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Calvin is the Lead Music Director of WMBR, and he has dealt with nearly all of the incoming music (physical CDs and digital media) at some point during his job. He receives an extremely large amount of digital media in his email inbox everyday (high throughput). He usually browses through the list of digital tracks, picks out the artists he knows for sure are popular at WMBR and burns the tracks onto CDs. However, currently this process is time-consuming and he only does the this very rarely. Most of the time for advance tracks, demos, and singles, he doesn't even bother looking at them and deletes them right away. This Calvin notes that this is unfortunate because Calvin notes that WMBR take pride in the fact that it is unique (no rules dictating what DJs should play); they play a lot of music from local bands and does not simply play everything that is on the CMJ list. However, local music bands simply cannot afford to send out physical CDs. Calvin estimates that if there is a way to easily file digital media, there will be at least a 25% increase in the amount of music tracks they file.
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- WMBR currently receives music through 2 channels: CDs (mail) and digital media (email). Every week Ken manually sorts through all the mail and places CDs into different genres by placing color-coded stickers on them. At the same, he places a label on the disk cover for DJs to mark down what track they have played on air, and the date they played that track.
- All new CDs filed are entered into a log book manually or through an Excel spreadsheet. Many music directors use this log book to check what the new releases are.
- Not all DJs track their plays regularly on the CD label, so as a secondary source Ken uses the Track Blaster (another system for logging the playlist for every show), but even that is no enough sometimes.
- Every 2 weeks, Ken will take all the new release CDs and tally all the play counts into a huge Excel spreadsheet. This is a time-consuming and tedious process.
- This spreadsheet is then sent to all music directors, where they will use the count to report to CMJ.
- After 3 months, Ken cleans the CDs under "new releases", permanently filing the ones with frequent plays and flushing the unpopular ones.
Lessons Learned:
- Receives a lot of great music digitally, bu
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