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Personality on Music Stations: New Research on Social FM

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This week’s Tuesdays With Coleman blog was jointly authored by Coleman Insights president Warren Kurtzman and Alan Burns & Associates founder Alan Burns. Details on a new webinar covering this topic and findings from a recent research project can be found at the end of the blog.

As covered in last week’s Tuesdays With Coleman, a hot radio format from Canada—which Alan Burns & Associates has dubbed “Social FMTM”—has captured our attention, due to the greater emphasis it places on personality-driven content than most music stations. As a result, Coleman Insights and Alan Burns & Associates have collaborated on research on the format’s successful music outlet, Now! Radio in Edmonton, even though the station is not a client of either of our firms. The research involved 100 18- to 49-year-old Cume listeners to the station to gather mostly open-ended responses to questions about the motivations for listening to the station and the perceptions they have of the brand.

Based on these interviews, we reached three primary conclusions:

  1. Social FM is seen as a “hybrid” format. The format’s outlets play a sizeable quantity of music that is complemented by foreground personalities and high levels of on-air interaction with listeners, and as a result, most listeners think of it for music and talk. Relative to the Image PyramidSM philosophy Coleman Insights has espoused for decades, this means that the format’s base position consists of a combination of musical and nonmusical content, with the highest profile personalities providing a layer of personality on top of that base.

In the case of Now! Radio, we see this in the fact that the majority—55%—of listeners choose “both” music and conversations as their primary motivation for listening to the station. While those who do not say “both” are more than twice as likely to cite “music only” over “conversations only” as their primary motivator, the fact that both of these groups are smaller than the “both” group makes clear that the combination of these two forms of content drive usage.

In a similar vein, the majority—54%—of Now! Radio listeners mention music and conversations when asked to describe the station to someone who had not heard it before. This video provides a brief sample of listeners frequently referencing music and conversations when describing the station:

One final important note about the importance of communicating that Social FM stations offer music and conversations is revealed when we compare the motivators and perceptions of Now! Radio’s P1 listeners versus non-P1s who also listen to the station. As seen in the two sets of bars on the right of the following graph, 70% of P1s answer “both” as the primary reason for listening to the station. Among the Other P1s we surveyed, however, music—at 52%—is the primary motivator.

This suggests that excluding or de-emphasizing music from how Social FM stations are positioned could significantly limit their Cume appeal and make them over-reliant on generating TSL from a small Cume base. In simplest terms, music brings in Cume and personality-driven content drives TSL.

  1. Listener passion for the hosts is crucial to the success of Social FM. While Now! Radio is seen for its combination of music and conversations, there is no denying that the hosts and the conversations they have with each other and their listeners are very prominent in the perceptions listeners have of the station. In fact, the frequency with which listeners mention hosts in general or specific personalities in their descriptions of the station and the things they like the most about it is higher than we have seen for any other music station. As revealed by the listener enthusiasm expressed in the following video, stations seeking to offer Social FM must build lineups of highly compelling personalities to be successful:

  1. Social FM is a Time Spent Listening-driven format. Now! Radio has led the Numeris Adults 25-54 ranking for 38 out of the last 40 quarters, and while the station has a sizeable Cume audience, its leadership is largely attributable to generating TSL from those who tune into it in the first place. We see this as well in our findings, as an impressive 56% of the Cume listeners we interviewed for this study name Now! Radio as their P1 station. Such a Cume Conversion Rate is well above the 40% benchmark Coleman Insights usually finds is an indicator of a station’s ability to generate high listener loyalty.

To learn more about these and other findings of our research on Social FM, please join us for a webinar presentation this Thursday, June 2nd at 2PM EDT/11AM PDT. Free registration is now open here.

 

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The Hottest Radio Format Unknown to Most American Broadcasters

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This week’s Tuesdays With Coleman blog was jointly authored by Coleman Insights president Warren Kurtzman and Alan Burns & Associates founder Alan Burns. Details on a new webinar covering this topic and findings from a recent research project can be found at the end of the blog.

When you’re a researcher or consultant to radio stations one of the most common questions you’re regularly asked is, “What’s the next hot format?” We admit this is often an impossible question to answer; listeners are fickle, and we often don’t know when new trends emerge until we see objective evidence that they are taking hold.

However, we can state with confidence that there is a hot format—in Canada. Alan Burns & Associates is calling the format “SocialFMTM,” as it features substantially more personality content than one typically hears on a commercial music format. That content is built around foreground air talents, extensive on-air audience interaction, and storytelling.

