RADIO FREE
Jack Is the Decider: How a radio format is a lot like George W Bush.
Slate.com
It's been a year since fans of WCBS-FM, New York's seemingly eternal oldies radio station, tuned in expecting to hear the Ronettes and the Righteous Brothers and instead heard a smart-ass congratulating himself for daring to play the Scorpions and the Stray Cats. Infinity Broadcasting, the station's corporate owner, had abruptly switched WCBS to Jack, a new format billed as oldies for 25-to-54-year-olds. The legendary DJ "Cousin Brucie" Morrow, the man who introduced the Beatles at Shea Stadium in 1965, had been replaced by "Jack" himself, a snarky 24-hour canned DJ created by Canadian voice-over king Howard Cogan. In lieu of a live human, most Jack stations employ "Jack," who's fond of lazily intoning the Jack motto: "Playing what we want."
That same day, an Infinity-owned oldies station in Chicago also went Jack; the company had previously flipped stations in Los Angeles, Baltimore, and Seattle. In the two years since Jack made its U.S. debut in Denver, the format has also reached Dallas, Kansas City, Las Vegas, Minneapolis, and at least 35 other markets, while Jack knockoffs with similar regular-dude names like "Mike" and "Hank"—and even a Spanish-language version, Jose ("Toca lo que quiere")—have sprung up around the country. But the Jacking of WCBS—"The Day the Music Died," as a Times headline put it—remains the real coup. New York's mayor reportedly promised Cousin Brucie he'd never again "listen to that fucking WCBS radio." "Hey, Mayor Bloomberg, I heard you took a shot at us in the Post," Cogan/Jack shot back in a WCBS promo. "What's with all the swearin' like a sailor? Fleet Week is over. It's just music." Yeah, Jack you, old man!
The basic idea of the Jack format, developed by the Canadian media company Rogers Communications, is simple: Any hit song from roughly the last 40 years is a Jack contender. Jack is widely believed to be commercial radio's response to the iPod. All those MP3 players out there set on permanent shuffle are a constant reminder of the mass ecumenical musical consensus that commercial radio routinely ignores. They prove the obvious fact that some people like "Sweet Child O' Mine" and some people like "Sir Duke," so why not play them both on the radio?
The typical playlist of Jack stations is said to be about 1,200 songs—about three times the industry norm—but in practice, Jack isn't that freewheelin'. A recent hour of WCBS programming featured, in rough descending order of awesome to abominable, songs by Prince ("Kiss"), Chic ("Good Times"), New Radicals ("You Get What You Give"), John Cougar ("Hurts So Good"), Stone Temple Pilots ("Plush"), Jet ("Are You Gonna Be My Girl"), Bruce Springsteen ("Pink Cadillac"), the Rembrandts ("Just the Way It Is, Baby"), Wings ("Live and Let Die"), .38 Special ("Rockin' Into the Night"), Journey ("Lights") and Whitesnake ("Here I Go Again")—overall, a representative summation of Jack's programming philosophy. From tenured classic rock to the one-hit wonders that seem to be the enduring legacy of '90s alt-rock, Jack is essentially a rock format, with occasional curveballs of pop, R&B, and dance music. They'll even toss in some hip-hop, provided the song is part of the funky-cold-medina'd canon that gets the dance floor moving at white weddings.
Whatever its faults, Jack is at least an acknowledgment that the radio industry's many rigid formats, however advantageous to advertisers, bear little resemblance to how people actually listen to music. Compared with most commercial stations, segueing from Whitesnake to Wings (a juxtaposition known as a "train wreck" in radio parlance) gives Jack an amateur status on par with college radio. But whatever Jack says about our music culture, it may say even more about our political culture.
