In the UK we have natioanl radio station Planet Rock. They do an excellent job in my opinion. One thing that stands out for me though is they seem to play Metallica's The Unforgiven all the time.
I dare any of you to tell me that Keep On Loving You by REO Speedwagon is NOT classic rock!
I guess people that dont know any better get their tunage from terrestrial radio and they get what they deserve. lol
The suits will swear on a stack of Arbitron ratings books (which is more important to them than the Bible) that the "college station" format won't attract a mass audience. And all they care about is as big a mass audience as they can attract. They sell commercial time to other suits from the advertising industry. The advertising suits just want raw numbers of "listeners" in their key demographic. To them, "listeners" are people who have the radio turned on, even if it's only for background noise and they aren't paying any attention to it. Consider that we are here in the Classic Rock Forum because we seriously into classic rock. We're not typical or even average radio listeners. We care about music. So we're not the audience they radio suits want to reach. Hell, I'm 67 years old. I not only listen to classic rock, I play classic rock on guitar! But I'm older than the target market, so no radio suit gives a damn if I tune them in or not. I don't count. I don't matter.
Radio suits also believe that serious music fans, if they hear even one shitty song, will change the station because they're actually paying attention. They don't want that. They also think that casual listeners get confused if they hear a song that they don't know or aren't expecting to hear. Now, in the UK, radio shows might have titles. Here in the US, they don't. Over here, stations are just non-stop juke boxes, and the "personalities" change every few hours, but they're never any different. On most stations, only the morning drive-time DJs are actually live. The rest of the day, the programming is voice-tracked. That means one voice person gets into a studio with a list of the songs that were programmed. He'll say something between each set of three songs. So, he'll record all those little snippets of words at once, without sitting idle while the songs play. He'll also record any live read commercials, though those are very, very rare. One guy might cut the voice tracks for a dozen stations, or they'll even use the same voice cuts in multiple markets. Back at the stations, the songs, between song comments, commercials, and other content are assembled onto a hard drive, and each one plays in correct sequence. Since one company might own several stations, one technician will run the classic rock station, the current hits station, the oldies station, the country station, and even the syndicated talk station.
Bottom line, broadcast radio is not only worse than you imagine, it's worse than you can imagine!
The above reminds me of American TV when I was last in USA. I think Bruce Springsteen says it all in his song '57 Channels and Nothin On' I was horrified to note as I was settling down to view a show on American TV that suddenly an announcement came on saying 'Now here is a short message' and a commercial came on - This is after the initial credits of the show came on. You poor, poor folks over there to have to go through this ads crap just to view TV! Here in UK we have BBC (which we tend to take for granted) however there are NO commercials and even our other channel ITV which has commercials would not be so cruel and crass as to put on a commercial immediately after the immediate start of a programme. Just goes to show that sometimes there are flaws in a pure capitalist system.
But we don't pay licensing fees to the government for the privilege of watching TV like you lot do. We have some excellent commercial-free networks that we pay to subscribe to, like HBO, Netflix, and many, many more. And we have lots and lots of networks with programs we see for free because they are sponsored by commercials. We also get to see many of your TV programmes over her, both on BBC America (which lately sucks) and our Public Broadcasting System. Frankly, I'm much more appalled by the terrible plots and writing on most television programmes, both American and British, than I am with a little break right after the opening credits to go to the kitchen to get another beer.
The above reminds me of American TV when I was last in USA. I think Bruce Springsteen says it all in his song '57 Channels and Nothin On' I was horrified to note as I was settling down to view a show on American TV that suddenly an announcement came on saying 'Now here is a short message' and a commercial came on - This is after the initial credits of the show came on. You poor, poor folks over there to have to go through this ads crap just to view TV! Here in UK we have BBC (which we tend to take for granted) however there are NO commercials and even our other channel ITV which has commercials would not be so cruel and crass as to put on a commercial immediately after the immediate start of a programme. Just goes to show that sometimes there are flaws in a pure capitalist system.