By far the most successful of the Social FM stations is “Now! Radio” in Edmonton. We know that—outside of the hockey fans among us—few Americans are well-acquainted with Edmonton, but the fact that this massively successful station is not known to most American radio broadcasters is astonishing. According to Numeris, Now! Radio has been the number one station among Adults 25-54 in Edmonton for 38 out of the last 40 quarters.

Now! Radio airs a Hot AC-oriented music mix that is broader—especially from an Era perspective—than most North American Hot AC stations. It is anchored by the wildly successful Crash & Mars morning show, while managing to play at least ten songs in most hours after the morning show is over, despite giving its air talents in all dayparts wide latitude for delivering personality-based content.

We want to be clear: Now! Radio is not a client of either of our firms. However, amid all the discussions currently taking place in the radio industry about the need for more nonmusical content on music radio stations, we are intrigued by its success. Both of our firms have consistently espoused the value of compelling, entertaining personalities for our music radio station clients, but as more consumers enjoy music on other platforms that often provide them with more control and commercial-free experiences, the need for radio stations to provide content that consumers can’t get anywhere else is greater than ever.

Our interest in Social FM is also increasing because variations of the format have launched in other Canadian markets; the owners of the Edmonton station launched similarly formatted “Today Radio” in Calgary in 2019 and “Now! Radio” in Winnipeg in 2021, and another ownership group introduced the format branded as “Today Radio” in Toronto this past February. Despite their common ownership, the Calgary outlet carries the Crash & Mars show while Winnipeg does not, and the new station in Toronto is building its own airstaff. All four of these stations offer similar music, but there are nuances between the mixes each station employs.

It seems inevitable that radio stations in the United States and beyond will take a close look at Social FM. That is why we are excited to share with you a collaboration between Alan Burns & Associates and Coleman Insights to gain a deeper understanding of the factors that drive the success of this format. As Now! Radio in Edmonton is the bellwether for the Social FM format, we have recently fielded a research project conducted with listeners to the station designed to determine what drives them to use it and their strongest perceptions about it and how those drivers and perceptions may vary across different segments of the audience. Among other things, the research will help us understand if Now! Radio looks like most successful music radio stations from an Image PyramidSM perspective, featuring a Base Music Position that leads listener perceptions, complemented by strong personality imagery.

Next week’s edition of Tuesdays With Coleman will feature a summary of our findings, including video clips of Now! Radio listeners sharing their opinions and perceptions of the station. Furthermore, we will offer a free webinar covering the findings of our research in greater depth on Thursday, June 2nd at 2PM EDT. Registration for that webinar is now open here; we look forward to sharing our insights with the radio industry and answering questions you may have about Social FM.

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Pop Reigns Supreme (Again!)

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Coleman Insights is releasing findings from its Contemporary Music SuperStudy 4 in a three-part blog series, followed by a free webinar on Wednesday, May 11th at 2PM EDT/11AM PDT, in which the findings will be covered in greater depth. Details to register for that webinar are below.

Last week we focused on the major finding of our Contemporary SuperStudy 4, which revealed that while American and Canadian society has gradually reopened from the pandemic-caused lockdowns, consumer appetites for the newest music releases have not rebounded. This week we will delve into our findings about how specific genres fared in our fourth annual study, which look reasonably consistent with our previous findings.

The most consistent finding with previous editions of the Contemporary Music SuperStudy is that Pop titles dominate the Top 100 titles of the most-consumed songs of 2021. At 44%, Pop’s share of the Top 100 is substantially larger than the 24% presence of Pop titles in the study.

The only other genre that “overperforms” relative to its presence among All Songs Tested is Alternative/Rock. However, at 11% of the Top 100, Alternative/Rock titles do not make up a substantial share of the 100 songs consumers rated highest.

Hip Hop/R&B and Country, while somewhat underrepresented among the Top 100 relative to their presence in the test list we used for the study, are heavily present among the 100 songs consumers rate highest. Nearly a quarter—24%—of the Top 100 songs are Hip Hop/R&B; Country titles make up 17% of the 100 best-testing songs.

The hierarchy of genre representation among the Top 100 titles—Pop well out in front, followed by Hip Hop/R&B, Country, and Alternative/Rock—mirrors our findings from last year. This means that the stronger performance of Hip Hop/R&B last year relative to the two previous editions of our study has been retained, while the recovery of Country’s place among the most popular titles has yet to take place.

Also noteworthy is the drop-off in the presence of Dance/Electronic titles among the 100 songs consumers rate highest. While failing to make up a significant proportion of the Top 100 in any of the four editions of the Contemporary Music SuperStudy thus far, the presence of Dance/Electronic titles has dropped from 12% three years ago to 4% in this study.