The voice of the archetypical radio DJ has always been an amphetamine rush, a Wolfman Jack-type spewing slogans that flatter listeners by appearing to cater to their desires ("All the rock you crave!" "The hits of your life!"). Cogan's "Jack," by contrast, exists in a constant state of whatever—"unaffected by life," is how Cogan describes him. When he delivers lines like "news about Jack is really spreading—oh, wait, those are my cold sores," he sounds like a recent college grad who IMs his friends between songs to tell them about this hilarious temp job he scored reading lame radio copy. And this decidedly "non-Wolfman" Jack also makes no attempt to package the music as anything other than what he feels like playing. "People always ask us what our format is," he often says. "What's a 'format'?"
On the surface, this tactic is a yellowed page from the Gen X anti-marketing handbook, the "you're too smart for our corporate tricks, so we won't even try" approach. The format's name, Jack, springs from the same semi-ironic anti-corporate impulse that led United to spin off a budget airline called Ted. But Jack takes this to a whole new level by not even pretending to pretend. Who cares what "you" want? Jack's slogan is "Playing what we want." Ten years after the 1996 Telecommunications Act destroyed the quaint notion, enshrined by Congress when it created the FCC in 1934, that the airwaves are a public trust, we've arrived at the perfect slogan for the age of media deregulation—"Playing what we want" is a corollary of "Owning what we want." Jack provides a phone number for listeners to call and leave messages to be played on the air—but don't bother making requests, he sometimes says, because he ain't playing them. The first time I heard that, I wondered why anyone would think that a station manned by a 24-hour Jack-bot would play requests. The only possible reason for Jack to state the obvious is that he wants to rub our noses in it.
Why does Jack brag about not listening to listeners? For the same reason that Andrew Card once proudly said that the president thinks of the United States as a nation of 10-year-olds and himself as the father. Jack sells radio the same way Bush sells politics. Jack is the Decider. Just let Jack take care of everything—really, it'll be cool. Moreover, the way Jack successfully conflates what "we" (Infinity Broadcasting) want with what "you" (listeners) want requires the same attitude that has allowed Bush's handlers to package his obstinacy as moral clarity. Jack/George programs/governs from his gut; he doesn't care about requests/polls. You may question Jack's decision to spin Glenn Frey's "The Heat Is On"—considering he can play whatever he wants—but you've got to admire how he does so without apology.
Bush's approval ratings suggest that this strategy has surpassed its sell date in the political arena, and Jack's Arbitron ratings, which have varied across the country, have been consistently disastrous in New York. On the whole, the original listeners of WCBS are as charmed by the man who put a big "doughnut" in their Medicare coverage as they are by the country-club insouciance of the virtual jackass who replaced Cousin Brucie. Not that Jack cares. Sure, historians may one day conclude that nobody but Jack wanted to hear "The Heat Is On" (ever), and that anyone with common sense and sentient ears should have doubted any programming formula that suggested otherwise, but what difference will it make? By then we'll all be dead.
What economics tells us about penalty kicks
World Cup Game Theory
Slate.com
Now the World Cup starts in earnest. The mini-leagues of the group stage are over, and the first knockout match takes place today between Germany and Sweden. Soccer being a famously low-scoring game, such matches often finish in a draw and must be decided by penalty shootouts—a competitive form at which my own team, England, has a particularly harrowing record. Perhaps England's players should study a little more economics.
In soccer, penalty kicks pit the goalkeeper against a lone striker in a mentally demanding contest. Once the penalty-taker strikes the ball, it takes 0.3 seconds to hit the back of the net—unless the goalkeeper can somehow get his body in the way. That is simply not enough time for the keeper to pick out the trajectory of the ball and intercept it. He must guess where the striker will shoot and move just as the ball is being struck. A keeper who does not guess correctly has no chance.
Both striker and keeper must make subtle decisions. Let's say a right-footed striker always shoots to the right. The keeper will always anticipate the shot and the striker would be better off occasionally shooting to the left—because even with a weaker shot it is best to shoot where the goalie isn't. In contrast, if the striker chooses a side by tossing a coin, the keeper will always dive to the striker's left: Since he can't guess where the ball will go, best to go where the shot will be weak if it does come. But then the striker should start favoring his stronger side again.
