After the Sugarland show the band and crew packed up and headed home to Nashville. I, on the other hand, stayed overnight with my in-laws and took a flight out in the morning to another city. I met up with a program director for a major radio network and one of our radio promoters for a lunch meeting, a chance to get to know each other and, honestly, give our single Bless the Lord a better shot at getting attention.
(NOTE: A radio promoter is a person hired by the label to bug and shmooze stations into playing songs from the label’s artists. Those songs are called “singles.")
I told the network’s programmer that I wasn’t in town to ask him to play my single - that’s the radio promoter’s job. I was there to learn. I love to learn about this business and teach others what I discover because it quells cynicism and angst. Knowledge does that.
If a station doesn’t play my music my human response it disappointment. If they don’t play any music from my label for two years my human response is anger. I’m just immature that way - especially when other artist friends of mine tell me of how their label gives TVs, vacation packages and golf outings to programmers in exchange for radio play. Chaps my hide.
So I can stew and curse and throw an artist tantrum or I can learn why a network like this does what they do and how they do it. I can try to get to the heart of what they want to accomplish, what their, for lack of a less used word, “mission” is.
If I can walk away truly supportive of who they are and what they’re out to do I’m less likely to be angry when I’m not part of what they’re doing. I can honestly say when I hear my new single has been added to rotation, “Well, that makes. That song doesn’t help them meet their goals. It won’t get them what they want.”
So I asked this programmer to explain what he’s doing, how and why and was shocked by his honesty. In a nutshell, and I hope I don’t misrepresent by simplifying more than two hours of conversation this way, his primary goal is to increase his audience size and therefore increase advertising revenue. He used the metaphor of a mountain regularly and this increase in ratings and revenue is the peak for his station and, he believes, every station.
He goes about reaching this peak by testing songs on people already listening to his station and those who sometimes listen. The goal then is to find new music that appeals to both old loyal listeners and potential loyal listeners. The station then sounds, not surprisingly, old. That’s not to say it’s bad. It just plays a great deal of “gold” music - old hits that are familiar to listeners and test well. And then sprinkles in new songs that sound like those old hits. Thing is these “new” songs aren’t often all that new.
He proudly told me, for instance, that his station just added SHOULD I TELL THEM, a song of mine that went #1 three years ago, because it tested well for him.
There’s more to the conversation you’d find interesting but here’s what surprised me the most. After time talking about testing etc I moved beyond business goals and strategy to spiritual matters. I asked him what I want everyone in this business to be asked, regardless of their sector of the industry. Who is your audience? Christians? Non-Christians? Both? And why? What do you dream happens through you for them and in them? What’s the spiritual goal of your station?
The answer floored me. I’ll share that soon. Until then, what do you think you local Christian station’s answers are to those important questions? WHat about your favorite artist or author or label? Have you asked? Maybe you should.
Sugarland is a suburb of Houston where my father-in-law pastors Williams Trace Baptist Church. The people at his church feel like a second family to us even though we only get to see them three or four times a year. This was our first time to play in their new sanctuary, a massive pewed room I was promised would be adorned with a plaque soon that reads “Shaun Groves Worship Center.” That would make it a house of worship named after me not a house for worshiping me.
Apparently the engravers are backlogged or something. Maybe next time.
Thanks to KSBJ for promoting this show so well and selling tickets for us too. And thanks to Pappasitos for feeding me queso, fajitas and other manna from heaven twice while in Texas.
The folks of Corpus were preparing for a hurricane that would hit in the next 72 hours. As we made the rounds from venue and hotel to lunch and Family Christian Store appearance we noticed lots of cars loaded down with plywood and other supplies for securing homes from destructive storms.
As a result, in spite of KBNJ’s stellar promotions, the crowd was smaller than I’ve had there in the past. But those who braved the downpour and shrugged off the impending hurricane were rowdy and ready for WHITE FLAG. Afterward contest winners climbed aboard our bus and had cheesecake with us. I like contests that involve me getting to eat. More of that.
Thanks to Aaron Daniels at KBNJ and to the brave people of Corpus for coming out once again. You make me miss Texas. Well, you and your fajitas.
