If you have a Category that contains songs that are Hour Restricted and prohibited from scheduling in certain hours/dayparts, then you may or may not want to “flip” the restricted songs. Here’s how to decide.
If the category is set to schedule the songs within it multiple times a day, you want to flip. If it is a category in which songs are scheduled only a few times a week or month, you probably do not want to flip.
Explaining it: Say it is your Hot Current Hits category and your rotation plan has the songs in it getting 7 spins a day; about a 3:40 turnover, and one of the songs is hour restricted for No Play between 6a and 10a. Normally every song in Hot Current Hits would be scheduled at least once each day between 6 and 10. The hour-restriction would ‘hold’ a song until after 10. But, we wouldn’t then want that song to come up in the 10am hour every day. Yes, the Previous Day Separation rule would prevent that from happening on the following day, but the song would be in the same position every day. You could apply the two rules in the second graphic below, but the Flip is the better thing to do for tight-rotation categories. Remember, in this example the Category is set to give each song 7 spins a day, with a 3:40 separation between those plays. Do we want the song to be forced into a slot that is less than 2 hours away from a song’s next scheduled slot? Probably not. We’d expect and want that one to get only 6 spins for the day because of the restriction.
Flipping a ‘tight’ rotation category helps in this way: The flipped song will retain its correct rotational placement pattern. After it flips, it will next be scheduled 3:40 minutes later. So, if it comes up for scheduling at 8:00 and flips, it will next be scheduled at 11:40. If it it comes to the top of the stack at 9:00 and flips, it will next be scheduled at 12:40. If the song is not flipped, it will be at the top of the stack for scheduling in the 10am hour, The flip will keep the song in proper order so after the 8am ‘flip’ it will still schedule 3:40 after that. If not flipped, then the hour-restricted song will always be at the top of the card stack come 10am hour, Flipping keeps songs in proper re-scheduling order so their ‘next’ scheduled position after the flip will be one that conforms to your timely rotation plan as displayed by the Average Turnover chart of the category.
On the other hand, if s Category is set for, let’s say 5 spins a week, I would not want to ‘flip’ a restricted song. I’d want M1 to hold it to be scheduled after the hour-restriction is lifted so it will get its planned 5 plays each week. In my “No 6-to-10 Play” example, the restricted song would next be scheduled in the 10am hour. Then, over the coming weeks and months, there is a Category rule to prevent that from happening (song in same hour) too frequently.
Hour Restriction Flip