As a Hot AC station that switched to all-holiday music each fall, WTSS (Star 102.5) Buffalo, N.Y., did a different version of the format. Even as the Christmas format tightened and became increasingly reliant on pre-rock-era music and ’60s MOR, Star played a larger library and was more aggressive on recent holiday releases than most of the stations doing the format from an AC or Classic Hits perspective.
Star first went all-Christmas in 2001. Despite its different take on the format, Star has lost to a holiday competitor only once in all that time. After Star, still one of Hot AC’s most successful stations, was sold to K-Love owner EMF this year, MD/morning host Rob Lucas, a 37-year employee of the station and its predecessors, began putting together a guide to Christmas music programming,
Lucas’s programming manual, The Art of Scheduling Christmas Music, is a comprehensive 20-page look at every aspect of the format, from imaging to managing morning shows that think they’re more compelling than Santa. Lucas can be reached at roblucasbflo@gmail.com, for stations interested in The Art of Scheduling Christmas Music, or to schedule holiday logs for your market. Here’s an excerpt dealing directly with Star’s different approach to a holiday library.
How many Christmas songs should you play? In a diary market, you likely won’t know the perfect number until the end of your first holiday ratings period. Until then, keep track of listener reaction on social-media responses, but try to avoid overreacting. “I will never listen to your station again” often gives way to the station being hugely up in January. In a PPM market, the results will be much more instantaneous, and one hopes will show reliable trends to help with music-rotation decisions.
WTSS took an aggressive library stance, with calculated risks, which helped us win 21 out of 22 holiday ratings periods, including the last five years, when we beat a direct competitor by a 4:1 or 5:1 margin in key demos. When we started in 2001, we played fewer than 150 songs. Toward the end, we were playing more than 250 songs between 5 a.m.-10 p.m. That surely seems like a lot, but in our case, it worked, because how you play it can have just as big an effect as what you play.
We were playing:
- 50 powers (every four hours)
- 120 secondaries (6-8 hours, 3x a day)
- 100 Cs (about 2x a day)
- 50 fill songs (10 p.m.-5 a.m. in drop positions; might also have been used to fill slots during the day where nothing else worked.)
Programming “All-Christmas” should take weeks of preparation, with getting songs properly credentialed in your scheduling program, and adjusting clocks to get the fewest wasted/dropped songs, especially 10 a.m.-8 p.m. and dayparts where there is no live host to adjust the music on the fly. Some Christmas songs are as short as 1:35; more than you think are over 3:50. If it takes 45 minutes to edit a Hot AC log, expect to spend an hour or more editing the holiday log.
Don’t feel bad if you are constantly updating clocks, moving songs to different categories, or packeting similar titles to slow their airplay. That means you care what the final product sounds like. All-Christmas is a living, breathing, morphing format that may sound as much as 30% different on Christmas Day than it did at sign-on.
The biggest misconception is that holiday stations can’t have flavor, tempo, or stationality. Christmas music doesn’t need to be downtempo, boring, or churchy. Just as a Hot AC likely wouldn’t play two ballads in a row, we maintained that mentality when scheduling Christmas music.
Title and artist separation are even more important when scheduling Christmas music than when scheduling a Hot AC or CHR. The frustration of dealing with five current and recurrent Taylor Swift titles gives way to balancing eight Andy Williams songs, nine Carpenters titles, six Phil Spector/“Wall of Sound” songs, eight Bing Crosby, and six Johnny Mathis titles, as well as many of those artists having playable versions of the same song.
