Little Feat "Cold Cold Cold"

The good thing about working for an independent radio station is that there is no corporate overlord who is telling me how to program the station, or what songs we should be playing.

Corporate, mainstream stations have lots of rules about what they will play and won't play, and on some level, it's understandable. If you need to capture a mass audience to make it in the Big City, you can't take chances, you can't make choices that might alienate the "political" center of your listenership and you can't be to niche-y.

So if a great song has some kind of cosmetic problem, that's just too effin' bad. It's not going to get played on the Big City station, even the cool Triple A Format stations that are similar to mvyradio (but corporate owned and in large markets). If it's too slow and could drag down the station's tempo, it's out. If it's too folky or too country or too urban, no way. And God forbid that it's too long.

Even stone cold classics like the 6 minute "Tangled Up In Blue" aren't likely to make the daytime playlist of a Big City station. There is science and statistics behind this choice---if you have pushed the attention span of your audience too far, you're going to lose them to the channel-changing button. So you find what the median threshold is, and you make sure you don't cross it.

You're unlikely to hear a song ramble past the 4 1/2 minute mark, on a Big City station.

But we have the good fortune to be in a small market, where, if our ratings change two 10ths of a percent, we will not lose hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue. We're a niche radio station that only appeals to a single digit percentage of the local audience, but because we're streaming on the web, we can actually program to that very small niche of folks, in every city in the world.

It provides a lot of freedom.

The freedom to occasionally play Little Feat's "Cold Cold Cold/Tripe Face Boogie" which is nearly 10 minutes long.

I only play this song a couple of times a year, but I LOVE to do it, because it always garners a couple of reactions.

When I play it, without fail someone calls the request line, freaking out. "I can't believe you're playing this! I haven't heard it on the radio in 20 years!" We can actually take advantage of the adventurousness-less of corporate stations, and make ourselves stand out.

The flip side, of course, is that the corporate stations are not entirely wrong.

Because also, without fail someone calls the request line, distraught: "What are you playing!?! Uggghhhh . . ."

There is a large percentage of the audience that just isn't going to stick with a song that's 10 minutes long.

I'd say, "Who needs em!!!" but that would be cold, cold, cold.