Spinja Crash Course

This thread is just meant as a crash course on everything Spinja. Hopefully you gain something out of this read no matter what your current level of knowledge of radio is.

Radio Formats

There are many different radio formats, but the ones that matter to Kris fans are the following...

HAC - Hot Adult Contemporary.  This is Kris' bread and butter format that he will have the easiest time breaking into.

CHR - Contemporary Hit Radio.  This is pop / top 40 radio.  This is the most popular of radio formats and is the most desirable to have your song played on.  It has the largest audience impressions and it sells the most singles.  This is the end-goal.

AC - Adult Contemporary.  This is where songs that were hits go to die.  After they make their run in HAC, they eventually end up here for forever.

Songs can either break into both HAC and CHR at the same time (see Pink's "Raise Your Glass") or become an HAC hit and then transition into CHR (see Train's "Hey, Soul Sister").  For AWM, it is very likely that the song will need to hit on HAC before CHR takes a serious look at it.  Even then, there are some CHR stations that will never play AWM because they are too Rhythmic leaning (dance / hiphop / rap).

Markets

The following are the top ten markets in the country (meaning they have the most listeners)...

   1. New York
   2. Los Angeles
   3. Chicago
   4. San Francisco
   5. Dallas
   6. Houston
   7. Atlanta
   8. Philadelphia
   9. Washington D.C.
  10. Boston

These are considered the "daddy" stations.  If a song plays on a station in one of these markets, smaller markets are likely to pick up on it and follow suit.  This is why a z100 (New York CHR) add is considered to be such a big deal.  If a song gets added to z100's playlist its almost a guarantee to go top 25.

Spins

A radio spin is when a station plays a song.  When determining rank on the mediabase charts for CHR and HAC, only number of spins are considered.  Meaning, a spin from z100 is the same for these charts as a spin from any random station with a small fraction of z100's listeners.  This means that every spin really does count...

Kind of.  A spin is only counted if it comes from a monitored station.  Here are the #s for HAC and CHR...

HAC - 101 Monitored, 22 Unmonitored
CHR - 143 Monitored, 66 Unmonitored

While unmonitored spins are still nice as they expose the song to more people, they aren't factored into the charts.  The charts matter because many stations wont consider playing something until a song reaches a certain point on the chart.  These are the follower stations and we wont be able to do much with them in terms of requesting aside from just convincing others to take lead.

Adds

A radio add is when a station adds a song to their playlist.  Once a song is added, you can expect to see it played on a regular basis until they decide to drop the song.  Stations do adds in one of two ways...

Manual adds - Station manually decides to add a song on a week-by-week basis.  Some stations will not play a song until their program director has added the song to their playlist.  

Auto adds - These occur when a station has played a song not on their playlist a certain number of times in the week.

When people say the term "adds date" they reference a particular date set aside by the record label that they are beginning a push to radio.  Add dates are often seen as the date in which a song starts to impact radio.

HAC adds occur on Monday and CHR adds occur on Tuesday.

Links

Below are a bunch of common spinja hotspots...

http://www.mediabase.com/mmrweb/insideradio/charts.asp?format=3&...
HAC Mediabase Chart.  Change the "format=3" to "format=1" for the CHR chart.  This shows the chart for the current day.  Refreshes every morning.  One big thing to pay attention to here is the Move column.  This shows how much the song has increased or decreased over the past week, and is a good indicator of how a song is doing.

http://addboard.mediabase.com/AddsByFormat.asp?format=A2
HAC Monitored Adds for the current week.  Can adjust to CHR / previous weeks within the site.  Also a great way of finding out what stations are playing what songs.

http://www.yes.com/#Kris_Allen
Real-time monitoring of stations around the country (though not all of them).  This specific channel is for Kris songs, though you can search the call numbers of specific radio stations to see what is being played.  Keep in mind that many people visiting this site have the idea that if a station is not playing their artist's song, it is a bad thing for them to be playing anything else.  Not the friendliest of places for Kris fans.

http://kworb.net/hac.html
Real-time monitoring of spins for various songs.  Website setup by a fan of Kris' from the Netherlands who is in-general a radio junkie.  Can change HAC in URL to be top40.

http://www.allaccess.com/
Radio industry site.  Has mediabase information and forums, but it is best used for its music section where you can see new music coming out (AWM is not listed), as well as what songs Program Directors are recommending to others.

http://fmqb.com/
Another radio industry site.  Good for monitoring add dates and music video rotations on VH1 / MTV (they still play music videos apparently).

http://pulsemusic.proboards.com/index.cgi
Best unprofessional radio forum.  If you can get past all the crazy, the site is the best for finding out new music before everyone else.  Again, beware of the crazy (though it can be really funny sometimes).

Thanks to Nick for putting this together for us!