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The Importance of Crafting a Music Log

By David Kidd, BPR

A great chef knows that cooking excellent ingredients is only part of creating an excellent meal.

The final step is “plating”. It’s how the food looks on a plate to the diner.

The chef considers what sits beside what, the balance of flavours, textures and colours and the size of each portion. You can have the finest ingredients in the kitchen and still produce an ordinary experience if you simply throw them onto the plate.

Music radio works exactly the same way.

A station can have a brilliantly researched music library containing hundreds of songs its audience loves. But that doesn’t automatically create a great-sounding radio station.

Crafting that music log means looking beyond whether every individual song deserves to be there. It means considering how those songs work together.

What happens when a slow song follows another slow song? Are there too many songs from the same era clustered together? Does an unfamiliar new song sit between two weaker-testing titles? Are we clumping music styles/genres?

Individually, every song might be perfectly acceptable. Collectively, the hour may sound terrible.

That’s why music scheduling should never become simply an exercise in feeding rules into software and pressing “schedule”.

Scheduling software is extraordinarily good at following instructions. It doesn’t necessarily know what great radio sounds like.

The best Music Directors don’t just schedule songs. They listen to the log in their heads.

They understand tempo, contrast, familiarity and flow. They know when the station needs energy and when it needs breathing room.

Most importantly, they consider the experience from the listener’s perspective.

A restaurant customer doesn’t care how sophisticated the kitchen’s inventory system is. They care about what arrives on the plate in front of them.

Listeners are the same.

They don’t care about your scheduling software, rotation mathematics, separation rules or music research methodology.

They simply hear what comes out of the speakers.

Great songs are the ingredients. Research helps you choose them. Scheduling software helps organise them.

But somebody still has to “plate the meal”.

And that’s where a great Music Director earns their money.