourse.