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Finally, and most importantly, Calvin emphasizes the importance of keeping up the relationships between the station and record labels. He spends a lot of his time talking to and communicating with companies about how much their artists' songs are getting played, therefore play count information is crucial for him.
Lessons Learned:
- Receives a lot of great music digitally, bu
Elves
1. Ken (Assistant to the Lead Music Director):
Ken is a helper around WMBR station, and mainly acts as an assistant to the Lead Music Director, Calvin. He, again, emphasizes the importance of "schmoozing" with the record companies and keeping them happy so that they will send more music to the station. He is currently in charge of "counting" the plays of music tracks for most Pop/Rock genres and several other less mainstream genres. He walked us through the entire process of his part of the job:
- 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:
- On a high-level, maintaining the relationship with record companies via showing the play counts for music tracks is crucial
- Transitioning gracefully from the now all-physical-disks process to all-digital-media (don't want to double the amount of work for music directors)
- Fast way to download digital media (or zip file) directly into the library
- Secure the download channel from potential abusers that may cause copyright issues
- Grant trusted volunteers to come into the system, rip CDs for 2-3 hours, then automatically log that the CDs have been ripped
Elves
1. Ken (Assistant to the Lead Music Director):
Ken is a helper around WMBR station, and mainly acts as an assistant to the Lead Music Director, Calvin. He, again, emphasizes the importance of "schmoozing" with the record companies and keeping them happy so that they will send more music to the station. He is currently in charge of "counting" the plays of music tracks for most Pop/Rock genres and several other less mainstream genres. He walked us through the entire process of his part of the job:
- 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:
- Definitely needs to keep track of the play counts accurately (DJs playing tracks on their own time versus playing tracks on air - Ken only cares about the air plays, and only care if at least 95% of the song is played)
- Automatic way to extract the play counts with dates played, track name, album name, and artist name into an Excel spreadsheet
- New releases are tagged and displayed prominently, but the tag must expire automatically after 3 months
- A search system that allows multiple condition specifications (e.g. "Show me all the new release tracks that have been played in the past week)
- Ability to automatically tag the date the track was filed, and assign one track with multiple genres
- Interface has to allow DJs to preview or listen to the tracks prior to air play, best if it can log which DJ played which song
- A logging system that shows what has been added/filed already, in order to prevent duplicatesReceives a lot of great music digitally, bu
User Classes
Describe the user classes that you have identified, and their major characteristics.
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