Jonatha Brooke "Linger"

My friend Sara posted this question on my Facebook wall this week:

i have a serious question ---- i've been using my free XM subscription on the van, and *mainly* listening to the Pearl Jam station ( along with playing "unthought known" 15 times a day, they do play some live deep cuts ( KKK took my baby away cover... influence tracks ! Black flag ( with Keith and Henry eras ... Fugazi... who songs that aren't tv show themes... ) Well, i started to think . . . DO you have to be a big PJ Fan to program such a station...  i mean, it's just so confining..Not that they don't have a million live shows to play and take up a few hours. But as a program director, i ask you... like there's a Grateful Dead, a DMB station.. and as i loath them, to think of having to program those stations for all of eternity sounds like hell. Or is it just a job and you just buck up, and have to listen to this crap to get paid? Thankfully i think my days with XM are numbered. 

Let me answer this question about 10 different ways.

But first, another question:

How do I get a job without compromising my principles?

This second question was asked by a college student.  I was on a panel with other DJs, speaking to college students involved in broadcasting at Cape Cod Community College.

The girl asking the question was concerned that after hosting her own radio show on the college station where she played whatever she wanted to play, that she'd have to go out in the big wide world and work at a station where she really didn't like the music.

So I guess thing is, what is the job of programming music about?

If you think its about being an artist, then yes, you are going to have to compromise your principles to be a programmer, if you want to get paid to be a programmer.  Because you have to understand what the job is.

A true artist creates, based on their clear, unfettered vision of how they see or hear their work.  We laud visionaries who are willing to ignore trends, or commercial concerns, or the desires of their audience, to be original.

But you know what?  If you program a radio station to suit your personal vision, guess who you're audience is going to be?

You.

And only you.

No one is Youer than You, Dr. Suess wisely pointed out.  And that's good if you are looking to fulfill your soul by creating something for yourself.

But if fulfilling your soul is your intent, why put it over the airwaves?  Just make an iTunes playlist, call it "My Awesome Mix" and rock out to it at home.  Why would you program something intended for an audience, for yourself?

Really, the only answer is "self-indulgence."

No, the only reason to program a channel is to share it with an audience.  It can be a target audience of 20 or of 20 million.  But programming the station has to be done with an audience in mind.

And hey, if you're lucky, the audience you want to reach has tastes similar to yours, has good taste and you yourself can enjoy the thing you've created.  But you should always remember it's for them.

The restaurant metaphor remains apt.

You would be the worst chef in town if someone came into your restaurant, ordered Chicken Parmesan off the menu and you said, "Yeah, I don't feel like chicken right now.  I'm not cooking that."

I suppose if you run a Chinese restaurant, and someone ordered Chicken Parmesan, it'd make sense to say "Sorry, we don't serve that."

But that's how I view my job.  I am the chef.  People come to my restaurant and have a general expectation of what kind of food their going to get at my place.  And it's my job to serve it up.

I take pride in that.

Just like the guy who makes your pizza does.

Do you think the guy with the North End Pizzeria wants to eat pizza tonight?  No, probably not.  But do you think he cares that he is carrying on a tradition, uses the best ingredients, and wants you to leave his restaurant saying, "That's the best damn pizza I've ever eaten"?  You bet he does.

Sara asks about the person who programs the Grateful Dead station on XM.  Could he/she possibly be fulfilled?

Every Monday, Jer Bear comes into mvyradio, to record his program "Shakedown Stream."  I can honestly say, I have never seen him come in to the studio bummed or bored or distracted by what he was setting forth to do.  Every week, he does a 4 hour Grateful Dead program.  He's done nearly 1,000 hours of shows for mvyradio.  But it's still exciting and interesting to him.  I'm sure part of that is the audience he has, that tunes in weekly, comments on the nuances of each show and lives for the music as passionately as he does.

So I guess I'm saying, if the person who programs the Pearl Jam station or the Dead station or the radio station in your neighborhood is not taking pleasure in satisfying their audience, then I think they're doing their job wrong.  Or at least thinking about it wrong.

Other thoughts . . .

A technical side note to folks outside the programming world, who may or may not know this . . .

Most programmers do use software to program their stations.

So at mvyradio, I do create the bones of a programming day.  The individual DJs are 100% responsible for their own specialty shows, and DJs take requests and make adjustments on the fly.  But the main programming day is created by me, with some software called Selector.

Selector helps me make sure I'm not playing Sting back-to-back with The Police.  It makes sure I don't play the same song at the exact same time two days in a row.  It helps shuffle and shift the music around.

I do look over every set of music and edit to make sure it all works and flows, but I'm not doing the old school thing of saying, "Okay, let's play 'Unknown Thought' again."  The software keeps me honest, by prompting me with a "Hey, we're due to play this song again," and keeps me from leaning too heavily on my personal preferences or prejudices.
 
So those programmers who are programming the Pearl Jam station or whatever on Satellite, don't really wake up each morning and figure out how to play the same 200 songs, but it in a different order.  Logarithms do that.  And they can focus their energies on how to add life to the station with creative ideas and approaches.

Now to undermine the thesis I have previously set out . . .

If I were suddenly traded to a Top Forty station and told to program that, I would probably be less happy than I am right now.  Because I DO like the music we play on mvy.  Programming music that my heart wasn't in, well, that would probably lead me to be a bad programmer.  If I didn't understand why people took pleasure in Top Forty music, then I wouldn't really be able to musically advocate for them, or deliver to their listening needs.

So Sara is right, programming a Dave Matthews Band station if you hate Dave Matthews' music, is going to be hell.  Bad for your soul.  And bad for the listeners.

Finally . . . this is a post inspired by a question, not by a specific song/memory.  So when I got to the part where I had to assign a song to the post, I tried to think about what song represents the crux of all I'm getting at here.

I went to Selector and did some simple database searches, and I came up with this tune.  As of today, November 18th, 2012, since we added Jonatha Brooke's "Linger" to rotation on February 7th 2001, we have played the song a total of 1720 times on mvyradio.

Right now, "Linger" is the most played song in the recorded history of mvyradio ("the recorded history" only dates back to 1999 when we first got Selector; the station has been on the air since 1983).

Do I like the song "Linger"?  Sure.

Do I like the song "Linger" 1720 times?  No.  No more than the Pizzeria guy likes the 100 pizzas he cooked during Friday night's rush.  But we play it because it's a great fit for mvyradio, it's a song the listeners seem to like and it's something we feel good about sharing.

I'm programming "Linger" for the audience, not for self-indulgence.

Self-indulgence is why I write a blog!


Hear the song on Youtube.