Travis "Why Does It Always Rain On Me?"

If you discover a band after their fourth or fifth record, do you go back and buy their old records?

As a music consumer, I usually do, figuring that if I like the new stuff, there is probably some older stuff I might like too.

But as a music programmer, it's a little harder to do that.

Meaning, if we start playing a band on mvyradio, five albums into their career, do we go back to their old albums and start to play their old songs too?

It certainly works that way, going forward. Meaning, that once we've brought a band into the mvyradio World, we are more likely to play songs from subsequent albums. If we like a band enough to add them, then we like them enough to follow them forward.

But backwards is harder, and here's why . . .

When a new song goes into rotation, we play it a lot. If it really resonates with the audience, we'll play it a couple of times a day, every day, for several months on end.

As a programmer, you do this to build familiarity. If a song is strong enough to withstand months of spins before people start to get sick of it, then it is probably sturdy enough to become a permanent member of our rotation. Songs that make it to this point might get played once a week.

So let's take Travis for an example.

They put out several very good albums, but for some reason, they never quite seemed to be a band that we wanted to put into full rotation.

By 2007, when they put out the song "Closer," they had evolved enough, and mvyradio had evolved enough, that it seemed to make sense.

And it sounded great on the air, as we played it very frequently for a few months, and now play it every 7 days or so. It's familiar enough at this point, that you don't have to play it often. People recognize it and remember it.

Listening to "Closer" and the album "The Boy With No Name" sent me back to older Travis songs. And I kind of think that they have several songs that are really good, and could potentially be a good fit for the station.

But we can't suddenly start playing "Why Does It Always Rain On Me?" which is a 10+ year old song, twice a day for months on end. That would be weird.

And if we only played it once a week, well, for most of the mvyradio audience, it's a completely unfamiliar tune, and would come up so infrequently that the average listener would never become familiar with it.

Then again, it's a pretty great song.

So all this week, old songs by bands that we now play. I'm asking you, are they good enough to overcome that hurdle of lack-of-familiarity?

What do you think of "Why Does It Always Rain On Me?" and "Flowers In The Window"?


See the video on Youtube.


See the video on Youtube.


See the video on Youtube.