Billy Sabatini posted a great piece a few weeks back about the power of association between songs, and how you can exploit this with multiple music streams on Satellite radio. I’m dead jealous. We get something like this once in a while on the better specialist shows in the UK, but in a very produced way, not as a straightforward enjoyable stream. Songs hang together in very interesting ways, and it’s my belief that a lot of radio folk lose sight of this. If you can work this right, you’re on to a good thing.
Often, Songs can just up and change audience on us without our really realising it. It can take years, but the appeal of a Song never ever stays still. A glorious example of this was highlighted at a London conference last week. Here’s a link from the Guardian’s gossip column to illustrate. It cattily paints GCap chief exec Fru Hazlitt in a bad light, which is slightly unfair. The gist of the story is that Hazlitt mentioned Abba’s ‘Dancing Queen’ as her favourite song. No big. But she was then followed by a speaker who demonstrated how research had this same song down as an all time audience turkey. The article failed to mention a few other facts, chief among which was that this was with a specific set of radio listeners in the US, and that this was live monitoring software. I must declare an interest here, by the way – the speaker was Philippe Generali, who heads up RCS, for whom I do a lot of work, and the research interpretation software he was demonstrating is, in my view, pretty damn powerful stuff.
Clever software apart, here is my point: ‘Dancing Queen’ has been through several lives, and it hasn’t stopped yet. And it’s got almost nothing to do with early adopters who bought the records, and almost everything to do with how the song has been used since then. From its first pure pop success, when it was comprehensively dismissed by music purists, though grudging acceptance for its pop craftsmanship, through reinvention as a camp classic with huge gay appeal, and exposure to new audiences through movies like ‘Muriel’s Wedding’ and the ‘Mamma Mia’ musical, through relentless airplay on Gold stations the world over… the song has changed audiences. Several times.
Many boomers who heard it over and over now can’t stand it; post-boomers, like Hazlitt, still love it; kids love it because it is ironic cheesy pop… and the listeners to a particular radio station in the US are pretty damn tired of it.
Like I said, several audiences. It’s up to us to work out who loves it, who hates it, and why. And after that, when to use it, and in what context. I’ll bet it sounds great on an all-Abba channel. Or a mid-70s pop channel.
It all depends on the context. Get that right, and you’ve cracked it.