Last week, my colleague Matt Fishman wrote an excellent piece about the way sound is used on a sports radio station. We may not agree on every point, but Fish couldn’t be more right about the lack of attention being paid to the overall sound profile of radio shows these days.
I want to particularly key in on the bumper music. I have been listening to a lot of different shows from a lot of different stations and networks around the country and very rarely do any of them surprise me with the music they use to bump to and from break. I’m not going to sports radio to discover a new favorite song, but in some cases, the music has become so predictable that if I am listening to the same show on Monday at 2:35 pm that I was listening to last Monday at 2:35 pm, I can tell you that they are going to bump back with AC/DC’s “Back in Black.”
Matt Fishman wrote that he wants to hear shows coming back from break with more than just music, and he certainly doesn’t want to hear lyrics. I won’t go that far. I have written before that I think the soundtrack of a radio show is very important for making a connection with your listeners, and to me that means using recognizable versions of recognizable songs is always preferable.
Never changing up your music takes away the ability for music to create any kind of content for you. There is no reason for a host to ask a producer what he is listening to coming back from break. If you aren’t freshening up the bump music, you know what you’re listening to and your listeners know you know what you’re listening to.
It’s not just on air either. Plenty of shows post their daily playlist on Twitter. Some go a step further and turn it into a Spotify playlist. There’s no need to do that if you’re playing the same music everyday.
There is also no need to do anything like that if you are using generic bed music to bump in and out of breaks. It sounds so bad. It doesn’t cost you anything to come back from break with Drake’s hit “In My Feelings.” Why wouldn’t you use that instead of some generic sounding 60 second riff that was recorded to use on a car wash commercial? Honestly, when I am monitoring shows for Barrett, the sound of music I recognize is a signal that the show is back and it’s time to start paying attention again.
When I say freshen up your bump music, I don’t just mean use different songs songs in different time slots everyday. I also mean update what you use. Look, I love Pearl Jam, but I never need to hear the Ten album again in my life. Chances are, you have plenty of listeners that feel that way about “Welcome to the Jungle” or “When I Come Around” or any other jock rock from the 80s and 90s.
Chances are you have plenty of others to whom that stuff sounds ancient. Remember, if your target demo is men 25-54, there are plenty of guys in your audience that were born after Kurt Cobain died and even more born after the Berlin Wall came down. To put that in perspective, the Berlin Wall fell five years after U2 released The Unforgettable Fire. So if you’re bumping back with “Pride (in the Name of Love),” it’s a safe bet that more than a few of your listeners are rolling their eyes.
Mix in some new titles and some different genres. When I was on ESPN Columbia, I had a producer named Josh Ivey, who also worked on our Urban station. I asked him to start bringing in beds, because even though I went outside of the normal sports radio bed realm with a lot of Drive-By Truckers and Steve Earl, I knew my listeners were probably alt-countryed out.
The result was that our listeners really didn’t know what they were going to hear next, and I got some new favorite artists out of it, so I did the same when I moved to SB Nation Radio. My producer there was Tom Okkema.
Tom, as his face might suggest, loved jam bands. I hate them. It created some great content when I would make him explain to me why we were listening to this garbage. It also generated great listener interaction on text and Twitter. People have very strong opinions on the String Cheese Incident!
The other thing I wrote about music mattering in that column from a year ago was that music can set the tone for your show. If your beds are preloaded from weeks or months ago, it keeps a producer from having to think about how a particular show flows or the mood of that day’s broadcast. In other words, whether you realize it or not, it gives a producer a license to be lazy.
Look, I’ve been a producer. I am not arguing that you need more on your plate. There is nothing wrong with using the same bump music for a year or so, but give yourself a lot of options.
When I was producing for Mike Maniscalco and Lauren Brownlow at Buzz Sports Radio in Raleigh, we did a four hour show that took three commercial breaks per hour. That means I had 12 total slots to put in bump music. I had a library of about 80 beds. I didn’t use them on a schedule. I just put them in to match the mood of what we were doing and what I wanted to hear.
Consider this a sequel to the article I wrote last September. If the moral of that story was that your music matters because putting some extra care into such a small detail can enhance your show, the moral of this story is that your music matters because never paying attention to that same small detail can make your show boring.
Demetri Ravanos is a columnist and features writer for Barrett Media. He is also the creator of The Sports Podcast Festival, and a previous host on the Chewing Clock and Media Noise podcasts. He occasionally fills in on stations across the Carolinas in addition to hosting Panthers and College Football podcasts. His radio resume includes stops at WAVH and WZEW in Mobile, AL, WBPT in Birmingham, AL and WBBB, WPTK and WDNC in Raleigh, NC.
You can find him on Twitter @DemetriRavanos or reach him by email at DemetriTheGreek@gmail.com.
