Ideal Turnovers

By Drew Bennett

Let’s say you have the rare opportunity to totally overhaul your database. You’ve been thinking about new clocks and rotations and you want to get started on bringing better rotations to your station.

When it comes to scheduling music, clocks are ‘where the magic happens.’ If you have great clocks that encourage a natural rotation of your category, your rules can be there as a safety net and not as a fix. Your goal should be to achieve perfect rotation at the clock level. Many times, clocks aren’t giving you the rotation you need. Rules that prevent eye-sores, like harmonics and stacking, are there to fix a problem that really needs to be addressed in the clocks themselves (and not necessarily the Rule Tree.)

When you begin the process of building clocks that achieve these perfect rotations you are looking for, MusicMaster has a simple but very effective tool to help you create great clocks. It’s called the Turnover Calculator and you will find it in Analysis.

When you get to Analysis, look at the middle of the screen on the right and you should see a group of icons. The Turnover Calculator has been circled in the example above.

Let’s say you have a category of 27 songs and would like to come up with clocks that achieve perfect rotation for the category. How many times should you call for the category in an hour? The Turnover Calculator will help you find that out.

In the example above, we entered the number, 27, in the Slot Count field because that is the number of records we have in the category. To find out basic turnover information for that category, and to see how our songs will rotate through the day, we will enter the average number of times we plan to call for the category in a clock. In this case, we entered 2 in the Average Per Hour field. Now, we can click the Calculate button to the right of the Average Turnover field and find out what the average turnover will be for the category. MusicMaster will show a graphical representation of the rotation of the category at the bottom of the Turnover Calculator. In the example above, our 27 songs are rotating perfectly as long as we call for the category twice per hour. Those values can be changed and tweaked until perfect rotations are achieved.

Once you are armed with the number of songs you have in a category the Turnover Calculator is there for you to determine how many times you need to call for the category in a clock and throughout the day on the Assignment Grid.

When you have perfect rotations to begin with, your rules become a safety net and you can focus on creating rules that develop the spirit and the sound of your radio station as opposed to applying rules that fix imperfect rotations at the clock level.

The Turnover Calculator is a simple piece of the software but it will prove to be invaluable in your quest to rotate your songs the best way possible.