Chris Parr Music Programming

Music programming process at CMT; I mean, we basically are – we’re interpreting for ourselves what it means to our brand because we have a – obviously, it’s a little hard to explain in a short sentence or two, but it basically goes back to what we believe our audience and what they show us and what they tell us they’re interested in.

We have a very dynamic communication loop with them through our online presence with CMT.com, so I equate it to the old days and I was doing this before. The web was really as prominent as it is now, and, obviously, that’s become a communication tool, not only one way to the consumer, but, obviously, the consumer can tell you what they think as well. So, for instance, our music programming is very much influenced by the input that we get from our fans. You can call it – may analogy is if you were at a radio station, and a music director, 15, 20 years ago, not even that long, but if you were there, it’s the equivalent of the lights on the phone lighting up when you play that record.

We get the same thing now. It’s just electronic through dot com, and we get a lot of response. We basically – our music videos; most of them that we’re programming on the network are also available online, so you can see them on demand. What makes sense is that if people are going online to look at them, then we know that they’re really interested in that artist or that song, so it helps us to kind of steer our overall direction of what they might want to see. If you see a huge spike on a new video that you put online, it tells us that maybe we should be playing that more often on the air.

The first step of kind of deciding – there’s a whole acquisitions process that happens, where, basically, record labels make the music video. In the perfect world, it’s an extension of an artist, of their art, and I think now, a decade ago, it was probably less so. I think some artists – you kind of have to grow up with it a little bit, and I mean the music video medium’s been around for 20+ years, about 25 years if you really time it out. Really, the early ;’80s was when it became a creative format.

So in a perfect world now, you have artists who’ve been kind of – they’ve grown up in the environment. Some of our biggest artists in country music are in their 30s and some in their 20s; some are in their 40s, but it’s a bit of a generational thing there, and you see the artists who are probably in their 20s and 30s are more likely to use it as an extension of their art. It’s a way that they convey their image and their personality, so we see those things. The record labels bring them to us. It’s a function of the record company to create them. We try not to get too involved. We like to get – we try to give them as much feedback as possible about what we think works and what doesn’t, and we’re interpreting that based upon what we know about our audience, and if you’re reaching over 80 million households across the nation, we have a pretty good beat on that, we feel like.

But that process is very much like a record company would go and pitch a record to a radio station. It’s a very similar process. They bring it in, and it’s an acquisition; we look at it; we decide does this work for us. If it does work for us, do you play it – do you jump on it immediately now and play it really heavy or do you kind of start it out slow and work its way up, and then we look at the factors. There’s a lot of things that we look at . I tend to call them the tealeaves that we’re reading because it’s not an exact science. It’s very much our opinion of what our audience is interested in seeing.

But you’re looking at sales for that artist. It’s like are people buying it? Are they passionate enough? It’s a big indicator for us to see people actually purchasing things, and now that you’re getting into – you’ve obviously got digital downloads and kind of more of a – it’s kind of going back to the singles-driven idea of selling music, where the consumer can decide; well, I love that song, and I want that song and I want it now. I think we’re really just on the leading edge of that, where it’s like you could see those, and we’re seeing tremendous download numbers. It’s, obviously, a new tool, and I think that’s going to continue and most of the industry thinks it will, but you start to see sales.

You look at are they getting played at radio? Are people – my interpretation of that is less; where is it on the chart, the radio chart, than what are the impressions? Are people hearing this song before we decide to play it on the channel or we just feel so great about it and love it, and it’s visually so exciting that you go; people have to see this, and you lead with those, so it can go either way.

Sometimes, if a video’s kind of – we look at it and go; that’s pretty average or we’ve seen that a million times, we may let the song lead it a little bit more and let people have some familiarity from their radio station, and then maybe they’re more interested in seeing it on the channel. So there’s a tremendous number of variables there.

I mentioned the feedback that we get from our consumers and our fans; tens of thousands of streams a week. Once we make these videos available and once they’re on the air, we also have them available online, and so we can read that. It’s like it shows us what they’re interested in and we can rank those. We try not to get too caught up in that from a crunching number standpoint. There’s a lot of feel that goes into it, and you look at all those pieces at once. You’re also gonna want to look at what kind of press that artist is getting.

Everything counts. We really do. We literally sit in our music meeting and lay out all this information and look at every piece of it collectively and try to make the best decision. If you don’t get it right, there’s always next week. It’s a weekly process that happens, where you adjust your rotations and music play.

The music media really consists of my department. We’re actually very – as opposed to, and I keep making analogies to radio stations because it is kind of the traditional way that music comes in and you decide whether you’re going to play it or not, and it’s like, in radio, you typically have a program director and a music director, and they’re making those decisions for the radio station. We take a little bit more of a committee approach, if you will. There is one person, one of my directors of music and talent, who is focused on music programming specifically, and he kind of is the point person for it and runs the meeting for the department for me, but we basically bring in – we have a couple of schedulers that actually make the logs and actually implement the plan that we come out every week, so they’re really hands-on, so they’re in there and they’re doing that day in and day out.

Everybody in our department actually participates, and my theory behind that is that no one person’s opinion should over – it’s like my director that I’m speaking of is in his mid 20s, and he’s at a different point in his life than one of my other directors, who has been in this business and is a 25-year veteran of working with talent and artists, and she’s married, two kids, soccer mom kind of thing, so, obviously, those perspectives; you’re going to interpret, as the audience does. I think you need a breadth of people in that decision making process that can represent different parts of our audience, hopefully, so you don’t get too much of one or the other, and you try to balance it out, and there’s a lot of debate and discussion about what’s good, what isn’t good; have we seen that a million times; is that completely new and fresh; man, I love that song, but that video just really doesn’t do anything for it or I listened to the record, and that song never really jumped out at me.

