by Taylor Ball

Created on: June 28, 2009

Variety is what an audience enjoys in entertainment businesses no matter what they are promoting. Re-runs are not watched as often for the reason that people have seen it before. They know what is coming. The sense of wonder and curiosity is lost in the eyes of the person watching and there is nothing to keep them interested and entertained. Therefore, the remote is picked up, not to turn up the television, but instead to quickly change the channel.

Radio stations have a similar problem when playing repetitive music. Even a favorite song can get old quickly when played over and over again. Songs are over played very often and stations need to keep up with what is new and popular for the audience that they are trying to reach out to whether that is teenagers, seniors, or middle-aged adults. It is just as important to keep up with every age and to know exactly what music they are looking for. People get tired of having to constantly tune it to different radio stations to change it up a bit and this is a key reason to the fact that most do not stay loyal to one specific station and ratings may go down.

What makes leading radio stations better then their competitors? The most popular stations most likely become this way by shortening commercials, promoting, but most importantly by variety. Nobody wants to turn on the radio and sit through ten minutes of commercials, they want music and they want it now. Promoting is important to get the name of your company out there and well known to the public. People will start to get interested and if they are lucky more listeners will check it out and tune in on a daily basis. They can not play the same songs hourly and expect listeners to put up with it. This is where variety plays a big role. Leading stations will have a larger play-list and I don't speak alone when I say this is why they are succeeding.

However, stations do have a specific genre that they tend to be loyal to.There are different styles of music out there including rap, hip-hop, rock and roll, jaz, country, techno, latino, and many others. There is no excuse to replaying songs up to twelve times in one day and unfortunately most stations repeat tracks hourly. Yes, they can still be loyal to one type of music but there are thousands, if not millions, of songs to choose from in each different genre. Give a variety, be unexpected, and stand out. That is what makes a good radio station popular and successful.

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