MEDIA & MARKETING:Creating station identity and increasing crucial airwave share just got tougher for 4FM

LIFE HAS just got tougher for 4FM, the multi-city easy listening radio station launched at the start of 2009.

The arrival of Radio Nova on Dublin’s airwaves means more competition for over-40 listeners who like to listen to songs you know and love. However 4FM programme director John Taylor is confident that he can turn around the station’s fortunes.

The launch of Nova means that radio listeners in the capital now have a choice of 14 licensed stations to choose from; 4FM’s remit is to play hits from the late 1960s to the mid-1990s. But most of the other stations in Dublin throw classic hits into their music mix too. So the challenge for Taylor is to carve out an identity for 4FM that resonates with his target audience in Dublin as well as Cork, Limerick, Galway and Clare.

Taylor, from New Zealand, is a veteran of the Irish radio scene. He spent eight years with 98FM from 1998 to 2006 before going back to Auckland to oversee a radio network there. He returned to Dublin last March to take charge of 4FM’s programming, as the station struggled to make an impact in the market.

Programming music radio is a mixture of science and art. Whether it’s a pop station like 98 or an oldies station like 4FM, the basic approach is lowest common denominator.

The starting point is an auditorium music test. With this process, about 120 people are assembled in a room representing blocks of the target demographic. They will then be played eight-second clips of 700 songs. The audience have a dial in their hands and if they like a song they turn the knob one way and if they don’t like it they turn it the other way.

Using this process, songs with minority appeal are weeded out and the favourites go into the playlist mix. The downside of this process is that a station playlist can end up sounding bland, with the listener rarely taken by surprise.

According to Taylor: “We have 13,000 songs in our database and around 2,000 may get played at some time. You can only play so many songs to create the sound you want and there is only so much time that people spend listening to the radio. You need to reach as many people as possible with the songs that mean the most to all those people.

“We have to focus on the central proposition – what can we offer that is distinctive? You try to create a station identity with the music genres that you have at your disposal. But that gets harder and harder the more stations you have in the market.”

Radio station music programming also centres on the idea of music clusters; 4FM’s three clusters are pop, soft rock and easy-listening ballads. When the song database has been settled on, a software programme can spew out a daily playlist, weighted to the clusters favoured by Taylor. It’s his role to tweak that playlist according to his judgment.

A complicating factor for Taylor is the obligation to include 20 per cent Irish content in the playlist. That can mean mining the archives for a nugget from pub rock band Stepaside or, as happened this week, adding Sharon Corr's new cover version of Everybody's Got To Learn Sometime, a hit for The Korgis in 1980.

Radio Nova, which shares some common shareholders with 4FM, will have researched its playlist in the same methodicial manner. Nova’s classic rock is more uptempo than 4FM’s but Taylor concedes he is likely to lose some of his Dublin male audience to the new arrival.

Auckland also has a very competitive radio market, with about 25 stations. However, in New Zealand there might be six different radio stations under the same ownership coming out of the one building. “There are some cohabiting stations in Dublin but you are not allowed to have mixed programming in one environment. From a business perspective and the economic climate we’re in, that doesn’t make sense,” says Taylor.

Despite all the choice, for much of the day the airwaves are filled with chatter, and 4FM is no exception. Taylor has fine-tuned 4FM’s autumn schedule, moving Dave Harvey to a 9am slot and toning down current affairs coverage on Gareth O’Callaghan and Cathy Cregan’s breakfast show.

“In the morning the music is only the glue. People wake up and want the news, weather, traffic, light-hearted banter and ammunition for water-cooler chats. By lunchtime it’s definitely more a music landscape,” says Taylor.

The 4FM programme director is hoping for a ratings lift when the next figures are released in October. “It takes a while to see momentum gather . . . which is frustrating. I think more people need to know about us. The issue is one of promoting and marketing ourselves and telling people what we play.”