Articles

Music radio has been testing its songs for decades now using carefully-targeted samples of listeners to rate song hooks. Of course, we use research to determine the overall awareness and popularity of DJ’s and personalities – and sometimes even the recurring bits and features they may employ. But, what about the other elements – the…

We all know that music radio in general suffers a perception that it repeats songs over and over.  Anecdotally, we also all know that smaller playlists tend to generate better ratings than larger ones.  Now that the word “playlist” is part of the vernacular for many people because of iTunes and other platforms, we wondered…

For many reasons, Social Media contact and advertising has become a vital channel for lots of radio stations. Not only can they reach and have a dialog with current and potential listeners, but they can also put the odds of interacting with ratings respondents squarely in their favor. We accelerated the frequency of our NuVoodoo…

What’s radio’s role in the morning from a consumer’s perspective?  In the changing media landscape, where do we fit in among the choices consumers have available? For many years TV morning programs have been sounding like radio shows (that just happen to have video).  All types of information are available online – news, weather, traffic,…

That funny thing about radio ratings interpretation: good ratings mean the station is doing a great job connecting with listeners, while bad ratings mean Nielsen’s sample sucks. Clearly there are situations where bad ratings are caused by mistakes and missteps in programming. And, just as clearly, there are situations where good ratings are caused by…

Setting out to write about the problems that arise when trying to move a music station’s audience older or younger (or more male or more female or more ethnic, etc.) we started to invoke the image of turning an aircraft carrier.  But, a quick online search reveals that aircraft carriers, being warships, are comparatively nimble…

With apologies to the authors of the wonderful book many of us have read to our kids over the years, we thought it was worth thinking about where those of us now in the radio business came from. Why’d we want to get into the business? How’d we get our jobs? If we were 21…

When was the last time the radio made you laugh?  When was the last time the radio made you smile?  We asked these and other questions about radio’s emotional bond with listeners in one of the two national consumer studies NuVoodoo fielded for 2016.  We were pleased with the relatively high marks radio gets for…

The results from our seventh NuVoodoo Ratings Prospects Study are in. We’ll be sharing our latest insights as we move through 2016 – though we’ll save some for clients, some for the designs of our revolutionary direct marketing programs for clients and still others for our keynote at the Worldwide Radio Summit in April. Many…

In designing the two national consumer studies that NuVoodoo fielded for 2016, whenever possible we wanted to ask new questions and probe different aspects of what listeners get from our brands.  With buzz in the digital press about “curated playlists” on Spotify and some of its competitors, as well as the mysterious algorithm that Pandora…