Here’s a starter guide to Christmas sound codes, showing the breadth of what Star played:
- Spiritual – Percy Faith, Ray Conniff, “The Little Drummer Boy,” Pentatonix
- Pop – Taylor Swift, Ariana Grande, Goo Goo Dolls, Kelly Clarkson
- Classic – Andy Williams, Carpenters, Burl Ives, Johnny Mathis, Stevie Wonder
- Traditional – Bing Crosby, Nat “King” Cole, Frank Sinatra
- Instrumental – Trans-Siberian Orchestra, Mannheim Steamroller, “Sleigh Ride”
- Rock – Tom Petty, Bryan Adams, Billy Squier, Bruce Springsteen, Brian Setzer
- Soft AC – Kenny Loggins, Kenny G, Josh Groban, Michael Bublé
- Novelty – Chipmunks, Straight No Chaser, “The Christmas Shoes”
Make sure the sound and tempo coding fit the mood and tempo goals of your station. Eurythmics’ “Winter Wonderland” may be pop and uptempo for many stations, but it was medium on our brighter radio station. Kelly Clarkson’s “Underneath the Tree” was pop, but her version of “Grown Up Christmas List” was, despite her artist image, traditional, bordering on spiritual. Don’t be surprised if you are often updating your coding based on how your station’s sound develops.
When a great new Christmas song is released by a contemporary artist, don’t just play it, play it often and spotlight it. Highlighting unique songs is a key to sounding different than Pandora and Spotify and being recalled by listeners. It also gives your station more life than a conservative competitor that just rolls 150 Christmas titles, never changing the playlist.
If a local band has a pretty good take on a holiday song, let the morning show spotlight it. No one is going to hate you for giving a local artist some holiday cheer! It will only get you more local attention and set the station apart from others in a way that radio used to do on a daily basis. If studio space allows, try to have local school choirs or acappella groups do three songs 1-2 days a week.
Packeting and separation times. Packeting is an effective way to keep multiple titles of the same song in the same category from sounding too repetitive, as in separating multiple instrumental versions of “Sleigh Ride,” which to the listener all sound the same, even though they are from different artists.
Suggested starting points for separation times:
- Title: 1:30
- Artist: 2:00
- Instrumentals: 30 minutes
- Spiritual: 35 minutes
- Novelty: Three hours to start. One hour for the two weeks before Christmas
Christmas Eve & Christmas Day: 4 p.m. Christmas Eve through noon on Christmas Day is a very traditional time. Listeners are having meaningful family gatherings and possibly headed to Mass. Don’t schedule any novelty songs, and go heavier on spiritual and traditional songs. But it shouldn’t be solemn. You can still have an uptempo feel with traditional music. Open up the playlist again at noon, becoming a little hotter and a little more fun.
After Christmas: If you’re programming all-Christmas, or even throwing in a few holiday songs after the holiday, be sure to manually go through your library and put an end date on any songs, sweepers, and promos that won’t sound correct after Christmas. You may be surprised how many there are, including:
- Santa Claus Is Coming to Town
- It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas
- Deck the Halls
- Here Comes Santa Claus
- I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus
Songs that sound perfect for post-Christmas play:
- Home for the Holidays
- Happy Holidays/It’s the Holiday Season
- Winter Wonderland
- Feliz Navidad
- Sleigh Ride
- Same Auld Lang Syne
Finally, here’s a sample hour, modeled on Star 102.5. Only a few titles separate it from the typical 150-song library, but those songs made a significant difference in our feel.
- Andy Williams, “Happy Holidays/It’s the Holiday Season”
- Kelly Clarkson, “Underneath the Tree”
- Bing Crosby, “Do You Hear What I Hear?”
- Boston Pops, “Sleigh Ride”
- Goo Goo Dolls, “Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!”
- Crystals, “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town”
- Carpenters, “Home for the Holidays”
- Train, “Shake Up Christmas” (drop position before a stopset)
- Jose Feliciano, “Feliz Navidad”
- Carrie Underwood, “Favorite Time of Year”
- Nat “King” Cole, “The Christmas Song”
- Beach Boys, “The Man With All the Toys”
- Trans-Siberian Orchestra, “Christmas Eve/Sarajevo 12/24”
- Taylor Swift, “Christmas Tree Farm”
- Burl Ives, “Holly Jolly Christmas”
- Michael Bublé, “All I Want for Christmas Is You”
- U2, “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” (drop song before a stopset)
- Bobby Helms, “Jingle Bell Rock”
- Ed Sheeran & Elton John, “Merry Christmas” — or whatever this year’s new title from a pop superstar is.
For more information on The Art of Scheduling Christmas Music, or to talk about Lucas scheduling your station, reach him at roblucasbflo@gmail.com.
This story first appeared on radioinsight.com