As we’ve seen in previous editions of our study, Pop’s dominance is the result of its strong performance across numerous segments of the population. For example, when we divide listeners by geography, Pop titles make up at least 40% of the Top songs with listeners who say they live in Urban, Suburban, or Rural areas.

The performances of Hip Hop/R&B and Country titles, however, vary significantly by geography, which is a consistent finding from previous years. At 42%, Hip Hop/R&B titles make up almost as large of a portion of the Top 100 among Urban consumers as Pop does; the same is true for Country—at 35%—among consumers who live in Rural areas.

These geographic findings—as they have in previous years—line up very closely with our profiles of the Top 100 songs among consumers with different political viewpoints. Pop leads with consumers who describe their political affiliation as Liberal-leaning or Moderate, while Country makes up the largest share with those who describe their politics as Conservative-leaning.

The performance of Hip Hop/R&B looks almost completely opposite from Country from a political standpoint. At 40%, Hip Hop/R&B titles make up 40% of the Top 100 songs with Liberal-leaning consumers, while 3% of the best-testing titles with these same consumers are Country titles. Among Rural consumers, only 9% of the Top 100 songs are Hip Hop/R&B. Moderates, not surprisingly, fall somewhere in the middle with Hip Hop/R&B and Country titles—at 23% and 22%, respectively—making up nearly the same proportions of the Top 100 titles.

Next week, Tuesdays With Coleman will wrap up our in-depth coverage of Contemporary SuperStudy 4 when my colleague Sam Milkman will break down our findings by age-, gender-, and ethnicity-based demographics. He will explore how consumers’ appetites for contemporary music vary based on their usage of different platforms for consuming audio entertainment.

Registration is now open for the Contemporary Music SuperStudy 4 Deep Dive webinar, which takes place next Wednesday, May 11 at 2PM EDT/11AM PDT.

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What in the World is Going On With Contemporary Music?

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The state of contemporary music is an ongoing topic of conversation among many of Coleman Insights’ clients. Questions about it have become more pressing for our radio clients, as the ratings leaders in many markets are Gold-based music stations targeted at older listeners, perhaps to a greater extent than in the past.

In 2022, however, this topic resonates beyond the community of those in the audio entertainment industry, as mainstream media like CNBC and The Atlantic have raised questions about the state of contemporary music tastes and how they have been impacted by the pandemic.

Therefore, the upcoming release of Contemporary Music SuperStudy 4, a preview of which we are presenting at this week’s virtual All Access Audio Summit, could not come at a better time. Last year, when we delivered the third edition of our now-annual assessment of the state of contemporary music tastes in the United States and Canada, we very clearly documented how in 2020—a year with almost no live music performances and when many artists held back their releases of new material—consumers’ appetite for contemporary music “stood still,” leading us to liken things to the classic movie, Groundhog Day, in which Bill Murray’s character lives the same day over and over again. While COVID-19 continues to create great challenges, it will be interesting to see if the gradual reopening of our society and the return of live music performances and new music releases have allowed us to break out of the Groundhog Day cycle.

Will this year’s Contemporary Music SuperStudy have another Groundhog Day vibe?

If you’re not familiar with our Contemporary Music SuperStudy series, let me give you a quick primer. We compile a list of the most-consumed songs from the previous calendar year and then test those songs with 1,000 consumers in the United States and Canada using the same platform we use for delivering FACT360SM Strategic Music Tests to our radio station clients. The list is built with help from our friends at Luminate (formerly MRC Data) and is based on consumption via radio airplay, streaming, and sales. (A shoutout also goes out to our friends at Hooks Unlimited, who provide the music hooks we test with consumers.) We drop any songs that are at least five years old and then add songs that are among the most consumed from each major genre that make up the world of contemporary music so that each of those genres receives adequate representation. The 1,000 consumers who participate in the study are representative of the population in terms of age, gender, ethnicity, and geography.

The consistent methodology we use every year has allowed the Contemporary Music SuperStudy to become the benchmark of contemporary music tastes. If you work in the radio, music, or streaming business, you may often get glimpses of how music tastes are changing through the many individual audio brand studies, music tests, and new music research reports you may see over the course of the year. The Contemporary Music SuperStudy, however, provides a truly objective view of those changes on the macro level.

At Coleman Insights, when the data from Contemporary Music SuperStudy 4 began to roll in, we were eager to see if and how the reopening of society impacted consumers’ appetites for contemporary music. Among the questions we wanted to answer were:

  • Will “Shape Of You” by Ed Sheeran test #1 for the third straight year?
  • Did any new songs released in 2021—and therefore appearing in the study for the first time—break into the top ten?
  • Will Pop titles continue to outperform their presence in the test list?
  • Will Country rebound after a disappointing performance in last year’s study?
  • Will the strong showing for Hip Hop/R&B in Contemporary SuperStudy 3 continue this year?

