How a hit-music hour is built
A hit-music hour sounds spontaneous and is not. This guide describes, in general terms, the working ideas behind how such an hour is normally assembled. It describes the practice, not any particular station's output.
Latin hits, non-stop
A hit-music hour sounds spontaneous and is not. This guide describes, in general terms, the working ideas behind how such an hour is normally assembled. It describes the practice, not any particular station's output.
Music on a hit-music service is usually sorted into a small number of categories by how often each record should be heard. A tight group of current records repeats most frequently, a second group of recent records that have passed their peak repeats less often, and a library of older titles fills the remaining slots.
The point of the categories is spacing rather than ranking. They exist so that a listener who tunes in at the same time on two consecutive days does not hear the same sequence, and so that a heavily played record does not land twice within an uncomfortably short window.
Programmers usually work from a clock: a diagram of one hour divided into slots, with each slot labelled by category rather than by title. The clock fixes the shape of the hour, and the individual records are then selected to fit it.
Because the shape is fixed, an hour has a designed tempo profile. Slower styles are placed where the hour needs to settle, and the fastest material is placed at the points that need lift, rather than being scattered at random.
On a Latin playlist the tempo bands overlap in useful ways. Reggaeton and kizomba share a slow band with very different textures, bachata sits above them, and merengue sits at the top. Cumbia sits below everything and gives the sequence somewhere to rest.
Texture matters as much as tempo. Moving from a guitar-led bachata record to a horn-led salsa record is a bigger change than the tempo difference alone suggests, so it is usually done deliberately rather than by accident.
A segue is the join between two records. The simplest is a straight cut on the downbeat; the more considered ones overlap an outgoing percussion tail with an incoming intro so that the pulse never breaks.
Styles built on a repeating one-bar pattern, such as reggaeton, are easy to join this way. Styles with a two-bar reference pattern, such as salsa, need the join to respect that pattern, or the new record will feel as though it starts on the wrong side of the bar.