So, what to do? The answer comes from a wartime collaboration between economist Oskar Morgenstern and mathematician John von Neumann. They produced a "theory of games," which mathematically analyzed situations of strategic interaction—that is, any situation where participants have to take into account the other side's responses. A free throw in basketball is not a strategic interaction, but a soccer penalty is. A "game" is a mathematical description of how all the possible payoffs to the different players vary with their different strategies—so if the goalkeeper jumps to his left while the striker shoots to the keeper's right, the striker will get a high payoff and the goalkeeper will get a low one.
Von Neumann and Morgenstern did not, in fact, analyze penalties, although von Neumann did produce a simple analysis of poker that still influences that game today. But rather than aiming to help footballers or gamblers, von Neumann and Morgenstern believed that game theory could illuminate anything from pay negotiations to waging war. The strategic question could be translated into game theory's mathematical language, solved like any old mathematical problem, and then translated back into the real world to explain what to do.
The trouble is that for these real applications, the wrinkles of reality always obscure whether ordinary people actually follow the strategies that game theory predicts they should. Yet penalty taking is different. The objective is simple, the variables easy to observe, and the results immediate.
Game theory, applied to the problem of penalties, says that if the striker and the keeper are behaving optimally, neither will have a predictable strategy. The striker might favor his stronger side, of course, but that does not mean that there will be a pattern to the bias. The striker might shoot to the right two times out of three, but we cannot then conclude that it will have to be to the left next time.
Game theory also says that each choice of shot should be equally likely to succeed, weighing up the advantage of shooting to the stronger side against the disadvantage of being too predictable. If shots to the right score three-quarters of the time and shots to the left score half the time, you should be shooting to the right more often. But as you do, the goalkeeper will respond: Shots to the right will become less successful and those to the left more successful. It might sound strange that at this point any choice will do, but it is analogous to saying that if you are at the summit of the mountain, no direction is up.
Ignacio Palacios-Huerta, an economist at Brown University, found that individual strikers and keepers were, in fact, master strategists. Out of 42 top players whom Palacios-Huerta studied, only three departed from game theory's recommendations—in retrospect, they succeeded more often on one side than the other and would have been better altering the balance between their strategies. Professionals such as the French superstar Zinédine Zidane and Italy's goalkeeper Gianluigi Buffon are apparently superb economists: Their strategies are absolutely unpredictable, and, as the theory demands, they are equally successful no matter what they do, indicating that they have found the perfect balance among the different options. These geniuses do not just think with their feet.
OTHER
- my parents' 36th wedding anniversary today
- sad for australia, but i suppose that was the right call
- wimbledon off to a slow start
- A human face drawn 27,000 years ago in an oddly Modigliani style has been found in a cave in France...
- fatboy slim put on one of the better concerts i have ever seen in seattle in 1999.
MP3s
gold soundz - pavement
spider song - thom yorke
"For this Eraser outtake, Thom Yorke, in an eerie vocoder castrato, reimagines the venerable children's spider (of "itsy bitsy" fame) as a harbinger of the apocalypse. Nigel Godrich contributes ominous minimal blips and bloops and a skittering alien-cyborg backbeat evocative of c. 1995 cyberprn paranoia made flesh and then made robot-flesh and then run through a Cuisinart by a bigger, eviler robot. Yorke has never been more effectively or affectingly cryptic, as his portentous yarn hopelessly frays: Spider spider/ In my head/ Or are you/ Or are you/ Spider spider/ Water spouts/ Cut it up/ Drag it out/ To the streets and you are dragging it about/ Would that you could/ Would that you would
The glitch-seizure finale (wherein Yorke scats free-associatively until his words dissipate into schizophrenic phonemes) might be the sound of a hypoglycemic fetus being aborted in a nuclear holocaust. Not his strongest effort."