The answer to these and many other questions are on the way. If you are attending the All Access Audio Summit this week, be sure to join us at 2PM Eastern/11AM Pacific this Thursday, April 21st when John Boyne, Sam Milkman, and I will reveal many of the topline findings from the study. Our presentation will cover the best-testing titles overall, how this year’s most popular songs compare with previous years in terms of genre and era, and how music tastes vary across demographics, geography, political persuasion, and media habits.

Could Ed Sheeran top the Contemporary Music SuperStudy again? Hmmm. (Credit: Denis Makarenko/Shutterstock)

In addition, we will devote the next three weeks of Tuesdays With Coleman to more detailed discussions of the study’s most important findings, culminating in a free, publicly available webinar on Wednesday, May 11th in which we will take a deeper dive into our findings. (Registration for the webinar will open later this month.) Furthermore, I will deliver a “Canada-centric” version of our findings in a presentation at Canadian Music Week’s RadioActive ’22 conference on Wednesday, June 8th. Finally, later this spring, we will provide online access to the song-by-song data from the study to all active Coleman Insights clients as part of our Coleman Complete service.

Music tastes change and we track them at Coleman Insights, with the Contemporary Music SuperStudy 4 providing a lot of useful and informative insights over the next few weeks. My colleagues and I look forward to your feedback on the latest and most comprehensive assessment of the state of contemporary music tastes.

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Why You Should Plan For Focus Groups In 2022

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Regular readers of Tuesdays with Coleman may recall when we made a big deal about our introduction of CampfireSM Online Discussion earlier this year. This service, which allows us to deliver qualitative insights to the audio brands we work with, utilizes an innovative online platform through which we deeply engage with a group of carefully screened consumers over the course of a week. We have delivered numerous Campfires already this year and have been gratified by the positive reactions we have received from the clients who have used our newest service.

While Campfire represents an exciting innovation in the world of qualitative research, this blog is going to focus on one of the oldest tools in the researcher toolkit—focus groups. The COVID-19 pandemic has prevented us from doing any of our 20/20 Focus Group studies for clients over the last 18 months, and even with a great new tool like Campfire available to us, I still think there are insights that only focus groups can deliver. My hope—obviously for many reasons besides this—is that it will be safe soon to gather consumers together to talk about the audio brands they consume and delve into the emotions that are the drivers of their behaviors. Focus groups have been derided by many for being “old school,” prone to the biases of those who moderate them, and far too often being driven by one or two participants who dominate the conversation and influence the softer-spoken attendees. Yes, they have been around a long time, but when they are moderated by someone who has been trained properly, they can unearth things that no other form of research I have seen in my nearly 35 years in this business can find.

One of my favorite focus group stories is truly old school; more than a half-century ago, General Mills learned via focus groups that their new line of Betty Crocker cake mixes was not selling well because homemakers felt guilty about how easy they were to use. When, based on that qualitative insight, the product was changed so that instead of just requiring the addition of water, the mix required that consumers also had to add eggs, the sales took off and the product became a staple of American kitchens.

A few years ago, I attended focus groups moderated by a colleague of mine for a Hip Hop station that was curious about a new sound that seemed to be testing well in their new music research. The clients and I sat with our mouths wide open behind the glass when we heard every Hip Hop fan in the group use a term to describe this genre that was clearly widespread “on the streets” but had not been heard by any radio programmers yet. By the next morning, there was imaging on the station using the term the focus group respondents taught us!

A few months ago, the Wall Street Journal ran a story, “Why Companies Shouldn’t Give Up on Focus Groups”[subscription required], that echoed many of the themes I am sharing here. It spoke of how in the rush to embrace big data—which, in many cases, can be very valuable—many large companies ended up looking the same and offering similar products and services because they were relying on the same input, behavioral data. The parallels in the audio business are looking at metrics such as Nielsen ratings, podcast downloads, and streaming channel user counts and trying to strategize based on the same data that everyone else has. In the WSJ article, a branding consultant named Martin Lindstrom, who has worked for firms ranging from Lego to Burger King to Swissair remarked, “The few companies that decide to go the opposite way of looking at the qualitative data, the small data, time after time discover insights which lead them to something profound, and that’s where you have true innovation take place.”

While the term “in these unprecedented times” is drastically overused these days, I can not imagine a time when the kinds of qualitative insights focus groups provide could be more useful. Another compelling quote in the WSJ article concerns the impact of the pandemic on consumers and how “It cannot be understated what a big shift has occurred. Companies should understand and study that because we’ve been altered in a way that is pretty profound.” The article goes on to state that “adapting to that new reality will require understanding the relative depth of people’s fear and fatigue. And that can’t be found on a spreadsheet.” The way people consume audio—which was already undergoing changes that were accelerated by the pandemic—is changing so dramatically that we need all the qualitative tools at our disposal to grasp the implications of these changes.