Man, this video makes it amazing, and it’s like that’s what you ultimately hope for is that the video is this kind of even – it makes the song and the creativity of the artist. It just conveys another message or it adds on to it so much that you’re like; wow, people gotta see this. That’s what we hope for every day. So it’s really – I hate to say a decision by committee, but there’s got to be one person that makes the final decision because, inevitably, you’ll get a stalemate of half the room thinks it shouldn’t go on, and the other half thinks it should play every hour on the hour.

But a lot of that comes from working together week in and week out, and you’d be amazed at how – there are definitely debates about things, but there’s also a lot of clarity that comes about, where it’s just obvious. It rolls in, and you’re like; man, I don’t know if that’s ever gonna be a hit at radio or if it’s gonna feel like it’s way too far out there for the audience or whatever, but we just look at it and go; we think that’s brilliant and people ought to see it and people ought to hear it, and, fortunately, we’re in a position where we can go and kind of push that envelope if we’d like.

The current playlist is usually about anywhere from 35 to 40 that are currents, but then you’ve got a whole – you’ve got hundreds of what we would consider re-currents, goals, primary goals, things of that nature, where you kind of segment them based on age and the ultimate hit factor, so if you have a video or a video and a song that was multiple, six week No. 1 at country radio in any given time period, and we got tremendous response to it; it was just a huge hit, both video and song; well, obviously, time moves along, and it’s like; well, that video, that piece of music, for us, should obviously live on a more elevated platform than maybe things that just kind of came and went that maybe weren’t as big a hit or didn’t have as much of an impact or whatever.

So you’ve got to kind of rank your – you gotta make sure that your re currents, as we call them, that you’re playing familiar hits that people love; that they loved two years ago, so why wouldn’t they like to hear them occasionally now, and that’s kind of that balance of you can’t be so current-driven, and we’re very current-driven kind of a format. We really like to – CMT, especially; we like to kind of lead the audience; we like to be the head of it, but I know we’d gut-check all the time and say; are we playing that Tim McGraw hit from five years ago or Toby Keith hit from five years ago or whatever. Are we playing that enough, and it’s that constant balance that we have.

We have a weekly music meeting, and, on average, we’ll see anywhere from four to six videos, on average, per week, new videos that will come in that are submitted to the channel, and out of those, we might, depending on the week; we could find one to maybe three new slots. It’s a constant no music coming in, and then you’ve got to decide; well, what comes off because it’s a finite list, and that’s part of the discipline of running music programming and a playlist. You’re like; I want to put this on, but then you look at your list and it becomes the what’s the weakest link discussion? Okay, we really like this piece. We added it 10 weeks ago, 12 weeks ago, 15 weeks ago, whatever, but we’re really just not seeing – we start to look at all that data again, and we’re really not seeing the kind of response that we’d hoped.

And sometimes, our favorite pieces; we put them out there, and we think; this is brilliant and everybody ought to see it, but sometimes, your audience may not agree with you or maybe they just aren’t ready to go there. It may be that next song and single and video from that artist that they start to gravitate towards, but we have to be realistic and honest about that feedback that we’re getting, and sometimes, we don’t always hit it, the things that we love, that we think; man, they’re gonna eat this up, and then, unfortunately, you just don’t see the response, and you’re like; okay, we gotta take that one off. We’ll go play it in our car or at home for ourselves, but that’s kind of the process. It’s one to two maybe out of four or five on a weekly basis. Really, what you’re talking about is the mechanics of rotating or the rotations of music.

And, yes, it is very much math-based. You’ve, obviously, only got so many slots that you program. If a song’s three, on average, three and a half minutes long, you’ve only got so many minutes an hour, so how many heavies, how many lights, how many re currents are you gonna play within that hour, and it is very much – it’s a very scientific kind of here’s the clock and here’s how these pieces rotate together.

And, as a consumer, the idea is that if I’m gonna play you something, we, as programmers, and this is very typical. Radio would do the same thing, but if you’re gonna play the audience something brand new; they’ve never heard before and perhaps never even seen the artist, so it’s completely unknown. If we see it and think; boy, that’s a great new artist and a great song that our audience should hear and see; the thing is, you gotta really kind of wrap it, and you want a big hit going into it and a big hit coming out of it because the one principle about programming is that familiarity, for the audience, is key. People want to tune in and see their favorites. We’ve got to find that balance between, like; okay, how many new things can we play and where do we play them and maybe entice them into something new, but wrap it around things that they’re familiar with and they’re big hits.

And that’s the way you, hopefully, keep people watching all the time, so the mechanics of a clock or of an hour, and we actually have multiple clocks, so you don’t see the same thing each hour or you couldn’t identify a pattern, potentially; that a clock; it’s a very complex kind of algorithm, where it’s like a clock will play, and then the next hour, it’s a completely different clock, and then the next hour, it’s a completely different clock, and I think, at this point, we’ve got three rotating clocks, I believe.

So the combinations and permutations of that are pretty far-reaching. It’s not gonna – you’re not gonna look up. You shouldn’t look up and see it and think; wow, they played that same thing yesterday about this time. And you can do that. Ironically, it’s actually very easy to fall into that trap of you make a clock and kind of – for that week before you make any rotation changes, it could seem very similar to you or you could tend to see things fall in the same order, and there’s scheduling software that’s very specific to this task. You have to set up the rules within that software, but we tend to probably program more of what we call freeform programming. It’s very much by feel and tempo and what are you going in and out of as much as the hard mechanics of it.

We don’t break the rules every time, but if we think something’s a creative way to do it, then it’s up to our schedulers. They have the ability to make that choice.

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