8.3.15 - 8.9.15 Numbers Thread

Happy Sunday all - 
I rarely post in the numbers thread, but i am here reading every day and have been intensely tracking.  Thank you so much to the people who post up the numbers - i log in every morning before heading to work and check things out.  The reason i am posting this morning - I understand the frustration with the tweeting and requesting efforts that seem to go ignored.  It is frustrating to everyone who is spending tons of time and effort to make the requests, vote, etc.  I would like to start thinking of another approach, and would appreciate feedback from the experts.

It is my belief that the big radio shows, such as SNOL and OHP, have pre-selected play lists that are worked thru the record company, promotions, etc.  They have almost nothing to do with the number of requests received for the songs on the night of the show.  The radio stations want to play a mix that is enjoyed by their listenting audience and also satisfies whatever deals are made in the background.  

I used to listen to the "Club Kane" show out of DC when i lived there, and he would spout off about getting tens of thousands of requests for some songs, and that is total BS.  There was no way physically possible that they could have received that many calls (this was pre-twitter days).  Kane played what he wanted to, or what the record companies paid him the most to play, and no amount of calling or emailing would change that.

I think is is a good thing for a fan base to publicly show interest in a song, but the way it is getting executed lately may be having the opposite impact from what we desire.  For example, I look a look at the twitter requests for "She's Kinda Hot" by 5 seconds of summer, which was one of the songs that SNOL said has the most requests last night.  When i do a search on my tweetdeck I can only find about 30 requests via twitter for this song.  When i look at Ghost Town during this same time period, there were many hundreds of requests.  Unfortunately, more than half the requests came from 2 people, which in my opinion, is an obvious fan club situation and not a typical radio listener.  There were many other duplicate requests from fans with Adam in their avitars, so they were obviously not just ordinary fans of the actual radio show.  

If I ran the radio show, i would not be motivated to play songs that a fanbase was requesting by the thousands unless there was some other deal with the label in place.  I would want to play a nice mix with the hottest songs (read, top 15 or 20) getting the heaviest play.  If a new artist was in the studio, or had a special deal, then of course that new, lower ranked song would get played.  I would be de-motivated to play a song that was requested by someone who was obviously not a pop radio fan.  That seems to be what has happened with Ghost Town.  It was played when it was just released, when Adam was in the studio doing interviews, but it is not high enough on the current rankings to get multiple plays in a 2 or 3 hour radio show.  They are probably playing less than 15 songs per hour, so that would be just a little more than one play for each song in the top 40.  As soon as they play a top 10 or heavily promoted song twice, they don't have room in the schedule for songs like Ghost Town.  In my opinion, no amount of requesting from the Glamberts is going to change that.  

Maybe i am just cynical, but i honestly don't think that the requests have much of anything to do with what gets played.

However, that said, I do think that we should all be showing our enthusiasm for the song by putting in one or two tweets each saturday night and maybe calling in if you are so inclined.  If everyone on this board and our twitter friends made 2 or 3 requests, that would be many more than most songs get.  Outside of that, it may just be diminishing returns.  We could all save ourselves a lot of frustration by just tweeting and requesting once per night.  Would that be a bad thing?

Are there any other approaches that you think would work?

schufly, I am sure you are right and the SNOL "menu" is pre-fixed. I am also sure we need to request actively anyway - just to show interest (as you mentioned). As far as limiting amount of requests per person - I would think if that happened there would be relatively very few requests for any artist, not only Adam. I can't believe a "normal", non-fan listener is going to bother requesting on a Saturday night...don't people have other things to do?

I watched SNOL twitter feed a couple of times (not last night) - both times the feed was heavily loaded with Demi's and Selina's fans. Some individuals were tweeting at some crazy rate, they were super fans obviously...I had a hard time finding GT at all...

Obviously I have no idea what the right way to go about requesting is, but I can't see how the repeated fan's requests can hurt GT's chances of being played...

Patti, ty for Flo Rida info...good to know it's on the way down for a while now... re SILENTO and those call out scores: continuing on a skeptical bend - do these matter?  Adam's scores are excellent but the spin increases are sluggish...

In any case WB is standing by GT for now, so let's hope it'll get into top 20, may be in Sept?

Yeah, i saw that too from last night. And there were also many many 1D requests.  I don't know the right answer, but just feel that the request angst may not be worth it.  I don't know if the repeated requests hurt so much, but I hate to see folks get burnt out for nothing.  And I hate getting played by the #$%@ DJs    

We have no ac at the moment and I think my computer is getting hot so I am going to shut it down and go to bed early. If I don't know if I will have time to power up in the morning to pull numbers so I may not post anything until tomorrow evening. Good night all.