Focus groups are hard; they are also time consuming and expensive. Our Campfire Online Focus Groups provide an easier and somewhat less expensive way to gather qualitative insights, and while I applaud the clients who have invested in such studies with us this year, I hope that many of them—and clients who have not done much qualitative work in recent years—recognize that focus group research should be in their plans as soon as it is safe for us to conduct such studies.

As one of my heroes, Ferris Bueller, memorably said,  Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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The (Not So) Strange World of Strategic Alliances

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Strategic partnerships are not new.

Usually, a strategic alliance between two companies involves two very different businesses. For example, Pottery Barn is not a paint company, and Sherwin-Williams is not a home furnishings store. But the two businesses collaborate on an exclusive line of paints. Customers can coordinate the Sherwin-Williams colors with Pottery Barn furniture, creating a win-win for both businesses.

Other times, an alliance is between businesses in the same market segment that serve a similar consumer. Two years ago, Kohl’s announced the availability of Amazon Returns. The department store allows Amazon customers to visit their local Kohl’s store to return eligible Amazon items, without a box or label, for free. The partnership between the two retail companies provides neighborhood convenience for Amazon customers, while driving new potential customers into Kohl’s stores.

This past year, the pandemic has inspired us to evaluate many components of our business, especially as many of our clients faced tremendous budgetary concerns­­. Was there a way to make sure our clients had access to high quality research even when Coleman Insights was not an option?

These conversations led to the strategic alliance announced last week between Coleman Insights and Advantage Music Research. It is a unique one because we both offer music tests for the radio industry.

But all music tests are not created equal.

That simple, but true statement is the fundamental core behind the partnership. We know not every potential client we speak to can afford a FACT360 Strategic Music Test. Sometimes, competitive conflicts prevent us from working with a station. Other times, the client isn’t looking for a test with strategic guidance, recommendations, and help with implementation.

In the past, we would have simply wished that potential client well. But over the past few years, we’ve developed an informal collaboration with Advantage Music Research. Their Scorecard music test costs less than a FACT360 Strategic Music Test and is a more streamlined product. But we’ve learned they share our commitments to rigorous respondent recruitment standards and high quality data, and we’ve recommended a number of potential clients to them. Conversely, Advantage has referred potential clients to Coleman when a more comprehensive study is required.

This strategic partnership is a formalization of this informal collaboration. Perhaps in years past, two companies in the same segment working together would seem exceedingly bizarre. But these days, maybe it’s not so strange. Ultimately, it’s about what’s best for the consumer.

And there’s nothing strange about that.

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Was the Field Of Dreams Game a Success?

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I love baseball. I follow my beloved New York Mets religiously (and appreciate your condolences!) and I play softball three days a week every spring and fall.

I also love Field Of Dreams. It’s an all-time favorite movie of mine that I’ve probably seen at least 50 times. In 2012, I added an extra day to an Iowa business trip just so that I could spend an afternoon playing ball on the field in Dyersville where the movie was filmed.

Me, at the Iowa site where Field Of Dreams was filmed

So when Major League Baseball announced that the White Sox and Yankees were going to play a regular season game at the site, I was hooked. Even if the game featured a match-up of teams I don’t care about and hate, respectively, the spectacle of a real major league game in an Iowa cornfield was irresistible to me.

By all accounts, the game—which took place less than two weeks ago and was broadcast nationally on FOX—was a smashing success. The FOX broadcast was widely lauded for its beautiful production values, the game itself featured a thrilling ending, and the 5.9 million people who watched it represented the biggest audience for a Major League Baseball regular season game in 16 years. The positive vibes from the event were so strong that MLB has announced that they will do it again during the 2022 season.

So why do I think there’s a problem?

It’s no secret that interest in baseball is on the decline. Participation at the youth level is down and the audience for games is getting older. Major League Baseball has been eclipsed by the NFL as America’s favorite sports league, while MMA, soccer, and eSports are generating far more interest among young people.

You may be familiar with the Pareto principle, which states that for many outcomes, roughly 80% of the consequences come from 20% of the causes. Many businesses experience this by generating about 80% of their revenue or profits from 20% of their customers.

In radio, Nielsen Audio has repeatedly demonstrated how roughly two-thirds of the Time Spent Listening to a station comes from less than a third of its Cume audience. This has led to a focus on P1 listeners, those who listen to a station more than any other. Nielsen provides tools to stations that show how—in almost every case—stations generate most of their listening from P1s.

