It often happens with a new Music 1 user’s first time around the track. It’s quite easy to install formatting and music flow rules that simply don’t jive with the content of the library. This video demonstrates something I’ve often seen with new M1 start-ups. M1 is designed to deliver the same number of spins for each and all the songs within a category. This station’s library contains about 33%Slow songs. The music director set rules in such a way as to allow only about 25% Slow content in the format schedules. So, the scheduling run is immediately clogged with a lot of Slow songs that have no place to schedule.
Platooning is a music radio formatting tactic that pre-dates music scheduling software, actually. Way back, I might have a Power Gold category of about 300 songs, but in a given week I’d have only 200 of them in the control room in rotation. Every other week, I’d move 100 of those out and move the other hundred in. It was much the same as a coach making strategic substitutions to keep his players fresh. Done consistently, it created the impression that the station was playing a lot more songs than it actually was. The Hits just kept on coming.
