A format is “a package of program content, announcer style, timing of program and commercial material, and methods for obtaining listener feedback and quality control.”1 In other words, format is radio's version of what organizational theory calls a core strategy.Read more at location 1391
This chapter will first provide a qualitative overview of the long-term trend toward increasingly differentiated formats followed by a review of literature on categorical schema in arts and diffusion.Read more at location 1413
the medium was not always as segmented by genre conventions as it is today.Read more at location 1418
On the one hand, there are more formats now than in the 1950s, but on the other, any given station today will have much less eclectic airplay than did early stations,Read more at location 1419
In response to the challenge from television, stations cut costs by relying on the cheapest programming they could find: disk jockeys playing records.Read more at location 1431
The most influential of these innovations was the Top 40 format, invented in 1951 by Todd Storz of KOWH in Omaha after he noticed bar patrons repeatedly choosing the same songs from a jukebox.Read more at location 1433
In 1967, Tom Donahue of KMPX-FM in San Francisco created a new “Underground” radio format that was primarily focused around cultivating an intense attachment to the late 1960s counterculture and only secondarily with music itself.Read more at location 1444
The finding that deregulation produces format diversityRead more at location 1465
Understanding to what categories a market actor belongs implies a whole host of questions, such as with whom is the actor in competition, what is the actor's reference or peer group for purposes of understanding appropriate behavior, and do potential customers or investors even notice the object, and if so how do they evaluate it?Read more at location 1479
Genre serves to provide a set of common understandings about art, which makes possible collaboration and exchange.Read more at location 1483
radio has experienced a long and persistent trend toward increasing differentiation.Read more at location 1486
“The more differentiated the system of genre classification, the less universal.”22 In other words, the more complex a schema is, the harder it is to agree on it.Read more at location 1488
falling into several categories benefits products except insofar as it causes the product to have a fuzzy identity, in which case its reception suffers.Read more at location 1490
baby names are subject to rapid turnover, to the extent that you can make a reasonable guess at a person's birth cohort entirely from his or her first name.Read more at location 1493
girls' names with a leading “J” were especially popular in the mid-twentieth century as were, for both genders, names with a biblical etymology in the 1970s and names with an Irish etymology in the 1980s (including Irish surnames and place-names repurposed as first names like “Ryan” and “Shannon”). Currently, anyone who ventures into a university-affiliated daycare center and reads the labels on the cubbies will see an abundance of Victorian names.Read more at location 1495
When an actor evaluates an innovation, the actor first considers it in terms of the various criteria in the actor's toolkit. If the innovation is sufficiently meritorious by these criteria, the actor may adopt immediately. Scaled up to the macro level this implies an exogenous diffusion pattern. In contrast, when an innovation seems dubious when measured by the actor's rubrics, the actor will delay adoption until a sufficiently convincing mass of the actor's peers have adopted.Read more at location 1506
we should see different patterns for songs that clearly belong to a format as compared to those that are crossing over from other formats or whose genre is emerging and has only a tentative claim to inclusion in the format.Read more at location 1519
the song was highly focused on the genre conventions of its initial format and by definition will not match additional formats as well. Record labels will go so far as to remix the singleRead more at location 1526
“Love Song” by Sara Bareilles, the third most popular song of 2008.Read more at location 1531
the song began spreading through Hot AC and AAA by a constant hazard.Read more at location 1534
the song spread slowly at first then began to experience exponential growth in November, which continued through December and January until by February the song had saturated the format via a classic s-curve diffusion pattern.Read more at location 1537
Thus we see “Love Song” first spreading by constant hazards, indicating that stations adopted without reference to their peers. Such behavior is theoretically consistent with the stations making the decision to adopt on the basis of their own reading of the song as measured against the genre conventions of the format. Following this we see the song spreading by s-curves through two formats, indicating that the stations were sensitive to peer behavior as their hazard was a function of prior peer adoptions. Note that this endogenous pattern is with regard to their format peers and not stations in adjacent formats.Read more at location 1542
Thus, for songs that are a dubious fit with a station's format, it is insufficient for the song to have been validated by stations in a similar format as the programmer knew ex ante that the song was a better fit with the adjacent format. Rather such a dubious song must be validated by peers in the station's own format.Read more at location 1548
Only in a very few cases does a song's crossover success follow a constant hazard. For instance, the Alicia Keys song “No One” spread exogenously through Rhythmic, Urban, and Urban AC, and then spread by s-curve through Top 40, all of which is consistent with the general pattern. Then two months after its initial success, it began spreading among Hot AC stations through a constant hazard.Read more at location 1553
to the extent that the industry is thoroughly segmented by category, it will inhibit the growth of music that breaks with these categories for the same reasons that a securities market that is segmented by industry will penalize conglomerates.Read more at location 1577
The late 1970s and early 1980s present an interesting case because AM was still largely characterized by the traditional Top 40 format (that is, an eclectic agglomeration of whatever is popular) whereas FM was characterized by narrow formats. As a result, “FM radio, now rigidly segmented by music styles, came late to the disco party.Read more at location 1579
we want to see how songs from a major new genre spread over the course of that genre becoming more institutionalized in radio.Read more at location 1597
The main musical difference between reggaetón and hip-hop is a distinctive fast and tinny staccato dance beat borrowed from Jamaican dancehall musicRead more at location 1601
Thus, we not only see a pattern of slow growth leading up to a tipping point, but also diffusion across a gradient of social distance from reggaetón's Puerto Rican base.Read more at location 1623
MexicanRead more at location 1637