As a result, radio stations—and many other media outlets—correctly pay close attention to the tastes and perceptions of their P1s. However, when a brand becomes too focused on what its P1s think and want, it could miss changes that are going on with lighter and/or non-users and can end up super serving an increasingly smaller segment of the broader marketplace. Therefore, research should be carefully constructed and properly analyzed so that brands gain insights into what their core users want and perceive and how that compares with what is happening beyond their core users.

Major League Baseball’s Field Of Dreams game was perhaps the ultimate P1-focused event. For a rabid baseball fan like me—a 55-year-old white guy—it was awesome. However, I fear that it did nothing—and perhaps even hurt—the game’s ability to attract a younger, more ethnically-diverse audience. My 22-year-old son was home visiting with my wife and me when the game aired, and to my dismay, I learned that he had never even seen Field Of Dreams! (I guess this shouldn’t be too surprising, given that the 1989 film came out before he was born; fortunately, I was able to correct this omission in his movie-watching experience before his visit with us was over.)

I should be clear that I don’t think the Field Of Dreams game is necessarily a bad thing. While I fear it could reinforce attributes that prevent baseball’s lighter and non-users from consuming the game more, it could work if it is balanced with other events and efforts designed to appeal beyond baseball’s P1 audience. One way Major League Baseball is doing this is by staging games between its teams at the Little League World Series each summer, which strikes me as an excellent way to engage younger fans.

Does your radio station, podcast, or streaming service have a clear picture of what its core users want and what the broader marketplace wants? If not, you can find yourself in one of two undesirable situations—catering to an increasingly smaller group of core users or being so broad in your approach that you fail to develop a core group of heavy users. Brands that can balance the ability to attract a broad audience while also engendering loyalty from a core group of heavy users are the ones that repeatedly hit home runs.

 

 

 

 

 

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Pop Reigns Supreme (Again!) in Contemporary Music SuperStudy 3

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Coleman Insights is releasing findings from its Contemporary Music SuperStudy 3 in a three-part blog series, followed by a free webinar on May 13th, in which the findings will be covered in greater depth. Details to register for that webinar are below.

In last week’s Tuesdays With Coleman blog, my colleague John Boyne evoked memories of the classic movie Groundhog Day when summarizing the findings of our Contemporary Music SuperStudy 3. The time-freezing impact of the coronavirus pandemic was evident in our findings, including how Ed Sheeran’s “Shape Of You” finished as the number one song in the study for a second year in a row and how six of this year’s top ten songs also finished in the top ten in Contemporary Music SuperStudy 2.

This week we will delve more specifically into how different music genres fared in the study. While there are many similarities to our findings from a year ago, there are some differences worth examining in detail.

The most obvious similarity between our new findings and the results of Contemporary Music SuperStudy 2 is—as given away in the title of this blog— the continued strength of Pop titles. If you read my preview blog post about the study two weeks ago, you know that the list of titles we tested represent the most consumed songs of 2020, along with additional selections from the Alternative/Rock, Latin, and Dance/Electronic genres.

At 20%, Pop comprises only the third largest group of titles in the test list, behind Hip Hop/R&B at 31% and Country at 20%. When we focus on the Top 100 titles in Contemporary Music SuperStudy 3, however, we observe that 40% of them are Pop songs.

This “over performance” by Pop titles represents a pattern we have continually observed in our series of studies. Furthermore, Pop has now been the genre with the biggest share of the Top 100 in every Contemporary Music SuperStudy, and its 40% performance this year represents an increase from 35% last year.

Another similarity between this year’s results and previous editions of the Contemporary Music SuperStudy is the continued health of Hip Hop/R&B, which looks even stronger this year than in the two previous studies. While at 27% of the Top 100 it slightly under performs its 31% presence in the test list, Hip Hop/R&B makes up the second largest share of the best-testing titles and is up from 23% and 18% from Contemporary Music SuperStudy 1 and 2, respectively.

Finally, as we have seen in the two previous studies, Alternative/Rock and Dance/Electronic remain as secondary appetites among 12- to 54-year-olds in the United States and Canada. Alternative/Rock and Dance/Electronic are present in the Top 100 at roughly the same levels as they are among All Songs Tested, but at 10% and 9% respectively, their presences among the best-testing titles are relatively low.

The biggest difference we see in our findings pertains to the performance of Country titles, which have been on a rollercoaster ride across our first three installments of the Contemporary Music SuperStudy. This year, Country titles make up only 13% of the Top 100, which is considerably lower than their 21% presence in the overall test list.

