Your Hit Momentm Report

Callout vs. Hit Momentum

Callout conducts a 10-minute online survey tomeasures how respondents react to a six-second snippet (the “hook”) of each song tested. The hook is designed to remind the respondent of the entire song.
Hit Momentum tracks and analyzes which songs listeners play for themselves when they’re in control of their music.

Callout recruits a panel of 50 to 100 paid research respondents who meet criteria designed to match a typical station listener.
Hit Momentum includes data from every listener who uses a major streaming music service, including Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon Music. Over 50% of all listeners 18 to 49-year-olds are included in Hit Momentum’s analysis.

Callout reports perceptions: It asks listeners if they recognize the song based on the hook (“Familiarity”). If the listener reports being familiar with the song, respondents rate how much they like or dislike the song (“Acceptance”) Respondents also indicate if they’re tired of hearing the song on the radio (“Burn.”) There are a variety of ways to gauge and calculate a song’s Acceptance, depending on the preferences of the callout vender and client, including “Average”, “Popularity”, and “Potential” scores.
Hit Momentum shows behavior: It reports how big of an audience each song has attracted “Plays”) and whether or not fans keep streaming a song week after week (“Momentum”) Songs with strong Momentum typically correlate with the songs mass audiences know and love in callout research, while songs with weak Momentum failed to attract listeners beyond an artist’s core fan base. Hit Momentum also measures how old listeners perceive a song to be (“Vintage”) based on when mass streaming began. The “MVP Rank” analyzes Momentum, Plays, and Vintage to create a simple ranker of the most appealing songs to your station’s mass audience.

Callout has typically taken eight (8) weeks for a song to reach its peak familiarity and appeal in the CHR format and up to 13 weeks for Country. During the past few years, however, those timeframes have become even slower for many callout clients.
Hit Momentum can gauge if a song will be a mass appeal hit within four (4) weeks and often in only two (2) weeks.

Callout: For a 50-person weekly sample, the typical margin of error for a song’s score is ± 13.9% for the standard 95% confidence level. For a 100 person sample it’s ± 9.8%. These values assume all respondents accurately reflect the audience they were recruited to represent. That’s a relatively wide margin of error and is the reason song scores often swing wildly from week to week in callout.
Hit Momentum: Since Hit Momentum uses census-level data, not a sample, there is no margin of error. That’s why Hit Momentum reports are far more consistent from week to week.

Callout: The vast majority goes towards finding, recruiting, and surveying participants to join a panel of respondents to participate in your research. Additionally, quality callout providers will invest in labor-intensive quality control systems to weed out dishonest respondents.
Hit Momentum pays to access raw behavioral data from streaming music services, for validating the quality of that data, and for the custom analysis to make that data useful for you as a radio programmer. Paying to access, validate, and analyze existing data costs much significantly less than traditional marketing research recruitment.