One of the cornerstones of the MusicONE algorithm is that every song in a category will receive the same number of plays. So, if a Recent Hits category is planned to get four plays each week, then every song will get four spins. Our formatting rules will give us a few stops for editing decisions, but if you encounter a lot of stops, the rules or the category content need adjusting. A “lot” of editing stops is a matter of perspective, of course. Some music directors enjoy spending ten or twenty minutes with each schedule. Personally, I think a “lot” is anything more than ten.
All music rotations are the end-result of a simple math equation. The number of songs in the category is divided into the number of times the category is formatted in the broadcast week. M1 figures this out for you; that’s what you see on each category’s Rotation chart. You can, however, set content and music flow rules that conflict with the makeup of your library. That will result in a lot of editing stops during the scheduling sessions.
A Rule That Doesn’t Work
On average, broadcast stations schedule 14 songs an hour. If the station’s song library is one-third by female singers, the math says the average hour will have 4.66 songs by Female singers. If the music director sets a clock rule to allow only 4 Females an hour, then the girl singers are quickly going to back up, clog the pipes with no place to schedule without violating the too-many-females-in-the-hour rule. If the music director wants no more than four Female songs in the hour, he needs to have five percent fewer Female songs in rotation. 25% of 14 comes to 3.5 Females an hour and that’ll work. Half his hours will have four girls and half will have three. Now, if he absolutely WANTS four Females every hour, he needs to create and format some categories that contain only Female singers.
It’s possible to create many hundreds of clock rules because they multiply exponentially. This is especially true with Sound Codes. There are thirty of them and every one can be ruled against every other one. It is quite easy to install so many formatting rules into the clocks that almost nothing can schedule without violating one rule or another. The four minute video below has an example of that very thing.