This represents a turnaround from Contemporary SuperStudy 2, in which Country’s presence in the Top 100 nearly doubled from 12% in the previous year to 23%. When we shared these results roughly a year ago, it generated some optimism that Country music was poised for improvement from the struggles the genre appeared to be suffering. With its downturn this year, the sustainability of Country’s rebound comes into question; with that said, we should be cautious about making long-term projections based on data collected during what we know is a unique time in music and audio entertainment consumption due to the pandemic.

A noteworthy aspect of Country’s surge last year and weaker performance this year is revealed when we break out our data by geography. As it has in all three of our studies, Country led the Top 100 among Rural consumers in Contemporary Music SuperStudy 3, and its 43% presence this year is down only slightly from 48% last year. Among Suburban consumers, however, Country’s fortunes have clearly changed. Last year, Country’s 27% presence in the Top 100 among Suburban consumers represented a tripling from 9% in the first Contemporary SuperStudy; this year, the same figure has plummeted to 7%.

Breakdowns like these—covering age, gender, ethnicity, politics, media consumption, and more—will be the subject of the final Contemporary Music SuperStudy 3 blog from Sam Milkman next week.

In addition, register now for our Contemporary Music SuperStudy 3 webinar on May 13th from 2p-3p EDT, when we’ll go in-depth on the state of contemporary music. In the meantime, keep an eye out for next week’s Tuesdays With Coleman blog for more sneak peek findings from the study.

Please join us for both!

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Tracking Contemporary Music Trends

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A major benefit of the long-term relationships we have with so many audio brands is that we get to look at trends. Lots and lots of trends. By measuring things in a consistent manner year after year and study after study, we get unparalleled insights into how the behaviors, tastes, and perceptions of consumers change over time. I’ll admit to being a geek about a lot of this stuff, especially when it comes to music.

That’s why I am looking forward to our upcoming release of Contemporary Music SuperStudy 3, a preview of which we are presenting at this week’s virtual All Access Audio Summit. Sure, I enjoyed the two previous studies in 2019 and 2020, but now that we’ve arrived at the third edition of our now-annual assessment of the state of contemporary music tastes in the United States and Canada, I am geeking out about the opportunity to share some real trends.

This opportunity is perhaps more intriguing than it would otherwise be this year because of the coronavirus pandemic. We’ve been through more than a year with almost no live music performances and many artists have held back their releases of new material, so it will be especially interesting to see if this has impacted the state of contemporary music.

If you’re not familiar with our Contemporary Music SuperStudy series, let me give you a quick primer. We compile a list of the most-consumed songs from the previous calendar year and then test those songs with 1,000 consumers in the United States and Canada using the same platform we use for delivering FACT360SM Strategic Music Tests to our radio station clients. The list is built with help from our friends at MRC Data and is based on consumption via radio airplay, streaming, and sales. We drop any songs that are at least five years old and then add songs that are among the most consumed from each major genre that make up the world of contemporary music so that each of those genres receive adequate representation. The 1,000 consumers who participate in the study are representative of the population in terms of age, gender, ethnicity, and geography.

By using this consistent methodology every year, the Contemporary Music SuperStudy is worthy of its designation as the benchmark of contemporary music tastes. Many of us in the radio, music, and streaming businesses get glimpses of how music tastes are changing through the many individual audio brand studies, music tests, and new music research reports we see over the course of the year, but the Contemporary Music SuperStudy gives us a truly objective view of those changes on the macro level.

When we began to analyze the data, many questions—informed by what we learned in the two previous editions of the study—immediately popped into my head and the heads of my colleagues. These include:

  • What will supplant last year’s top song—“Shape Of You” by Ed Sheeran—as the best-testing song this year?
  • What new songs released in 2020—and therefore appearing in the study for the first time—did consumers rate highest?
  • Will Pop titles continue to outperform their presence in the test list?
  • Will the improvement we saw for Country titles between the first and second study continue with the third study?
  • Has the pandemic impacted the demand for contemporary music?
  • Will Hip Hop/R&B titles continue to lead the tastes of younger listeners?

The good news is that if you have similar questions to ours, the answers to them are on their way. If you are attending the All Access Audio Summit this week, be sure to join us at 2PM Eastern/11AM Pacific this Thursday, April 22nd when John Boyne, Sam Milkman, and I will reveal many of the topline findings from the study. Our presentation will cover the best-testing titles overall, how this year’s most popular songs compare with previous years in terms of genre and era, and how music tastes vary across demographics, geography, political persuasion, and media habits.

