04.04.07 An Insider’s Look At Christian Radio Pt.6: Testing 1,2,3.

Profanity - a theological issue - is my primary and only real concern about Christian radio today.  It’s the only thing, to me, that’s worth fighting about.  But there are other issues worth discussing, worth working through with those in the radio industry.

Among those is testing - specifically, how songs are tested by radio stations before being deemed worthy of airplay.  Many stations test songs on a group of target-market females without ever playing the songs on the air first.  Some of us believe this isn’t in the best interest of the music business in the long run.  Here are three observations about this form of music testing that will hopefully explain why some of us in Nashville don’t think it’s the best way to do business or treat listeners and artists.

1. When a radio station tests music without playing it on the air a few hundred times first, the test is primarily measuring the familiarity of a song, not how well the song will be received by its audience in the long run. The “long run” is as few as 300 spins away, by the way.

I majored in music composition with an emphasis on music of world cultures.  (Impressed?  Of course not.) One of the great unexpected insights gained from all that study was an understanding of how human beings, across cultures, religions, and history, determine which music is “good” and which is “bad.” A song, for instance, won’t be considered “good” by the listener unless it is familiar. 

I’ll give you a far-fetched scenario to make the point.  Imagine Mozart - someone universally considered a musical genius - were to be transported from his time and his culture into another.  Say, we transported him into the 1980’s in America.  Would he think any music made in the 20th Century was “good?” Ethnomusicologists say he wouldn’t.  Having never heard a synthesizer and a song with a verse, chorus, bridge form sung in English, he’d reject pop music in the 80’s as weird. It would be too different from what he knows to even be considered musical to his brain.  Also, having never heard a piece of music without a key signature and containing mixed meters, he would also reject “classical” atonal music of the 80’s.  It too would contain almost no familiar musical elements for him.

Turns out, the first thing we humans unconciously determine about a song is whether it is familiar.

We also like surprises though: A bridge that changes key unexpectedly and returns to the original for the closing chorus, a rhyme we’ve never heard before, etc.  But if we’re played a snippet of a song and forced to rate it as “good” or bad”, having never heard the song before, we aren’t warm to those surprises.  Such surprises in a short clip make the clip feel more unfamiliar than familar.  It’s then labeled “weird”, not “good.” A song must contain both familiar elements and surprises, and in the right amounts, if it’s to have a chance of being called “good.” Testing never-before-heard songs guarantees that songs with any amount of surprise in their short samples will be rejected...especially when being tested before or after very familiar sounding songs.  The contrast is startling to the listener.

Play the song a few times for us though, in it’s entirety, and what was once weird and new can be more easily appreciated as “good.”

Take my song “Twilight” and the testing it underwent at two major stations, as an example.  A certain large Adult Contemporary radio network tested the song.  I was elated.  They reported back to us, however, that it tested horribly.  On a scale of one to five it received a two point something.

At the same time, KXOJ in Tulsa played “Twilight” a few hundred times on the air and then tested it.  It did quite well.  And it wound up on their year end chart, proving that their listeners loved it in the long run.  And my sales in Tulsa on that album back up that claim as well.

Both stations tested the song on females of the same age in the bible belt (I think that’s important) using roughly the same methods.  But only one played the song first, getting listeners/test subjects past the awkward new phase and enabling them to give a true opinion of the song, not how it’s unfamiliarity made them feel.

2. Testing music without playing it first irritates the music business folks and the consumer by killing diversity of choice. It gives listeners more imitations and fewer originals.  It penalizes innovation and the new artist and rewards the copycat.

As one radio program director recently lamented to me over dinner after naming five female artists who, to him, sound identical: Record labels keep making the same record over and over.

Of course they do, I said.  It gets played.  And what gets played sells.  And you have to sell stuff if you’re in the music business.

Need examples?  That’s risky, but OK.

Mercy Me, Casting Crowns, and Stephen Curtis Chapman:  Great guys.  BUT...Vocally very similar.  The production, also similar.  Lyrical themes and style vary, but not much.

Barlow Girl’s first album and Evanescence:  Good girls.  I like what they say to teens and tweens everywhere about purity.  BUT...A blatant imitation.

Jimmy Needham: Talented guy.  So why did his first single sound just like Curbside Prophet by Jason Mraz?  It sure tested well.

And then there are the covers of mainstream songs: Rosanna becomes Hosanna.  Kyrie gets made over (with almost no changes) by Mark Shultz.  Selah resang Josh Groban.  My label’s radio promoter suggested I remake “Live Like You Were Dying.” Why?  Radio will play it.

And what about worship music?  A guy from our local AC station told me that I needed to find a worship song everyone knows and redo it so I can get back on the charts.  Like By The Tree, The Newsboys, Big Daddy Weave, Michael W. Smith, Rebecca St. James and… The surest way to test well these days and, therefore, get played is to stop singing a new song and sing someone else’s, especially if church services have already made it familiar to test subjects.  (How many Hymn records have been put out in the last three years for the same reason?)

3. Testing songs that haven’t been played on the air yet turns test subjects into nothing but a focus group. And leaders don’t limit themselves to the feelings of focus groups.  Focus groups don’t know what they want or need or what they will like over time.  All they know is what has already been done, what they liked once, what they might like again, how they feel.  That’s a flakey set of data to base a business, let a lone a ministry, upon.

Consider this:  If Henry Ford consulted a focus group, he would have made better horses instead of cars.  That’s what the people thought they needed.  Horses were all they’d ever known.  Horses were familiar.  They knew what to do with a horse. When the first farmers were shown the first car they laughed.  But once they saw a few in action, well, exposure has a way of changing minds doesn’t it?  Think about that the nest time you’re driving down the road listening to one of the many recordings of Breathe on your local Christian radio station.