CRS: Panel Attempts To Pick The Hits

Easton Corbin

During a panel discussion Friday billed as a “real life music meeting” at the Country Radio Seminar in Nashville, panelists and audience members listened to, and rated, ten new country singles. According to a story at Billboard.com, the goal was to choose which two you would add to your radio station’s playlist, and audience members got to join the discussion and play along to see how their choices stacked up with the panelists’.

Only one song, Easton Corbin’s “All Over the Road,” would have been added by all four radio panelists -- John Paul, vice president of programming at Dial Global, Bruce Logan with Clear Channel, Marci Braun at WUSN, Chicago, and Becky Brenner of Albright & O'Malley & Brenner consultants..

The audience took part with hand-held meters, using them to respond to 30-second hooks played in the room for each of the ten songs. The meters rated whether the respondent liked or didn’t like each hook, with real-time results displayed on the screen at the front of the room. Some respondents liked songs less as the end of the hook neared, some liked songs more. And while the panelists all agreed that the Easton Corbin song would have been one of two adds out of the ten songs chosen for the session, the audience results showed the Corbin song was not a shoe-in; it was tied for the second add-slot with Charlie Worsham’s “Could It Be.”

For the four radio panelists, there was no consensus on what would be the second add.

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