Same Artist Comes Up Too Much

Packeting and Platooning

An Artist separation problem is the first scheduling problem most people encounter when they get MusicOne.  Or any other scheduler, for that matter. When an Artist is giving you problems, the first thing to do is to go to the Artists tab and run a Computed Separation on the singer.  See what is possible for the artist and don't set it higher than what M1 computes because the computed separation is the mathematical minimum of what will allow all of the songs by the artist to schedule without having a lot of Artist separation edit-stops during scheduling. A station can't schedule nine Dua Lipa plays a day and also give her a two-hour separation.

Next, look at the Rank Order of your Categories.  Move the heavy-play Artists up to the top part of the rank order of the category. Like, if Dua Lipa is in Hot Current, getting six or eight spins a day, And if the Recurrent Category has a Dual Lipa track getting a play a day, and if you have a half dozen by her in your Gold Category with each getting three or four plays a month, then move those to the top half of the rank order. In a category of 300 songs, shuffle and separate the artists, then eye-ball the list.  there'll be at least one, maybe two Dua Lipa's between 250 and 300.  Move those up to be above the 250 point in Rank position. That will allow M1 more opportunity to automatically place them all without needing many human edits in the scheduling run.

In the Country format, I once had a new one by Garth Brooks in Hots, scheduling seven times a day. There was a Garth in Recurrent getting ten spins a week.  And the Gold category had a dozen Garth songs. It was near impossible to get the Golds all scheduled without six or eight Garth-Artist separation edit stops.

I created a Garth packet and moved eight of his oldies into it and added the packet to the Gold category giving me a Gold list with five Garth Brooks 'records', the four biggest hits with full rotation and the packet.  Those were getting much less exposure, but were still getting plays.

Another thing I did with the Country super-group, Alabama.  At one point, they had more than thirty big hits worthy of continuing play in the Oldies rotation. The group always one in Current and a couple in Recurrent receiving daily airplay. So in the Oldies scheduling pass, there'd be a bunch of Alabama-stops.  So  I "platooned" the records.   I moved  twenty songs to Rest and played just ten Alabama oldies for a month or two.  Then I moved those to Rest, replacing them with a different ten for the next month or two.  Over the months, all the songs were getting played and the platoon tactic seemed to my ears to be regularly "freshening" my Oldie mix.

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