Music Library Maintenance

As you look ahead to Fall, now is the perfect time of year for Music Library Maintenance.

Rule #1 – Keep the fur out of your keyboard!

Pull a MediaBase report, purge songs that are getting stale and platoon in songs you haven’t played in a while. Set a calendar reminder to do this again in the next 60 to 90 days. It’s the most important thing you can do to keep your audience interested.

Use the Turnover Calculator to check rotations and adjust accordingly to make sure you’re getting the desired turnovers you want for each category. This is especially important for Recurrent categories that tend to inflate over the months.

Sort your active library by artist and scan to check for misspellings to maintain accurate Artist Separation. That includes any Special Artist Separation that you may want to add, or eliminate if not needed anymore. If you’re using Group consider altering it to Group-Male Lead and Group-Female Lead. Even better, eliminate Group and just use Male and Female.

Look over all the coding. To prevent listener fatigue, use Mood to keep sad, angsty, or angry songs separated. Sound codes should reflect what you want that song to stay away from, and to make sure you’re playing a Core Sound at least once every quarter hour. Check Tempo/Energy for any inconsistencies, keep the flow and meet your average energy goals.

If more than one person in your organization is working in the database it’s very important that everyone is on the same page. Talk about this with the staff and consider devising an exercise where each individual “codes” a list of diverse songs, then compare notes to ensure everyone is in sync and aligned with the goals.

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