Jack Is the Decider: How a radio format is a lot like George W Bush.
Slate.com
It's been a year since fans of WCBS-FM, New York's seemingly eternal oldies radio station, tuned in expecting to hear the Ronettes and the Righteous Brothers and instead heard a smart-ass congratulating himself for daring to play the Scorpions and the Stray Cats. Infinity Broadcasting, the station's corporate owner, had abruptly switched WCBS to Jack, a new format billed as oldies for 25-to-54-year-olds. The legendary DJ "Cousin Brucie" Morrow, the man who introduced the Beatles at Shea Stadium in 1965, had been replaced by "Jack" himself, a snarky 24-hour canned DJ created by Canadian voice-over king Howard Cogan. In lieu of a live human, most Jack stations employ "Jack," who's fond of lazily intoning the Jack motto: "Playing what we want."
That same day, an Infinity-owned oldies station in Chicago also went Jack; the company had previously flipped stations in Los Angeles, Baltimore, and Seattle. In the two years since Jack made its U.S. debut in Denver, the format has also reached Dallas, Kansas City, Las Vegas, Minneapolis, and at least 35 other markets, while Jack knockoffs with similar regular-dude names like "Mike" and "Hank"—and even a Spanish-language version, Jose ("Toca lo que quiere")—have sprung up around the country. But the Jacking of WCBS—"The Day the Music Died," as a Times headline put it—remains the real coup. New York's mayor reportedly promised Cousin Brucie he'd never again "listen to that fucking WCBS radio." "Hey, Mayor Bloomberg, I heard you took a shot at us in the Post," Cogan/Jack shot back in a WCBS promo. "What's with all the swearin' like a sailor? Fleet Week is over. It's just music." Yeah, Jack you, old man!
The basic idea of the Jack format, developed by the Canadian media company Rogers Communications, is simple: Any hit song from roughly the last 40 years is a Jack contender. Jack is widely believed to be commercial radio's response to the iPod. All those MP3 players out there set on permanent shuffle are a constant reminder of the mass ecumenical musical consensus that commercial radio routinely ignores. They prove the obvious fact that some people like "Sweet Child O' Mine" and some people like "Sir Duke," so why not play them both on the radio?
The typical playlist of Jack stations is said to be about 1,200 songs—about three times the industry norm—but in practice, Jack isn't that freewheelin'. A recent hour of WCBS programming featured, in rough descending order of awesome to abominable, songs by Prince ("Kiss"), Chic ("Good Times"), New Radicals ("You Get What You Give"), John Cougar ("Hurts So Good"), Stone Temple Pilots ("Plush"), Jet ("Are You Gonna Be My Girl"), Bruce Springsteen ("Pink Cadillac"), the Rembrandts ("Just the Way It Is, Baby"), Wings ("Live and Let Die"), .38 Special ("Rockin' Into the Night"), Journey ("Lights") and Whitesnake ("Here I Go Again")—overall, a representative summation of Jack's programming philosophy. From tenured classic rock to the one-hit wonders that seem to be the enduring legacy of '90s alt-rock, Jack is essentially a rock format, with occasional curveballs of pop, R&B, and dance music. They'll even toss in some hip-hop, provided the song is part of the funky-cold-medina'd canon that gets the dance floor moving at white weddings.
Whatever its faults, Jack is at least an acknowledgment that the radio industry's many rigid formats, however advantageous to advertisers, bear little resemblance to how people actually listen to music. Compared with most commercial stations, segueing from Whitesnake to Wings (a juxtaposition known as a "train wreck" in radio parlance) gives Jack an amateur status on par with college radio. But whatever Jack says about our music culture, it may say even more about our political culture.
