A recent commentary by industry writer Shawn Ross has me thinking about my own opinions about how much DJs should talk. Ross has talked about the content of these breaks more often than how many exist, and in listening to the national programming services, I hear a lot of the stuff he is so against. When listening to local stations though, I actually haven’t heard as much of this content.
The content of the breaks is not something I will get into here, but that is not to say it isn’t important. Shawn Ross and I seem to have a lot in common, at least in terms of how we listen to radio. Unless I’m in the car going somewhere, I have a station on for at least half an hour, usually longer. If the station is in fact hosted, I usually hear at least one break. There are still things that drive me nuts about how certain stations are programmed though. Fortunately, some of these have become less common over the past few years.
First, there’s the one break per music set station. Regardless of how compelling your content is, this just makes your station sound extremely automated. There’s also the end of set variant, where the jock only talks after the last song of a set going into a commercial break. For some reason, Classic Rock stations are especially bad about doing this.
Next, there’s what I’m going to call the top-loaded set, something I’ve only heard once or twice, but it was still annoying. The station I clearly remember this on only had one commercial break during the workday, and it seemed the host only talked between the top of the hour and that break. There may have been a couple of other breaks after the commercial break, but what I clearly remember was a long stretch of music and imaging with no jock at all. I remember thinking to myself at multiple points while listening to this station, “Where did the jock go?” I have heard this on iHeart’s national Premium Choice feeds as well, but it makes sense there, as they don’t take commercial breaks. If you listen to the feeds for say Hit Nation and compare that to a station running that format, you will notice that the station gets behind after a commercial break, and only becomes synced to the master feed again at the top of the next hour. In this case, it makes sense for the jocks to disappear on the national feed, as most local stations won’t hear what they have to say anyway if there’s a break between any of the last four songs of the hour. Otherwise though, this makes no sense, as nobody is listening to the master hour you have scheduled, if one even exists. I suspect that stations that don’t follow a nationally programmed format only have one or two songs in an hour more than they need if any, not four, so there’s really no excuse for top-loading sets.
Leave a Reply