You may not have heard about it but last week a big name radio consultant  had this to say about playing female artists on country radio .

“If you want to make ratings in country radio, take females out,” Keith Hill says “The reason is mainstream country radio generates more quarter hours from female listeners at the rate of 70 to 75 percent, and women like male artists. I’m basing that not only on music tests from over the years, but more than 300 client radio stations.

I’ve had more than a few people ask me what my opinion is on this topic.  In the past few days I’ve noticed a lot of radio programmers are chiming in on this as have many artists. . I’d like to preface this by saying my opinions are mine and not those of the staff here at the station or Rogers Broadcasting. Just my thoughts right or wrong based on 15 years of experience with research and programming radio stations. I’ve heard many programmers say ” Females just don’t test well ” Well that’s a whole lot of …….feel free to replace that space with whatever descriptive word you like. What concerns me most about this statement is it’s almost become this unwritten rule and I think people just throw it around to sound like they are part of some elite group of programmers that know more thane the rest of us. None of the research I’ve ever looked at has been that conclusive to be able to make a broad statement like that. It could be a case of reading what you want to read out of the stats. I just looked at our latest batch of testing and guess what? some of the songs testing well are by Reba, Carrie and Kacey. What a Shock !!!!!  Yes we have had some songs by female artists not test well but the men don’t go unscathed. I guess it was all a fluke when Shania, Faith, Terri , Martina etc where driving the format in the mid to late 90’s.  I think there are a lot of people who do things the same way just because they’ve always done it that way. The old school and possibly narrow minded mentality was that you don’t play back to back females and that females don’t test and a whole bunch of other imaginary rules . As much as people like to hang their hat on this there is as much research if not more to dispute this claim.  Maybe people just want to believe what they want to believe but  to me the bottom line is we need play the big hits.  Male or Female makes no difference, It’s all about the music not the gender!  Sure the male artists are dominating the country charts these days but a quick look at the pop charts shows it can swing the other direction in a big way. Long story short, don’t expect us to pull our female artists anytime soon as I’m not buying what Mr Hill is selling