What’s the worst part of scheduling music? Almost universally, program directors and music directors will tell you it’s unscheduled music positions.
They drive you crazy! And you spend hours fixing them, or trying to tweak the software to eliminate them.
When it comes to scheduling music, music directors and program directors usually fall into two categories. There are artists and scientists.
A scientist understands the mathematical boundaries of a music log. They tend to obsess over perfect turnovers and linear placement in a log. A scientist cares more about hour exposure, the mean turnover of a category and whether a song repeats in the same shift too soon than song-to-song sequencing.
An artist is the opposite. They care about flow of music, quarter hour representation of the library and how songs sound or pair with one another. They care less about turnover and more about mood, texture and the attributes that contribute to a music mix.
Is it better to be an artist or a scientist? Well, you need both art and science. But today, we’re going to focus on the science of music scheduling by showing you two ways to deal with unscheduled music positions.
