BING AND HIS BUDDIES’ MOST ENTHUSIASTIC FANS ARE—WHO?
I recently spoke with a friend who has been an air personality—a terrific one, I might add—at a major market soft AC station for many years. This station does very well year-round and, like many of its format ilk, plunges into an all-Christmas music format around Thanksgiving. In fact, it’s already starting. What’s newsworthy about that to me and to radio station managers in any format is how the station’s demographic alters when White Christmas and the rest begin to roll.
Want to take a guess at what consistently turns out the be the most enthusiastic and appreciative age group for Chestnuts, Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree and all the rest? (No fair if you already air the format and have discovered this yourself.)
According to my friend, the soft AC jock...it’s Generation Y.
This demo is loosely defined as people born between about 1986 and 2000—in other words, 10 to 24 years of age. The children aside, what my friend has observed is that listeners in their late teens and early twenties—definitely not your average soft AC P1 demo—flock to the all-holiday format every year about this time. Yes, the same bunch that normally listens to everything from Death Rock to Keith Urban loves to hear the good old Christmas classics, at least for a few weeks out of the year.
Why on earth would this bunch, which was virtually raised on iTunes, get excited about the same old holiday retreads? Ask the air personalities who work the format.
In this case, my friend’s view is that these kids welcome holiday music as a pleasant change from their usual instant-gratification diet of iPod fare. Perhaps, too, a little touch of homey normalcy to an age group that may be the most heavily-scheduled, stressed-out bunch in history. (I have an 18-year-old. I'm right in the thick of it.)
That prompted me to cruise over to the iTunes Store and see what was cooking for the holidays. A lot of holiday music, that’s what! They’re offering a package of up to 20 Christmas and holiday song downloads free for a week. It’s called iTunes Holiday Sampler and includes artists such as Sarah McLachlan, Amy Grant—and who wouldn’t want to fire up We Wish You A Merry Christmas by Weezer?
Not to be outdone, Amazon is also offering some free holiday music downloads through its MP3 store.
So, obviously, Gen Y has plenty of holiday ho-ho available for its MP3 players. But the news to me was that they’re also ready and willing to actually listen to the radio (and to a station they might well never sample otherwise) to help get in the holiday mood.
Which, of course, is solid platinum for sales.
Let’s see, with soft AC (the most common format employing the all-holiday music format, though by no means the only one), we have:
- A large core of steady, loyal listeners already in place
- Incredible TSL numbers, much beloved by Arbitron’s PPM
- And a hefty side dish of unexpectedly young listeners who sample the format
Give me a list, I’m hittin’ the street!
I still don’t go for lighting up the all-Christmas format even before most listeners are lighting up their holiday displays. As I wrote some days ago in this space, it borders on overkill, which will dependably kill an otherwise valuable format. But my friend’s observations about the attraction of Gen Y listeners to the format does make it a solid temporary format—providing no one else in your market is doing it, of course.
There’s only so much room for Bobby Helms.
