The Infinite Dial

The WunderRadio iPhone app has, for the last 10 weeks, been the nerve center of most of my radio listening. And one of the things it does is show you not just your "recently played" stations, but the number of times you've listened to them.

One of my client stations is far ahead in the lead. I've listened to them more than 400 times since late December. Another client is around 350 listens and their closest competitor is around 300. As you can imagine from that later example, a lot of what I was doing in those cases was using those three stations as punch buttons--checking what was going on for a song or two or even a few seconds, but not staying.

After that, there's a precipitous drop. There are 23 plays for one of my deep Oldies favorites, CKWW (AM580) Detroit. But almost everybody else is under 10 spins, and that includes some other faves that you're used to hearing about, such as Top 40 WDJQ (Q92) Canton, Ohio, and Urban AC KFXZ (Z105.9) Lafayette, La.

In other words, at a time when programmers are being encouraged to stop worrying about tuneout and boost a greater number of listening occasions, there are very few stations that have brought me back more than once a week. And that is a result of the Infinite Dial's worth of choice that other listeners are having made available to them right about now.

Okay, only another radio geek is going to have quite as many "buttons" as I do--in the hundreds and counting. But even for somebody outside the business, the number of available occasions is going to be split many more ways. And then it comes back to the things that we've been talking about here for years -- trying to be famous for something when your competition is a whole nation of similarly named music utilities and controlling your station's place in the directory of available choices.