Archive for month: July, 2019

Here’s a fun, new feature that highlights two important attributes of a show – music and fun around pop culture.  The Ty Bentli Show, Nashville (syndicated) has access to hundreds of artists being in the mecca for country music.  Each morning, they bring in a different budding artist (they’re screened for a sense of humor) and given a topic right out of the headlines and tasked with writing a quick song around the topic in ten minutes.  There are some terrific attributes of this feature:  it reinforces the contemporary nature of the show’s content, it’s intended to be funny and highlight the music images of the program, and proves an advocacy for the struggling artist because they get the show’s platform.  The other item that stands out is its design and name – given we all want things right now, a show with a feature as unique as this starts and pays off in ten minutes, possibly getting more listeners who want to follow it from topic choice to completion to stay for a few more minutes.

A goal for your show should be to start moving away from being feature driven (all those benchmarks do work to create appointments) so that the draw for listeners and fans is the compelling conversation you and your team have around the topics of the day.  Go back to when New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft was arrested for getting his happy ending at a message place when the Super Bowl happened.  We’ll identify first that, at the time, this was a top shelf topic.  It had all the elements of solid content:  it was relevant (Super Bowl), is had just happened so the timing was perfect, and it had a sex component, which always adds to things. And for The TJ Show, AMP 103.3, Boston, it was local.  TJ, Loren, and Producer Matt are terrific in many ways – most especially because they are hyper aware of the world around them, very knowledgable on all topics because they read a lot on everything, and have an almost infinite take on what’s going on.  This break is not revolutionary for its innovation, but it serves the goal of moving these guys to become more personality-based because it was great in the moment and the team did a terrific job just conversing about all its twists and turns to connect with the audience and keep them engaged.