Do radio stations use digitized music?
(disclaimer: I have had some radio experience but it has been a very long time, and most of it was non-commercial, but not all.) “I heard a great story about the music library in a college radio station in the pre-CD days, how there were index cards attached to the front of the LP sleeve with comments about which tracks were suitable for whatever, that had useful lengths and so on. ” This is true. It was kind of neat to pull a record out of the library and read the comments that folks had left. They also used to either scratch out or cover with Liquid Paper the tracks that we absolutely, positively, should never play. (The ones with dirty words and such.) Just to make sure we wouldn’t “accidentally” play them. Regarding commercial stations, my understanding is that most of them don’t really play requests except in special programs. When you hear them play a user’s request call, it’s for a song that would have been played anyway. It makes the station sound interactive when it really isn
Ooo, squarely on my turf at last. There are two kinds of programme on (99% of) music-driven commercial radio – the normal daytime stuff, and the evening/night-time “specialist music” shows. I understand that in the US the latter of these is becoming very rare, but it doesn’t affect the answer. The main means of playing music on a commercial station (or, outside the US, any properly funded noncommercial station as well) is through the use of a playout computer. These are also known as ‘automation systems’. As the name suggests, these are capable of running the output of a station without anyone being present. All the studio systems I’ve ever seen have three settings, though: automatic (used when there’s nobody home), live-assist (it loads the next song in the schedule into memory ready for the presenter to hit the big green ‘START’ button once she’s done talking) and manual (usually the same but sometimes without the prebuffering). There’ll be music, ads and — if applicable — hard-tim
Here’s a May 2006 article from Radio Magazine that briefly discusses station automation, and has a list of links to lots of vendors of commercial systems. Perusing the vendor sites should be hugely educational. DRS Systemtechnik and Register Data Systems are two vendors systems I’ve seen in action. 95% of U.S. FM stations are digitally programmed and controlled now, because it is both much cheaper and much more reliable than the older CD and cart systems ever were. Almost everybody produces content (commercials, announcements, weather, traffic, and news) now digitally too, and digital control provides incontrovertible “proof of air” for ad billing, and for ASCAP and BMI compliance.
This, to me, is one of the great, enduring reasons to support public radio … As I write this, I’m sitting in the DJ chair at my station, WFPK in Louisville, KY. We’ve got three CD players,a turntable, and a room full of CDs and vinyl. Most of them have sticky notes on them with thoughts on specific tracks. Now, we do schedule our music – I’ve got a printout telling me what songs to play each hour, and that probably comprises 80-90% of the hour, with the balance being “jock’s picks.” So even public radio is far from freeform – there is method to the madness. But we’ve intentionally resisted the use of digital music files and automation, even though we have all of the tools necessary to do it.
I worked in radio from 1990-1993 (100KW country station in Anadarko, Oklahoma). We first transitioned from vinyl to CD (two turntables and two CD players that I could trigger from the “board”), then we got rid of the turntables. One of the last things I did before I went on to college was assist with the move to a “library” (a 42U rack full of 18-disc CD changers) where a computer controlled the track retreival and all the commercials were on a 600M hard drive hanging off a 386 system. It was nice to not have to manually change CDs for every song. Nowdays, I suspect that EVERYTHING comes off a hard drive – I couldn’t imagine that physical CDs are still used past the “CD arrives, CD gets turned into a MP3” stage. Of course, this all depends on each individual station..