The voice of the archetypical radio DJ has always been an amphetamine rush, a Wolfman Jack-type spewing slogans that flatter listeners by appearing to cater to their desires ("All the rock you crave!" "The hits of your life!"). Cogan's "Jack," by contrast, exists in a constant state of whatever—"unaffected by life," is how Cogan describes him. When he delivers lines like "news about Jack is really spreading—oh, wait, those are my cold sores," he sounds like a recent college grad who IMs his friends between songs to tell them about this hilarious temp job he scored reading lame radio copy. And this decidedly "non-Wolfman" Jack also makes no attempt to package the music as anything other than what he feels like playing. "People always ask us what our format is," he often says. "What's a 'format'?"
On the surface, this tactic is a yellowed page from the Gen X anti-marketing handbook, the "you're too smart for our corporate tricks, so we won't even try" approach. The format's name, Jack, springs from the same semi-ironic anti-corporate impulse that led United to spin off a budget airline called Ted. But Jack takes this to a whole new level by not even pretending to pretend. Who cares what "you" want? Jack's slogan is "Playing what we want." Ten years after the 1996 Telecommunications Act destroyed the quaint notion, enshrined by Congress when it created the FCC in 1934, that the airwaves are a public trust, we've arrived at the perfect slogan for the age of media deregulation—"Playing what we want" is a corollary of "Owning what we want." Jack provides a phone number for listeners to call and leave messages to be played on the air—but don't bother making requests, he sometimes says, because he ain't playing them. The first time I heard that, I wondered why anyone would think that a station manned by a 24-hour Jack-bot would play requests. The only possible reason for Jack to state the obvious is that he wants to rub our noses in it.
Why does Jack brag about not listening to listeners? For the same reason that Andrew Card once proudly said that the president thinks of the United States as a nation of 10-year-olds and himself as the father. Jack sells radio the same way Bush sells politics. Jack is the Decider. Just let Jack take care of everything—really, it'll be cool. Moreover, the way Jack successfully conflates what "we" (Infinity Broadcasting) want with what "you" (listeners) want requires the same attitude that has allowed Bush's handlers to package his obstinacy as moral clarity. Jack/George programs/governs from his gut; he doesn't care about requests/polls. You may question Jack's decision to spin Glenn Frey's "The Heat Is On"—considering he can play whatever he wants—but you've got to admire how he does so without apology.
Bush's approval ratings suggest that this strategy has surpassed its sell date in the political arena, and Jack's Arbitron ratings, which have varied across the country, have been consistently disastrous in New York. On the whole, the original listeners of WCBS are as charmed by the man who put a big "doughnut" in their Medicare coverage as they are by the country-club insouciance of the virtual jackass who replaced Cousin Brucie. Not that Jack cares. Sure, historians may one day conclude that nobody but Jack wanted to hear "The Heat Is On" (ever), and that anyone with common sense and sentient ears should have doubted any programming formula that suggested otherwise, but what difference will it make? By then we'll all be dead.
What economics tells us about penalty kicks
World Cup Game Theory
Slate.com
Now the World Cup starts in earnest. The mini-leagues of the group stage are over, and the first knockout match takes place today between Germany and Sweden. Soccer being a famously low-scoring game, such matches often finish in a draw and must be decided by penalty shootouts—a competitive form at which my own team, England, has a particularly harrowing record. Perhaps England's players should study a little more economics.
In soccer, penalty kicks pit the goalkeeper against a lone striker in a mentally demanding contest. Once the penalty-taker strikes the ball, it takes 0.3 seconds to hit the back of the net—unless the goalkeeper can somehow get his body in the way. That is simply not enough time for the keeper to pick out the trajectory of the ball and intercept it. He must guess where the striker will shoot and move just as the ball is being struck. A keeper who does not guess correctly has no chance.
Both striker and keeper must make subtle decisions. Let's say a right-footed striker always shoots to the right. The keeper will always anticipate the shot and the striker would be better off occasionally shooting to the left—because even with a weaker shot it is best to shoot where the goalie isn't. In contrast, if the striker chooses a side by tossing a coin, the keeper will always dive to the striker's left: Since he can't guess where the ball will go, best to go where the shot will be weak if it does come. But then the striker should start favoring his stronger side again.
