3.13.13 Adam in Connecticut for 2 performances!!

mika,

Game Change is a fantastic movie... both Steve Schmidt and Nicolle Wallace have done interviews affirming the accuracy of the behind-the-scenes details.

Tonight I think i'll watch Firefly....

I think Adam sounds amazing in all these performances and Tommy sounds fine--as does Kevin. As a singer, I have jammed with lots of musicians, but you can't always do that (depends upon the musician, as Cassie so accurately said above). Lots of musicians aren't comfortable performing on the fly -- I wouldn't want to perform a song in front of a group when I hadn't rehearsed beforehand. Adam has high standards and wouldn't put anyone in a bad position in front of a group, either (he's too professional and cares for others).

BTW, during the GNT, I had a chance to meet Tommy and talk with him a couple of times. He seems like a nice guy who doesn't seek the spotlight and is just interested in playing the guitar and being one of the guys. He's not an Alpha male like Adam, that's for sure!

I wonder about this. In a much smaller way it's like Beiber or One Direction. At some point PD's have to decide which songs they want to play that will appeal to MORE than just the core vocal fanbase. It may be though in these cases that demographics show who is casually liking the song and who is a stan.

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So I just got back from a two hour radio station testing/focus group. I'm not sure what exactly pertains to Adam, but just in case anyone is curious here's what it was like:

1. I was called out of the blue. I indicated that I listened to our local HAC and Top 40 station when they asked about them by name, and fell within the age range, so I was invited to the session. They paid me 60$.

I was thinking that the research was for our newest HAC station in town (the one that added BTIKM a long time ago, but has yet to play it during the day : ) but I'm not sure.

2. There were 30 of us, all women, and we had to indicate whether we fell into the 25-33, 33-44, or 45-54 age brackets. This seemed a little old to me, so maybe it was testing for an AC station?

3. We had to chose our favorite categories of songs (basically the same artist groupings as you find in the Rate The Music options to indicate your format preference. Adam songs in my mind fit kind of in the Pink grouping, and kind of in the Katy Perry/Gaga grouping.)

4. We had to fill out a form with what stations we listened to, which station we listened to the most, and if we were listening to a station more or less than before, we had to explain why (here's where I worked in a subtle plug for Adam and a few other artists )

5. Then we had to listen to the hooks of 550 songs in a row over two hours, played very quickly, and indicate on a hand-held device how much we liked them, from 1-5, or whether they were unfamiliar and how tired we were of hearing the song on the radio.

It went so super fast that if your mind wandered for a second, you could fall behind and have to just quickly enter a bunch of 'unfamiliars' to catch up.

Also if you couldn't instantly recognize a song, (most songs only played one verse), you were out of luck, and had to enter an 'unfamiliar'. It really shows the importance of hooks that I could probably recognize 90% of the songs from that one 5-8 second line they would play before instantly moving on to the next song.

6. They played a huge variety of songs including hits from the 80's and 90's (this made me wonder if I was in an AC station test -- although I recognized the playlist from my HAC station).

They played Top 40 current songs too, but not the most recent ones (nothing from K Perry's last two hits, or Gaga's recent era).

It was clear that certain songs were hook based (I didn't know the artist, but I immeadiately identified the song), and certain songs were very artist based. I must have listened to 20 Nickleback songs it felt like, because his voice was so distinctive . The only Adam song tested was WWFM, which I of course voted up.

A few songs were repeated at different times during the testing, and they may have played a different part of the song. I'm sure there was some obscure statistical reason for this, lol.

And that was about it. Like I said, my main take-away was how important (and short) hooks are. Also there can be a sound only hook. They played just a bit of the humming part of Tom's Diner, and I recognized it. And the starting notes and handclap of Hollaback Girl. If Adam releases Trespassing as a single, it will be instantly recognizable. Whether people burn out on it or not is another question.

Mika, EXXXACTLY. He IS in a Catch-22 here and it's a very arbitrary Catch-22 that PDs and DJs like to describe as "complicated" and "political" (Toby K., from yesterday, which he has alluded to more than once as have several other PDs who have attempted to engage in the conversation).

It would seem the whole issue is some amorphous nebula of unwritten rules that no one really knows except for those on the inside, and that's why it seems there is no rhyme or reason to us and also why they don't have to qualify anything. It's like the ol' "because I said so" reasoning parents give.

The insight about the smaller markets being the risk-takers (thank you Hoppers and Schufly and of course, Tommy McFly!!) that's the most concrete information anyone has provided to date that I've seen and it fits very nicely in pjd's theory of several weeks ago about RCA deliberately holding back the larger markets while the small markets get on board first. This is the only theory that has resonated as making sense to me.

I really enjoyed "Game Change," but I'm two weeks behind on "Smash" now /o\

ETA: Wow, that's really interesting, RabbitRabbit!! I've been involved in focus groups and market research from both sides and I always find it fascinating. I wonder what they were testing for??