Does your radio station do this?

[AlphaChiGirl]

This happened to me about two years ago. I stopped listening to the radio altogether. For current events I read the paper/watch the news/go on the 'net. Radio has held very little interest for me in recent years. Sometimes it's hard to check out the new music, but I've been doing just fine...

[KarenC725]

Oh yeah, Hero, Fallin, Hey Baby. I can't stand it. Thank God I have tomorrow off so I can listen to something else. The most annoying thing is that I did the counts and emailed the station. Talk about being nice to listeners. Too bad I'm not in consumer pr, I could use that...

[KillarneyRose]

Is there anyone out there in GC-land who can explain something I've been baffled by?

How come literally years will go by without me hearing a song and then for a couple of weeks I will hear it on the radio (different channels) a few times a day? For example: "Edge of Seventeen" by Stevie Nicks. Came out in 1983 or so, was dormant for almost two decades, but now I hear it all the time.

[DeltAlum]

Hi Rose,

I haven't been in radio for years, but here's the deal I think.

Much of the music (all radio formats) these days is delivered to file servers (big computers) via satellite. I don't know how often they download, but for that amount of time, you hear that playlist. Then the opposite happens -- you hear something you really would like to hear again -- and its gone for heaven knows how long. This is especially true of oldies and classic rock stations.

In fact, you'll notice as you travel from town to town you hear those same songs because the stations subscribe to the same service.

Of course, there some "big programmer in the sky" who decides what you should be hearing.

When I was a disc jockey in the 60's, I personally owned about 500 45 RPM "oldies" singles so I used to bring them to the station and play them. I wish the heck I still had them.

[KillarneyRose]

DeltAlum,
Thanks! That makes sense to me.

[aephi alum]

At least you guys can get music. Where I live I can get NPR or NPR. And I don't have a CD player in my car I've copied a few of my favorite CDs onto cassettes to listen to in the car.

At work I used to listen to a webcast of a radio station out in California. I'm on the east coast - it was kind of wild listening to the all-request lunch hour at 3pm but they played good music. I bookmarked it on my work computer, but forgot to copy it down when I quit. Now, I take CDs to work and play them on my computer, with headphones.

Unfortunately, there's a guy who sits a couple of cubicles away, who has yet to discover the magic of headphones or volume control. He listens to crap, and as if that weren't bad enough, he sings along, OFF KEY. So I have to crank the volume up to drown him out...

[SilverTurtle]

Originally posted by DeltAlum


When I was a disc jockey in the 60's, I personally owned about 500 45 RPM "oldies" singles so I used to bring them to the station and play them. I wish the heck I still had them.

DeltAlum, not only were you a DJ (and it sounds like a rockin' good one if you brought in your own music!), but at a time when music was so good. What kind(s) of music did you play? Or should I say, what format was the station?

I took radio production in college, and interned at a local Christian rock station, Radio U. That gave me a lot of opportunity to learn different things about radio & radio production. Most of the guys that worked there were old school... they kept telling me that they dropped out of college to get into music/radio but they knew so much.. it still amazes me.

Anyway, I'm not doing radio now, but do like it. I've always thought the best DJs were the ones who obviously listen to a lot of their own stuff and then share it with the listeners. (You can tell when a DJ's music knowledge doesn't span much further than the stations' playlist).

[DeltAlum]

Silver Turtle,

Actually, I started my paid broadcasting career right there in Columbus when I was in High School answering the telephone at WCOL, which was a rocker at that time. Then I was an on air "personality" for a Junior Achievement radio company at WBNS.

In college I worked at the university radio station doing the morning drive time show as a first semester freshman -- which really ticked a lot of upperclassmen off.

The situation I was talking about above was down Route 33 at WATH in Athens while I was a O.U. (That's the original OU -- the one chartered in 1787 and founded in 1804, not the one in Oklahoma or Oregon) At the time it played a little bit of everything, but I was basically a "top 40/oldies" every other song kind of show. I was also announcer for the marching band in both high school and college. Then I became a television announcer (back when TV stations had live announcers) at Channel 4 in Columbus.

During the "Summer of Love," 1967, I lived in Athens and worked at the station. There was a GREAT local "trumpet band" ala Chicago and BS&T living right down the street from me, and a bunch of Delts had rented a summer house in town. Damn, what a party that summer was.

I dropped out of school to become a television director, and finished my last 14.5 hours twenty-five years later -- much like my fellow Bobcat, Today Show host Matt Lauer who graced the halls of "Harvard on the Hocking" some years after my time there.

And, yeah, I think I was a pretty good jock for a while...