The Infinite Dial

As long as radio stations have been looking to become more contemporary, there has always been a balancing act involved: not trying to recruit new, younger listeners by chasing off the ones that already exist. It's smart to think about the existing core, rather than chase the listeners that may have been siphoned off by a new competitor. Some stations have famously fumbled that maneuver and wound up making neither audience happy.

But after working with music research for many years, here's the secret to updating a radio station:

The audience is almost always ahead of you. The songs that most PDs think they would never accept often end up as the top of the page records by the time they do go into a station's music research.

That doesn't mean you can entirely dismiss compatibility and expectation. But it does mean that an audience's expectation may have been redefined without you knowing about it. And it means that everything your target likes should be monitored as often as possible -- most PDs wouldn't regard testing an "edgy" song as "actionable" until they've personally come to grips with it being a record for their format. But if the audience is moving faster than you, isn't that actionable information also?