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Determining Music Crossover – Don’t Fool Yourself

By David Kidd, BPR

Recently, I did an analysis through one of the radio monitoring services to determine how much music crossover there was between two stations in the same network in the same city.

The programming team at Station B was convinced that the crossover was only around 20% but comments from many other staff members said regardless of that analysis, Station B sounded like a “light” version of Station A, the market leader.

My analysis showed that indeed the programming team was correct ……if you only look at song “titles”.

However, just looking at the number of titles two stations have in common ignores the number of plays a song has; in, other words its like looking at cume and ignoring TSL.

The only way to correctly analyse crossover is by looking at the total music played, which factors in how many times each title was played.

In this example, just looking at “titles”, of the 410 titles played on Station B, 76 titles were also played on Station A i.e. 19%.

However, there were around 1000 song plays during the week on Station B… of those, there were 450 plays in common with Station A.

In other words, the REAL crossover of music is 45% not 19%!

This can be a real issue for a station trying to establish its musical identity in a crowded market.