Thoughts on Mixing Currents, Recurrents and Oldies
If you are playing ONLY Current Hits, or if you are playing ONLY Oldies, then different strategies apply. If your station is like most, you've got three main types of songs to Categorize and mix.
2026
MusicOne Cloud – Smart Song Selecting
MusicOne Cloud schedules much like M1 Pro does, but does it smarter and faster. Here’s an 80 second video explaining…
MusicOne Cloud – Daily Doings
By daily doings, I mean the kind of things we do when we work with the music scheduler day to…
MusicOne Cloud – Replace A Song
The music scheduler needs to be quick, don’t you think!? When you want to replace a song in a schedule…
MusicOne Cloud – DayFormat
A DayFormat is a grid with 24 slots, one for each hour of the day. You click the clocks you…
MusicOne Cloud – PlayoutOne Connection
If you use Music 1 Version 7 or SE with the PlayoutOne automation system, you know that when you import…
MusicOne Cloud – Cloud Sync
Mid-June 2026 – There’ve been some updates to the CloudSync plug-in and you need to have the latest build installed.…
Radio Drops #27 – The Idea of Quarter Hour Maintanance
It came with the debut of the Arbitron ratings company in 1968. The company’s methodology was to recruit people who…
M1/Windows Database to MusicOne Cloud
How Easy It is to Move M1 to the Cloud Edition First Up: MusicOne Cloud is now running on our…
Radio Drops #25 – Talk Quickly
Quick Talk Communicates Better Around 1980, the Lexicon Time Compressor was introduced. The electronic device could expand or compress audio…
Radio Drops #23 – PsychoSeasoned Oldies
When the competing stations are playing much the same Oldies that you are, it’s the little things that make a…
2025
Radio Drops #22 – Dayparting/Hour Restrictions
The Word and the Phrase = the Same Thing In the early days, Top 40 played whatever were the current…
Radio Drops #19 – How I Would Do Internet Radio
Here’s What’s Gonna Work By “Work”, I mean build and maintain a loyal audience of listeners. We are facing such…
Radio Drops #18 – You Be Your A.I. Voices
You Can Be Another Person If you aren’t satisfied with your voice, if you don’t like the way you…
Talent Tips 1991
Positioning Statement Ideas From 1991 In Radio Drops #17, I talked about Positioning as the marketing mantra before it came…
Bill Gavin's Advice To A New Music Director
Program Notes From Bill Gavin You don’t know who he was? Gavin was one of the most important men in…
Critique – the All A.I. Radio Station
What does an old pro have to say about how an AI does radio? For the middle third of my…
Radio Drops #17 – Positioning
Positioning – The Battle For Your Mind Music radio is a self-taught craft. To be more successful, read all you…
Radio Drops #16 – Selecting New Music
For CHR and Other Today’s Hits Radio Stations The fact is new and unfamiliar songs are the number one reason…
Radio Drops #15 – Picking the Hits; Early Lessons
It used to be a lot easier. When yours was the only Top 40, or only Country, or only R…
2024
Formatting Christmas
Video How-to It’s pretty much the same every year. A few new titles maybe. We’ve always got to deal with…
MusicBrainz
The Latest Ultimate Tagger I’ve just been tipped about this one. I regularly have M1 users who are moving from…
Talking About Radio
Radio veteran John Leslie has been talking with radio people on his podcast for about near two years now. And…
Radio Drops #12 – Station Identification: Over-Do It
Identify Your Station. Identify Your Station. Identify Your Station. At first, saying your call-letters once between the records was sufficient;…
Stagers Linked To Selected Songs
Stagers Linked to Some, Not All Songs In A Category Linking Promos, Stagers and other tracks to schedule before certain…
Radio Drops #11 – Where Did Long Spot Break Come From?
It Wasn’t Always This Way In the beginning, you played a song, you played some commercials. You played another song,…
Schedule A Full Hour
Never Less Than 60 Minutes Most commercial stations over-schedule a song or two each hour so there’ll be extras available…
Radio Drops #10 – The Birth of Music Radio and the Top 40 Format
1951, Todd Storz and the 45 rpm Record
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…
Radio Drops #9 – Connections
There’s this old music radio saying: It’s what’s between the records that counts.
Radio Drops #8 – How to talk on the radio – pt.2
The Three Speaking Zones Personal: Your listener is three to ten feet away.You speak with a comfortable volume.Public: Your listener…
Links to the A.I. Toys
ElevenLabs and Suno In my recent posts I’ve had examples of A.I. created jingles and my voice replicant. That…
Radio Drops #7 – How To Talk On The radio
Short Course: Be Yourself. Be Quick. Get Back to the Music.