This is where my parents and sister live and where I grew up. KVNE, the station there, once played nothing but choirs and Sandi Patty, not that there’s anything wrong with that, but today plays more contemporary fare. Because they’re not a reporting station (a station whose activity helps determine what songs are on the charts) they have freedom to play songs that labels aren’t asking radio to play. So KVNE is playing four songs from my new CD. That’ll mess you up. Way more than the legal limit. I’m pretty sure there’s a warning label of some kind on the disc about that kind of thing.
I did the morning show at KVNE, an interview with the local TV station I grew up watching, and then headed to lunch with contest winners: more Mexican food for me. The show that night was at Friendly Baptist Church (every church in Texas is Baptist it seems) and I recognized most of the large crowd from my childhood. There was a lot of “Do you remember me?” going on afterwards. Not fair. You got old since I last saw you.
It poured in Tyler as people were deciding whether or not to come to the show so fewer people came than bought tickets. And the other downer of the night was a newspaper reporter’s complaints that the sound was bad and too loud. I know the journalist and like him a lot actually so I was surprised that when he wrote about the show he spent as much time on the poor sound quality he perceived as he did the music and message of the evening, even going as far as interviewing people at the show, not about anything of substance in the evening, but about whether they too thought it was too loud.
Truth is we were in a church, a Baptist church, and Baptist churches made to host distortion fueled concerts are as rare as baptistries filled by water towers. We do our best to get pictures of venues, square footage, seating maximums etc to determine whether we’ll sound good in each venue but we can’t please everyone.
What’s ironic or just unfortunate is that my home church in Tyler is a little upset with me for not having the concert on their campus as I’ve done in the past. But the reason we didn’t bring our show there is because we thought it was too small and square to sound good - too much wood and parallel surfaces make for bad sounding shows. So we moved the show in hopes of better sound, risking hurting old friends, and wound up with a difficult sound night (that still, I think, managed to sound good) and hurt old friends. Sometimes we can’t win.
Apparently the sound issues we may or may not have had didn’t hinder people’s appreciation of the evening. Many children were sponsored through Compassion International and a record percentage of CDs left the merchandise table and are hopefully being spun at any volume level their owner desires.
Thanks KVNE, The Tyler Telegraph, Friendly Baptist Church, Mom and Dad and everyone else in Tyler who got the word out about the show. And yes, of course, I do remember you. Absolutely.
KXOJ in Tulsa, by contrast to the station we dealt with in Dallas, produced the best radio spots (and funniest) I’ve ever heard on radio anywhere and got a large crowd out to the show in Broken Arrow. They had me on their morning show, the top rated show in Tulsa, and we took radio contest winners to lunch at Abuellos, my favorite Mexican food joint outside of Texas.
First Baptist Broken Arrow is a massive church that is built for great sounding concerts and for the first time we felt like we sounded great. II hope you don’t mistake that for egotism. It’s not. It’s just that I’ve never played electric guitars, two of them, live with my band before while using in-ear monitors. Doesn’t sound hard, but for me it is. In Franklin, TN and in Dallas, TX I made mistakes, lots of them, because I couldn’t hear well enough to know if I was playing the right thing or because I just hadn’t switched pedals and instruments enough to get it down.
But in Tulsa I made no mistakes and neither did the band. The crowd was fiercely into the show, listening and dancing, laughing and pondering at all the right times. And the church just sounds great. I wish more churches paid attention to acoustics when building in hopes of hosting shows. It really paid off for FBC Broken Arrow.
I got the feeling this church doesn’t do anything half way. Want dinner? How about a full spread of Tex Mex and a jillion drink choices? Want a runner? How about a staff member in a van doing nothing all day but waiting for you to need a ride? Want to be baptized? How about a water tower dedicated to nothing but?
Actually I have no idea what the tower is for but I hope people use it to find this church staffed with service minded people, great cooks and of course people who know a thing or two about sound.
Thanks for having us. And thanks to KXOJ, the only station in the country that has played every single of mine ever released, for telling your listeners about the show and just being real people (that are actually funny) I look forward to hanging out with every time I visit. Oklahoma, you’re more than OK.
