Moneyball: Just Over Two Weeks to the Fall Book
• It’s just over two weeks until the start of the October ratings period that begins the “Fall book.” We made peace with “October” commencing less than halfway through September, right? After all, most of Munich’s “Oktoberfest”is in September.
As you’re making final preparations for the upcoming ratings period, working to ensure more listeners and longer TSL, we wanted to share results from NuVoodoo Ratings Prospects Study 24 showing the biggest tune-out catalysts across our sample of over 3,000 respondents nationwide, ages 14-64.
In the chart above, commercial breaks don’t even make it into the top five tune-out catalysts — they’re tied for sixth with songs that all sound the same and jokes or sketches that aren’t funny. Burned out songs is fifth, causing slightly fewer tune-outs than songs repeated multiple times in a few hours (the latter tied for second with talk about things that don’t interest me). And the number one tuneout catalyst is too many bad songs, which nearly half the sample says has caused them to tune out.
If we drill down in the sample to the 15% subset of the sample we predict are most likely to participate in ratings methodology (labeled “RPS Yes” in the table below), the percentage who’ve tuned out to avoid bad songs climbs to 61% — better than 3 in 5. Music repetition and fatigue (“Burned out songs”) have each caused tune-out among close to half the ratings likely respondents. Commercial breaks are a problem at over 40%, but music management problems are bigger issues.
We’re glad to show these results broken down by format constituencies — and even the ratings-likely format constituents where possible. There are lots of useful insights throughout NuVoodoo Ratings Prospects Study 24 and we’re walking clients (and could-be clients) through the deeper results. An email to tellmemore@nuvoodoo.com will get your team on our schedule. We promise it’ll be long on data and short on upsells.
If you manage or program a music radio station, the most important thing you can do to be ready for the book is make sure the music is right. When there’s no budget for music testing, using Mediabase to poach insights from stations similar to yours that may have a recent music test is a smart thing to do. Setting up a custom panel of stations so you can compare spins on all of them in a glance can show the titles that may hurt (or help) your station. It’s not perfect, but we’ll argue that data-driven decisions are usually better decisions.
Even with the fall ratings period starting in less than three weeks, you could still order a music test and have your library tuned up well before the end of the first phase (which ends October 9). OMT Lite from NuVoodoo is a solution for 400 titles and 100 perfectly-screened respondents for less than $10K, all inclusive. Again, an email to tellmemore@nuvoodoo.com (or leigh@nuvoodoo.com) will get you quick attention.
When you can stop worrying about the songs being right, then you can attend to making sure your content is dialed in. As we run up to the November election, music radio listeners will be looking for a safe space – a place where discord is minimized, and they can pursue a grin from hearing songs they love.
