Maybe instead of having some sort of pre-arranged format,they should model themselves after the college based stations where the DJ gets to play things he's really in the mood for and feels should satisfy his listening audience.When they format things only with almighty doilar in mind,they stoop to the level of all those nitwit TV commercial producers who disgustingly utilize some really great old tunes just to peddle vartious wares and services..........
I think it should be an abstract mind which chooses the songs to play, that way the listener is more often left guessing whats next than predicting the same song (probably on the same time as well....), yet keeping the choices within the context of the title of the show.
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!