Absolute on the other hand has a great policy of no repeats between 10am til 5pm Monday til Friday which is just great & keeps up with music festivals,new music & sports news where as Heart don’t they just keep talking showbiz eg X Factor & Big Brother which is so annoying.

The Heart playlist is just being shuffled around everytime. some tunes have been ruined by them like Snow Patrol’s Chasing Cars being played over & over again & Heart seem to forget they had more songs than that & the same with Bryan Adams, Soft Cell, Spandau Ballet, Human League etc making just sond like 1 hit wonders

Absolute’s image is of a credible, contemporary rock and modern pop station – less heavy than Planet Rock, more ‘rock’ than Radio 2, and so forth – but unlike on quite tightly-playlisted stations like Heart, Absolute does, through its broad remit, have quite a lot of wiggle room when it comes to determining what is a good track.

Broken Strings in itself is not a hideous song. It’s not one of my favourites, but nor do I hate it. If I was programming Absolute, I would play it occasionally rather than all the time, as I think it is on the fringes of what Absolute should be doing – certainly Morrison is one of the more talented soloists doing the rounds.

But it is important that Absolute maintains that the quality of the song is just as important for radio listeners as the identity or supposed credibility of the artist. OK, I’m not expecting Alexandra Burke to get on the station, but my point is, real music is just that – real music. For real people. Keep it real!

As for Llia’s suggestion, well, I’d love to hear the artists she mentioned – Sia, Santogold, MIA, well, even just a hint, and not as often as Absolute’s core material, but if we’re out to discover new music then I believe we should take a lot more chances, and not just limit it to Absolute Xtreme.

Although understandably Absolute isn’t aiming to be an all-out new music station like XFM, I think you guys would do a great service to all listeners to take the plunge once in a while. Then again, we cannot please everybody, and while rotation is sometimes still an issue for me (overnights above), it is much better than before.

Oh, and while we’re at it, kudos for playing the Killer’s “Joy Ride” (my favorite song off their latest album) and… for letting Alan Lake play with those cheesy gooey songs. Its definition as real music may be utterly questionable, but hey, at least we know the difference.

When the play list was laden with James Blunt, Daniel Powter and Jack Johnson tracks, THAT was brutal to listen to.

The play list is much better now in my opinion.

I’m not sure what demographic I fall into. Perhaps, a category has yet to be created for me.

It has been demonstrated many times in playlist meetings that it’s not the case that if we’ve played an artist before, we’ll automatically play their offerings in the future. Just because Morrison’s other songs have sat comfortably in the playlist previously, I don’t think it gives ‘Broken Strings’ the right to be in the playlist. And putting Miss Furtado into the mix; I don’t particularly like her, especially not her most recent offerings which have a more “pop” slant than her earlier work. Compare ‘Maneater’ to ‘I’m Like A Bird’ for example.

What bothers me about ‘Broken Strings’ is that it sounds schmaltzy. Now some would argue that a song like Cohen’s/Buckley’s ‘Hallelujah’ sits in the same realm of sentimentality, but somehow, it’s different. It’s in a different league to me. ‘Broken Strings’ sounds like an easy-listening, “ Top Slushy Songs For A Chick Flick” compilation album filler track. I’m pretty sure that we don’t play Dido any more for a similar reason. See Absolute Radio’s last.fm account for evidence of that: http://www.last.fm/user/absoluteradio/library?sortBy=name#p8

One of the things that bothers me most about ‘Broken Strings’ is that it sounds as if Morrison and Furtado recorded their vocals in different studios, there’s no chemistry. It just *feels* corporate. To be blunt, I’ll have to quote Adam, “I don’t like it. At all.” That’s pretty much the long and short of it. And anecdotally, you should hear the groan that emanates from our end of the first floor when we hear the opening shimmer and gravelly croon from Morrison…

As a female, I prefer hearing tracks from Amy Winehouse, Duffy, Lily Allen and Adele fulfilling the pop quota. Plus, there’s a whole swathe of interesting acts sat just outside of the regular Absolute Radio style that could be tried; Sia, VV Brown, Santogold and MIA for example. Or even something from the new breed of electro-styled 80’s-tinged artists like Ladyhawke, Little Boots or La Roux.

OK, none of those acts fit neatly into the Absolute Radio style and we’ll probably rarely, if ever, play them, but I can dream… If we can play something as poorly fitting into the playlist (in my opinion) as ‘Broken Strings,’ we can take more little risks and try pop-flavoured tracks that edge towards being a less middle of the road. Absolute Radio is not about being audio wallpaper, nor is it about being the aural equivalent of eating a bowl of flour.

And one last thing before I get off my soapbox, it’s not all bad news! This is just one song that causes us to whinge and is far outnumbered by some of the brilliant stuff we’ve been playing recently. ‘Time To Pretend’ by MGMT, ‘Mykonos’ by Fleet Foxes and ‘To Lose My Life’ by White Lies are just some of the great tracks we’ve been playing that have been welcomed by many. I’ll be honest, I never thought we’d play any of those, they seemed outside of the station’s comfort zone, and yet they seem to have had a really great reaction from the VIPs on our website and people in the building.

At the end of the day, we should all remember that there’s no accounting for taste. I love Lily Allen, many people hate her. We all like different music and no station’s output will ever be 100% to your taste.

Actually, if there is one song that really really bugs me at the moment, it’s the Killers “Human”. That, to me, sounds more like a lame techno-dance track from the kind of compilation you buy in a petrol station to play in your hand-painted-pink 306 with the big spoilers on it… (not speaking from personal experience, obviously) It just doesn’t sound rock or even pop enough to me. Also, the lyrics are just plain annoying.

Now that is just a personal feeling, but it did make me wonder if it was playing simply **because** it was a Killers song, and whether Absolute would play, say, a new U2 track if they suddenly released a really bad RnB-techno tune that would make Chris Brown break down and cry? If Kings of Leon decided to do a girly-spice tune with Britney, would that find its way onto the Absolute airwaves **just because** they happen to have produced a great deal of great songs in the past?

This is almost the opposite question to the Take That issue raised above by James. What if a really good band suddenly began producing sh*te? Should a song be judged purely on its individual quality, on the general quality of the band that produced it, or a mixture of both?

And why IS there not more Jackson Five on Absolute? :D