Christmas mandate: Clear Channel Corporate CC's

[seattlefollower]

Wow, glad I'm not programming KOSY. Of course, with mandates like this... is anyone actually programming KOSY?

From Taylor at Radio-Info:

Where does the Christmas music come from? Not the North Pole, but (if you’re a Clear Channel station) Cincinnati. That’s where the main server is located and most CC stations that are going all-Christmas get a Selector database with pre-programmed logs. I’m told that if the local PD wants to salt in some regional favorites, he or she needs to check with the Regional VP of programming. Things are different at the large-market stations like New York’s “Lite” – but again, there’s going to be more and more centralization.

[henry]

Centralization goes up.
Ratings go down.

(sarcasm) But OBVIOUSLY it's ALL the iPod's fault. (/sarcasm)

[CAwasinNJ]

The whole point of having a PD is to create something that will work at that station in that market. If they can't really do anything, why have one at all? Just run the same playlist everywhere. Or maybe even have CC run everything off a satellite with just a local morning show.

Of course that would be a ratings disaster, but it isn't too far removed from what we have now.

[Timmy]

So there's no local music storage? It's all T1'd to the Prophet systems locally? Talk about margin of error! Don't get me wrong networking, in general, has become very robust and reliable, but to rely on a network/sat connection for multiple stations? Tell me I'm not reading this correctly, tell me Cincy just sends out a hard drive they slap in their station's music server. Tell me.

[henry]

I'm sure it's network only. Nexgen is a funny thing. At a station I worked at, I never did learn exactly where the "heart of Nexgen" was. It's just a bunch of editing stations all over the building. So if the file is local or in Ohio, it doesn't matter.

But if you got a bad connection, or a power outage in Ohio ... it could really mess stuff up for a lot of stations.

I don't intend to sound too mean, but it's marginal disasters in waiting that could one day bring Clear Channel (and other bloated corrupt owners) to its knees. And it can't be one day too soon.