So, what to do? The answer comes from a wartime collaboration between economist Oskar Morgenstern and mathematician John von Neumann. They produced a "theory of games," which mathematically analyzed situations of strategic interaction—that is, any situation where participants have to take into account the other side's responses. A free throw in basketball is not a strategic interaction, but a soccer penalty is. A "game" is a mathematical description of how all the possible payoffs to the different players vary with their different strategies—so if the goalkeeper jumps to his left while the striker shoots to the keeper's right, the striker will get a high payoff and the goalkeeper will get a low one.
Von Neumann and Morgenstern did not, in fact, analyze penalties, although von Neumann did produce a simple analysis of poker that still influences that game today. But rather than aiming to help footballers or gamblers, von Neumann and Morgenstern believed that game theory could illuminate anything from pay negotiations to waging war. The strategic question could be translated into game theory's mathematical language, solved like any old mathematical problem, and then translated back into the real world to explain what to do.
The trouble is that for these real applications, the wrinkles of reality always obscure whether ordinary people actually follow the strategies that game theory predicts they should. Yet penalty taking is different. The objective is simple, the variables easy to observe, and the results immediate.
Game theory, applied to the problem of penalties, says that if the striker and the keeper are behaving optimally, neither will have a predictable strategy. The striker might favor his stronger side, of course, but that does not mean that there will be a pattern to the bias. The striker might shoot to the right two times out of three, but we cannot then conclude that it will have to be to the left next time.
Game theory also says that each choice of shot should be equally likely to succeed, weighing up the advantage of shooting to the stronger side against the disadvantage of being too predictable. If shots to the right score three-quarters of the time and shots to the left score half the time, you should be shooting to the right more often. But as you do, the goalkeeper will respond: Shots to the right will become less successful and those to the left more successful. It might sound strange that at this point any choice will do, but it is analogous to saying that if you are at the summit of the mountain, no direction is up.
Ignacio Palacios-Huerta, an economist at Brown University, found that individual strikers and keepers were, in fact, master strategists. Out of 42 top players whom Palacios-Huerta studied, only three departed from game theory's recommendations—in retrospect, they succeeded more often on one side than the other and would have been better altering the balance between their strategies. Professionals such as the French superstar Zinédine Zidane and Italy's goalkeeper Gianluigi Buffon are apparently superb economists: Their strategies are absolutely unpredictable, and, as the theory demands, they are equally successful no matter what they do, indicating that they have found the perfect balance among the different options. These geniuses do not just think with their feet.
OTHER
- my parents' 36th wedding anniversary today
- sad for australia, but i suppose that was the right call
- wimbledon off to a slow start
- A human face drawn 27,000 years ago in an oddly Modigliani style has been found in a cave in France...
- fatboy slim put on one of the better concerts i have ever seen in seattle in 1999.
MP3s
gold soundz - pavement
spider song - thom yorke
"For this Eraser outtake, Thom Yorke, in an eerie vocoder castrato, reimagines the venerable children's spider (of "itsy bitsy" fame) as a harbinger of the apocalypse. Nigel Godrich contributes ominous minimal blips and bloops and a skittering alien-cyborg backbeat evocative of c. 1995 cyberprn paranoia made flesh and then made robot-flesh and then run through a Cuisinart by a bigger, eviler robot. Yorke has never been more effectively or affectingly cryptic, as his portentous yarn hopelessly frays: Spider spider/ In my head/ Or are you/ Or are you/ Spider spider/ Water spouts/ Cut it up/ Drag it out/ To the streets and you are dragging it about/ Would that you could/ Would that you would
The glitch-seizure finale (wherein Yorke scats free-associatively until his words dissipate into schizophrenic phonemes) might be the sound of a hypoglycemic fetus being aborted in a nuclear holocaust. Not his strongest effort."
posted by D @ 5:55 AM
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