Music radio

Music radio is a radio format that plays music in a way intended to increase profitability of advertisers, thereby increasing the value of the station's advertising.

In general, the items least valuable to the audience are played before the commercial, and the most valuable items are played after the commercials. To reduce station changes, commercial breaks are made as brief as commercially possible, and the valuable item following a commercial is rotated several times per hour. Dead air time is considered waste.

Music radio has been helped by the development of semiautomated song picker programs. Basically, these present the disk jockey with a list of commercially-acceptable music selections, and other items for the current time slot. These gave the jock far more artistic freedom to select songs, promotions, jingles, etc., and yet still assure a standard station sound and good audience satisfaction. They also reduce a disk jockey's busy-work, allowing him to develop news items, run the station, prepare gags, or take call-ins while a song is playing.

A station's value is usually measured as a percentage of market share in a market of a certain size. The measurement in U.S. markets has historically been by Arbitron, a commercial statistical service that uses listener diaries. Arbitron diaries were historically collected on Thursdays, and for this reason, most radio stations have run special promotions on Thursdays, hoping to pursuade last-minute Arbitron diarists to give them a larger market-share. Stations are contractually prohibited from mentioning Arbitron on the air.

The original formulaic music radio format was "Top 40." In this format, disk jockeys would select one of a set of the forty best selling singles (usually in a rack) as rated by Billboard magazine. In general, the more aggressive "Top 40" stations could sometimes be better described as "Top 20" stations. They would agressively skirt listener boredome to play only the most popular singles.

Top 40 radio would punctuate the music with jingles, promotions, gags, call-ins, and requests, brief news, time and weather announcements and most importantly, advertising. The distinguishing mark of a traditional top-40 station was the use of a hyperexcited disk-jockey, and jingles.

Jingles are the musical equivalent of neon signs, and they can be remarkably beautiful. Jingles are brief bright pieces of choral music that promote the station's call letters, frequency and sometimes disk jockey or program segment. Jingles were produced for radio stations by commercial specialty services. The most famous jingle service was called PAMS, based in Texas.

Gags are audible jokes, often with a (sometimes imaginary) side-kick. Talk radio evolved out of gags.

News, time and weather are often quite valuable to listeners. The engineer typically sets the station clocks to standard local time each day, by listening to WWV or WWVH (see atomic clock).

The station will usually have a policy of announcing time, station call letters and frequency as often as six times per hour, in order to build station loyalty. Jingles can very useful for giving the station a branded sound in a pleasant, minimal amount of air-time.

While small stations may simply "tear and read" news items (from the teletype), larger stations may employ an editor to rewrite headlines, and provide summaries of local news. The summaries allow more news to fit in less air-time. Some stations can share news collection with TV or newspapers in the same media conglomerate. An emerging trend is to use the radio station's web site to provide in-depth coverage of news and advertisers head-lined in the air.

Most radio stations maintain a call-in telephone line for use during promotions and gags, or to take song-requests. Jocks generally answer the phone and edit the call during music plays.

Promotions are usually the on-air equivalent of lotteries for listeners. Promotional budgets usually run about $1 per listener per year. In a large market, a successful radio station can pay a full time director of promotions, and several lotteries per month of vacations, automobiles and other premiums. Lottery items are often bartered from advertisers, allowing both companies to charge full prices while incurring whole-sale costs. For example, consider a cruise vacation. Cruising companies often have unused capacity, and when given the choice, prefer to pay their bills by bartering vacations. Since the ship will sail in any case, bartered vacations cost the cruise company little or nothing. The promotion is itself advertising for the company providing the premium.

"Top 40" was the original form or music radio. A later development was "freeform" Rock, later commercially developed as AOR (Album-Oriented Rock), in which selections from an album would be played together, with an appropriate introduction.

Traditional freeform rock stations prided themselves on offering their disk jockeys freedom to play significant music and make significant social commentary and humor. This approach developed commercial problems because disk jockeys attracted to this freedom often had tastes substantially different from the audience, and lost audience share. Also, freeform rock stations could lack a predictable sound, so that listeners could often not trust them to serve their tastes.

Responsible jocks would realize their responsibility to the audience to produce a pleasant show, and try to keep the station sound predictable by listening to other jocks, and copying some of their selections.

At their best, freeform stations have never been equaled for their degree of social activism, programmatic freedom, and listener involvement. However, to succeed, the approach requires genius jocks, totally plugged into their audience, who incidentally are also committed to the commercial success of the radio station. This is a rare combination of traits. Even if such people are available, they often command extremely high salaries. However, this may be an effective approach for a new station, if talented jocks can be recruited and motivated at low salaries.

AOR (Album Oriented Rock) developed as a commercial compromise. A program director or music consultant would select some set of music "standards" and require the playlist to be followed, perhaps in an order selected by the jock. The jock would still introduce each selection, but the jock would have available a scripted introduction to use if he was not personally familar with a particular piece of music and its artist.

Computer-directed p[laylisting was a god-send for AOR, because it gave the jocks a great deal of freedom, without hurting the station commercially. The result was often happier jocks, happier audiences, and higher ratings.

The compromise was that a few times each hour, usually in the least commecially valuable slots of the hour, the disk jockey could highlight new tracks that he or she thought might interest the audience. The audience would be encouraged to comment on the new tracks, allowing the station to track audience tastes.

A skillfully run AOR station can be virtually indistinguishable from a top-quality freeform station with good jocks that listen to each other.

The willingness to locate and play new talent makes a radio station very valuable to record promoters and artists. It allows a station to develop a high quality music library at low cost. The commercial organization must publish rules about the commercial gifts and promotional offers, in order to prevent corruption and payola to the jocks. This is in the interest of the company, because if it plays bad music, it will lose listeners. It's in the interest of the jocks, because it gives them reasons to say no, so that they can continue to do a good job.

Not playing new artists is a crucial weakness of "classic rock" or "oldies" formats. Oldies formats may assure a strong market initially, but they will fail as the audience demographic changes, and they can never surprise or delight their audience with a wonderful new sound or artist.

See also radio.