Music is not a simple subject. Instead, it is a rather subjective one. Curating playlists for hundreds, thousands, then millions of radio listeners can be tricky. Consider the role music plays in a listener’s life – the selective and intimate nature of their choices. Listeners don’t just listen to music; they live inside it.
We allow music to regulate our emotions. Music maps our memories. We don’t remember years; we remember songs. Music forms part of our daily rituals. Music helps us bond socially, and our choices in music validate our personal identity.
So how does OFM curate a playlist that identifies with, bonds with, and maps the social cohesion of its listening audience in central South Africa?
When OFM started 40 years ago, the brand itself – the nation, and the world, for that matter – naturally documented songs that would ultimately stand the test of time. These are what we’d consider ‘golden oldies’. For OFM, these stretch as far back as the eighties. Through soft research methods, such as OFM’s request programming, we’re able to take note of the brand’s most sought-after songs. Repetitive requests suggest that some songs are more popular than others. Given enough time, a brand learns that Tina Turner’s 'The Best', Tracy Chapman’s 'Fast Car', and many others are core audience favourites – thus, we bank these for rotation.
OFM maps the teenage years of its core median listener. This is the brand’s target persona – a composite of its core listener’s habits and identity – whom we call Odette. The theory applied here is that a listener’s personal taste and preference for music are shaped from the age of 13. These are the years when memories become linked to moments and music – your first party, first dance, first kiss. Friendship groups. Heartbreak. We sift through the biggest songs from these years and apply them to our playlist, knowing they’ve left an indelible mark on our audience’s memory. This is what underpins OFM’s music policy: ‘a sound that makes for easy listening – to recall an old, or create a new, memory’.
The recurrent category refers to songs that have peaked on the charts but are still familiar and popular enough to keep in rotation – these can be up to three years old.
Then comes the challenge of adding new music to the playlist. The world currently uploads over 106,000 new tracks to streaming platforms every single day – and that number includes a growing share of ‘debatable’ AI-generated songs.
Consider that volume against the following facts: radio cannot play more than approximately 350 songs a day. That’s 2,500 songs a week and 10,000 songs a month. Some stations worldwide rotate anywhere from 100 to 3,000 songs across their databases. More than 100,000 new songs a day makes this task considerably harder than it was in the eighties, when roughly 55 songs were produced every day.
So how does OFM navigate this flood of music? It starts with understanding the parameters set out in the station’s broadcast licence. From there, we frame a target audience and research broad music preferences within it. This can take the form of virtual music testing (VMT) – the modern evolution of the old auditorium music tests (AMTs) – for both large- and small-base tests.
OFM runs quarterly digital music tests with its audience to gauge listeners’ appetite for current songs. This, hand in hand with daily song requests and the monitoring of similar brands and their charts, helps curate the collection of current songs played on the station. And that’s before factoring in the songs publishers and record labels pitch to feature on the brand.
Beyond formal testing, a crucial component of identifying songs is listening to the world and remaining curious about its song choices. This includes navigating malls, stadiums, stores, festivals, and filling stations, and using the ambient environment to hear which songs are most commonly played.
Finally comes the skill and art form of the music compiler: absorbing all of this information and applying it to the OFM music database. It takes real skill to choose and allocate songs across the station’s various music categories. Music compiling was once described as part science, part art – the ability to apply research while trusting intuition, backed by audience familiarity and the brand’s chosen music policy.
The above is a very rudimentary explanation of how OFM approaches music compiling – so much more goes into it. And while technology has enabled this space, the investment in music can never be underrated.
Music triggers a dopamine release in the brain and lowers stress hormones. It can even synchronise groups of people. When OFM applies its daily music playlists, it has to understand its audience personally. It must take into consideration the time of day, the day of the week, the time of year, and the season its audience is experiencing. It must be nuanced enough to understand the mood of its listener – the difference between the festive season and January. OFM has a policy so sensitive that, should fires be the scourge of the region, we pivot and pull songs referencing fire from rotation.
Any force with this much influence over people demands respect, and radio understands the power music holds over its audiences. Coupled with the presence of an adept radio personality, this makes radio broadcasting one of the most intimate media platforms out there. And while radio celebrates more than a century of broadcasting, it stands strong against modern platforms – many of which now position themselves as complementary to broadcast radio rather than substitutes for it.
