Radio Sales Café

The discussion began some time ago here at Dakota Broadcasting; WHEN do we start playing Christmas music on the air, and HOW MANY songs do we play an hour. So WHEN do you start and HOW MANY songs do you play an hour?

you run the risk of irritating a lot of listeners if you drop a Santa song in before Thanksgiving... by and large, they're tired of feeling rushed, so Black Friday seems like the perfect day to start. I'd do one an hour that morning, dropping to once or twice a shift by Saturday morning following Turkey Day.

There's no "right" or "wrong" answer. Think of football: Is it right to pass long, pass short, run left, run right, fake or punt? The answer depends on what your competition is doing, how well they are doing it, how well you do what you do, the brand and demographics of your station and tone of your market. It also depends upon how many stations are in your cluster and what they're doing.
The answer also depends upon your personalities and presentation. A Casey Kasem style tease like his long distance dedications or tear-jerker phone call from a listener with a family member in a war zone who can't come home for Christmas could set up a Christmas song that every listener would melt when they hear. Just dropping an unexpected Christmas song into a sweep with no setup and before Thanksgiving...not so much.
I've programmed and consulted rock stations that never played a Christmas song: It enhanced their hip rock & roll grunge image. And others at the other extreme and most in between.
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We are starting our Christmas music on the first of December. We will be playing 2-3 songs per hour.

We at Lite 104.1 start Christmas music the Friday before Thanksgiving. There is a outdoor tree lighting festival at one of the big malls in Des Moines, the music starts when the tree is lit. We play all Christmas music until noon Christmas day.

Yes, we do. Since the early 60's, beginning at 5 p.m. on Christmas Eve, we play nothing but Christmas music and sell sponsorships in hour blocks. I.E. Acme Radios sponsor from 5 to 6 p.m. We also sell Christmas Greetings that air Christmas Eve and Christmas Day with sponsors wishiing everyone "Merry Christmas." The day after Christmas, the script changes to "Happy Holidays." These are 15 second greetings and we combine 4 together. Then they rotate thru out the day. On our Oldies Network, we start playing Christmas music only Thanksgiving Day thru Christmas Eve with one Corporate Sponsor. Thru out the day (and night) we have a 10 second liner which says, "the Sounds of the Seasons are being brought to you by....." I hope this helps.

The A/C station in our cluster began airing non-stop Christmas music November 11 at 5pm. I'm told that other stations in our company with the same format have had good response doing this. On FaceBook last night the first comment that I saw about it was very positive. There were other comments not so positive, but most of them that I saw sounded as though they liked it. A bit too early for me...

We are a Contemporary Christian station. Three years ago, we wanted to get people's minds off of scary stuff at Halloween so we treated our audience with Christmas music all day. Our listeners LOVED it. We went 24/7 that year the next weekend. The last two years and this year we start our 24/7 Christmas music no later than Halloween. Each year our listenership explodes when we do. Last year we had 300% listener growth in the month of November. This year, our first week (the week of 11/1) we had 150% growth over previous week.