Radio Drops #6 – A.I. Steve
We Fed My Voice to A.I. and A.I. Came Back with…Me
Clock Rules – Mass Change/Update Sound Code Rules
Apply the Rule Change to All Clocks At Once This short video show how to update Sound Code transition rules…
Radio Drops #5 – The A.I. Jingle
A.I. Voices Aren’t Yet Human. Jingles are Close Enough. We are all actors. Not just us media people, all humans…
The DAX system in the UK and EU
Internet Radio Monitization I’ve been wondering why nobody’s done it before now. Well, that’s not quite right; there have been…
Sound Codes Used to Format Pre-Song Stagers
Schedule a Voice Track or Schedule A Sweeper Situation: You have two types of Stagers that you schedule before songs.…
End-Date Display Selection
How to Select the Format You See Non-music cards in M1 and Spot cards in TrafficOne may sometimes have start…
How to Back-up M1 and T1
Do This Regularly You may have noticed the “backup” button has been removed from the start-up screen. The function was…
Artist Separation
More Trouble Than It Need Be Today’s world. The label says the song is a duet by This Singer and…
Radio Drops #1 – Care for Drive-Time Repeats
Launching a Mini-Blog While talking with the owner/manager of a station in Geogia a few weeks ago, I went into…
Scheduling Stops On Same Song…a quick hack
It happens to us all… Everybody runs into this at one time or another….M1 starts giving editing stops during the…
The Category 35% Rule
This Doesn’t Do What We Think It Might Do This is a minor category rule that seems more important than…
Category Rules 101
The most important rules are those you set in Format clocks. Category rules are minor few and as a…
Adding New Announcements into Rotation
Spread Them Out When new items are added to a non-music category, they appear at the bottom of the list. …
2023
Year End Countdown
Scheduling the Year End Top Hits Countdown A couple of calls came in this week asking about how do to…
Christmas Formatting – A bit of History
Handling so many songs with the same title Here’s as link to my Christmas Formatting article. A long time ago,…
Delete and Re-schedule Logs
There will come a time when you need to do this. You may have scheduled through next Monday the 11th…
Olbermann On One-to-One Communication
We have, all of us, but One listener Outside the USA, Keith Olbermann is probably unknown. Here he is recognized…
How Many Songs Should I Be Playing?
Mike Joseph Invented The Tight List…in 1958. The question comes to me with some regularity. How many songs does a…
Standard Rule Enforcement Settings
Enforce Only the Formatting Rules That You Use Music 1 has more rules settings than 99.5% of people need. That…
The Death of Radio?
That’s What the Man Said Bob Lefsetz is a bodacious blogger about all things and culture. Primarily, he is a…
Keeping Safe From Ransomware
Enabling the Russian language on the computer may protect it from ransomware attacks.
Why Today’s Radio Sucks
Why Radio Plays The Same Songs Over and Over You may know of Pat Holiday’s YouTube channel. He’s a veteran…
Faster Scheduling for TrafficONE
Revision 840 = Faster Scheduling for T1 Stations that use our advertising schedule and billing extension, TrafficONE should subscribe to…
Categories 101
This six minute video covers the need-to-know basics of MusicONE categories. It includes the single most important screen in the…
MusicONE Backup
Backup and Moving MusicONE or TrafficONE to a New Computer You should make it a practice to backup your MusicONE…
Formatting for the Quarter Hour
Radio sells advertising by the quarter hour; specifically the average number of listeners will hear an advertiser's message in the…
Disc Jockey Instructions, circa 1974
DJ Instructions for a CHR/Top 40 Station circa 1974
The TrafficONE Blog
For some who don’t know, MusicONE’s companion enhancement is TrafficONE, our advertising scheduler and biller. Most of the tutorial videos…
Music Scheduling Before Computers
The thing guys coming into music radio today don’t have that the young radio guys of my generation had is…
Linking – Elvis Intros
It is easy to record a bunch of Artist intros and link them to songs by the singers. Simple little…
2022
Formatting the Year End Countdown 2022
The single most listened to Thing on music radio is the Countdown. People love lists, of course and we soon…
Christmas 2022
Strange to you but back in early days of Rock ‘n Roll Radio, most stations didn’t add Christmas music until…
How the Cassette Changed The World
It came out in 1983 and did change things, indeed. For the first time, we had a small, light, very…
The Radio Book I’m Reading
Sub-title: American Radio Tales (1946 -1996). I happened across this book on Amazon and have recommended it to many old-hands…
2021
12 Predictions for the Music Business
This linked article below isn’t about M1 or radio, per se. It was an interesting read for me. I post…
What Makes A Successful Radio Ad
Almost every dime I ever made came to me either directly or indirectly from radio advertising. I’ve recorded thousands of…
What I Did When Don Everly Died
I was on the air at Gulf 104 in Tallahassee when Elvis died in August of ’77. Today, I don’t…
Strangest Recent Radio Story
In case you missed it in the radio trade papers, here’s a link to the new report. An AM signal at…
Alexa Skills for US Stations
One of our long-time MusicONE users has a side-gig making Google and Alexa skills for radio stations. If your listeners…
How To Be A Radio Program Director
Pat Holiday and I haven’t met but we ran in the same small circle of traveling radio program directors a…
Twelve Minutes with Lee Abrams
Lee Abrams was a major force in the music radio business before his 20th birthday. The Progressive Rock (aka: Album…
2020
A New Site for TrafficONE
Our traffic & billing application now has it's own website. You can see it in action in the posted videos.
The Listenership Evolves
Pandora has released some findings from an audience and listenership survey conducted by the respected research company, Edison Media. Click here…
The Programming Operations Manual
A lot of M1 users are aware of my extensive career in this business and a whole bunch more radio…
Steve Warren On The Air
Alright folks, after some few requests and years of hold-out, I'm posting a couple of my old airchecks; me-on-the-air for…
2019
Your Voice Make You Cringe? Here’s Why
It didn’t happen to me because I was fortunate to be born with a “radio” voice that sounded adult the…
The Best Idea I’ve Heard This Year
Last week, I was talking with Dan Lewis, the manager of a station in New Zealand. He’s got our whole…
2016
Boston Tests New Music & Flunks (1972)
This isn’t about M1 at all, but radio geeks will find it interesting. I’ve started going through my archives and…