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]

Depends what you mean by "narrative," but it may be rather (or also) that teenpop's use in the Disney narrative (by which I don't mean the plots of Lizzie McGuire and Hannah Montana and High School Musical but the story that Disney is telling kids of "this is your music, your kid concerns") runs counter to whatever narrative the audience for mainstream Top 40 is telling itself - and the actual sound and lyrics of "Potential Breakup Song" gets overlooked in this: if the Top 40 radio audience will accept Avril's "Girlfriend" and Pink's "U + Ur Hand," there's no reason in principle for it to have a problem with the sound of "Potential Breakup Song," though, as you suggest, the sound may be too high-spirited (as opposed to JoJo, who's simply someone young singing - very well - standard r&b-based pop). And the lyrics to PBUS are right along the lines of male-female relationship stuff that saturates pop radio, nothing particularly kid specific, even though the "forget my birthday" thing is maybe too innocent and unfraught in comparison to, e.g., JoJo's "you left her number on your phone."