Author: Jay Goldberg
In a prior column I wrote about using a clockwheel in place of AutoDJ (including in place of clockwheel as AutoDJ). The main reason? You can track the songs that are played. To do this, give all your songs the same category, such as “all” and create a simple clockwheel with a station ID, ad, promo, and then 5 to 7 of the category codes (e.g. “all”).
Now the next step, a quick case study on how 'random' tracks are when using a clockwheel. I will now look at that for my clockwheel that plays all songs in my account randomly. That clockwheel plays all day (23:59) on Fridays. Since my station plays indie and small label artist songs along with established artist songs, this ensures all indie and small label artist songs are eligible to be played on the station at least once a week (the other days are themed so not all songs are eligible to be played). This programming strategy has resulted in lots of indie artists, promoters, and small record labels sending me music.
Note: I am purposely writing the above intro before I do the study so as to commit to it no matter my findings.
To start, I have 6,831 songs on my station at the start of this analysis.
On my show for January 31, there were 327 songs 'scheduled' to be played. I wrote 'scheduled' because often the last few songs in the clockwheel don't play because the next day's event starts. Two songs (less than 1% of the songs) played twice, all other songs played once.
On my show for January 24, there were 316 songs scheduled to be played. Five songs (about 1.5% of the songs) played twice, all other songs played once.
On my show for January 17, there were 323 songs scheduled to be played. Three songs (about 1% of the songs) played twice, all other songs played once.
On my show for January 10, there were 325 songs scheduled to be played. Eight songs (about 2.5% of the songs) played twice, all other songs played once.
On my show for January 3, there were 324 songs scheduled to be played. Three songs (about 1% of the songs) played twice, all other songs played once.
So, no songs were played more than twice in a day and there were a total of 1,615 songs played with only 21 songs played two times a day during any of these five days (1.3%).
Lastly, how about repeat songs during the five days combined (we already know 21 played twice)? Over the five shows (one show per week), 85 songs were played more than once. Of those, 81 were played twice, 3 were played three times, and 1 was played four times (out of 1,615 songs – about 5% of the songs were played more than once over five shows).
All in all, pretty random without a lot of repeat songs when using the clockwheel method.
Now on to the music. The indie artist this month is Karen Sucher from South Florida. In addition to writing songs with terrific melodies, Karen is one of the better songwriters when it comes to lyrics. Her approach to writing lyrics is like a folk singer, although her music is definitely adult alternative rock. That means there is more depth to her lyrics than many of the indie artists whose music I play on my station. Below are some of my favorites of her songs. You can contact her for songs for your station through her Karen Sucher Music Page on Facebook.
"Raise a Glass"
"Huntington Nancy"
"Greenlawn"
"Better Be Careful"
"A Mother's Love Never Dies"
"Wake Me Up When It's Over"
"It's Only Life After All"
"I Wanna Be"
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