
Armies are highly organized machines that depend on leadership to manage complex operations. They organize troops into platoons that can be activated at any time. This concept can be applied to music scheduling. Smart programmers can enhance perceived variety without compromising song strength by applying the power of the platoon.
The simplest description of a music platoon is to rest a subset of songs while activating the same number of songs that have been rested. A set of music is removed from rotation and replaced with another set of music. This allows a station to maintain tight rotations on the most popular songs (power categories) while keeping the music library fresh.