In addition, we will devote the next three weeks of Tuesdays With Coleman to more detailed discussions of the study’s most important findings, culminating in a free, publicly available webinar on Thursday, May 13th in which we will take a deeper dive into our findings. (Registration for the webinar will open later this month.) Finally, later this spring, we will provide online access to the song-by-song data from the study to all active Coleman Insights clients as part of our Coleman Complete service.

At Coleman Insights we often say that music tastes change and that’s why we track them. For my fellow data geeks and music fans, the next few weeks should be a lot of fun. My colleagues and I hope you gain a lot of insights out of our Contemporary Music SuperStudy 3 findings and look forward to your feedback.

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Winning by Embracing Nostalgia

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As we pass the one-year point of the COVID-19 pandemic you may have noticed that the Nielsen audience shares of many Gold-based music radio stations have grown. Some suggest this is the result of a downturn in contemporary music. Others point to this as evidence of an increase in the pace with which younger consumers—and those with presumably more contemporary music tastes—are abandoning radio.

There may be some truth to both ideas, but I have a different theory. I believe that good Gold-based music stations provide nostalgia for their listeners and that such an elixir has been highly valued by consumers during these difficult times.

Clay Routledge is a professor of management at North Dakota State University, a faculty scholar at the Challey Institute for Global Innovation and Growth and a senior research fellow at the Archbridge Institute, and as he recently wrote in the Wall Street Journal, there should be no shame in remembering the good old days. In fact, research suggests that nostalgia is something to be embraced in many situations.

This runs contrary to a lot of conventional wisdom about nostalgia, which some see as a sign of mental weakness or a way to escape reality. Some go as far as suggesting that those who reflect nostalgically on the past often stand in the way of progress. As recently as the 19th century, nostalgia was regarded as a medical condition requiring treatment.

Modern behavioral science, however, has revealed such thinking to be wrong. In fact, as Routledge wrote in the Journal, “…nostalgia doesn’t cause distress. Instead, distress causes nostalgia.” Basically, negative feelings like sadness, loneliness, a sense of meaninglessness, and uncertainty trigger reactions in people that make them experience nostalgia.

Now I don’t know about you, but I certainly experienced—among other things—sadness and uncertainty over the past 12 months. Sure, I feel fortunate that those closest to me have avoided the worst of the pandemic so far and that I’m not among the millions experiencing severe economic hardships during this crisis, but there were enough moments in 2020 when experiencing nostalgia gave me some comfort. It provided me with what the behavioral scientists have found in their research on the impacts of nostalgia—happiness, love, gratitude, and hope.

I am clearly not alone in this, as demonstrated by how the television and movie businesses have embraced nostalgia during the pandemic. A list compiled by Insider includes more than two dozen reboots, remakes, and spin-offs—ranging from a new take on the late 60s/early 70s series “Bewitched” to a reprise of the more-recent “Sex And The City”—that are in the works. It doesn’t even include nostalgia trips like “Cobra Kai” that have already launched; for a child of the 80s like me, this TV-series sequel to the “Karate Kid” movies provided much-needed nostalgia during the height of the pandemic.

Even the world of sports is embracing nostalgia. A great example is how NASCAR has introduced Throwback Weekends, featuring races scheduled at nostalgia-inducing venues like Darlington Raceway in South Carolina.

If you oversee a Gold-based music radio station or any other audio brand that can tap into the potential of nostalgia, it is important to do so in a meaningful way. While simply playing a “Class Reunion” featuring ten titles from 1982 may evoke positive emotions from your listeners, you can and should go much deeper and truly strike a chord with them. In the Wall Street Journal piece cited earlier, Clay Routledge discusses how nostalgia is often experienced through “meaningful social memories of experiences such as weddings, holidays, vacations with family or friends, family gatherings, and religious rites of passage.” Thus, think about how much more effective a Class Reunion feature can be with hosts and/or listeners sharing brief funny, uplifting stories about events in their lives that are connected to each of the songs.

A great example of making nostalgia meaningful is how Chicago’s Classic Rock station The Drive celebrated its 20th anniversary on the air last week. Rather than simply airing “celebrating 20 years” promos, the station not only played all of the same songs in the same order as they did on day one of the station’s launch in 2001, it featured its listeners, hosts, and even former hosts telling stories on-air about the beginnings of the station and what it meant to them. It was truly great radio that likely generated positive vibes for those listening to it.

Longtime Coleman Insights clients and readers of this blog know of our advocacy of Outside Thinking. A major component of that philosophy is that consumers turn to audio brands to instantaneously meet at least one of five major needs—to energize and improve their moods, to relax, to avoid boredom, to stay in touch, and to relive memories. Nostalgia arises from reliving memories; if you think of it less as a source of escape but as a source of inspiration and meaning for your listeners, it can provide your audio brand with a major advantage.