Anyone here ever worked at a Top 40 radio station?

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Anyone here ever worked at a Top 40 radio station?

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Maybe.

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Do DJs play what they want to to play

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No. Back when radio actually *had* DJs they would play what the boss told them to play. Say what the boss told them to say, as well.

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I have kids so they’re wanting to hear the current Top 40 music.

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Here you answered your own question: People want to hear the hits. Audiences frequently turn over. Only so many minutes in an hour to play the hits.

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Are these record companies paying radio stations a certain amount of money to play these songs so much?

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No no no. The two tend to not like each other, IMO.

20 years ago they used to have a 36-hour blood drive every summer at the Parker Ag Center.

One volunteer stayed the whole drive and heard the Titanic song 26 times.

I've worked at several - several years ago.

Most, like 98 percent of them are all formated. One station, a top station in the large city's market, had an idiotic chart you had to follow. Couldn't play two women back to back, or men, or black artists, ect. They had everything color coded, too. Spent half your time just trying not to break the frickin' rules and find a song.

Then, there's the "power songs" you know the ones you play over and over again. These "hot" songs really get on your nerves because you hear them so much. That's why most DJ's make up their own lyrics, to keep their sanity.

Speaking of which, I was in the casino Friday night. Really good band playing. Lead singer slipped in some of his own lyrics quite often to the covers. He did "Take it Easy" by the Eagles and when he came to the lyric:

"Looking for a lover who won't blow my cover", he said:

"Lookin' for a lover who won't blow my brother" I was walking through the casino at the time and all the women just sort of had this look like, "Yeah, he got me. He's right."

I did work at several "free form" stations during my career. I started in college and it was "free form". Really cool stuff. Created a couple of free form stations, where the DJ's actually picked their music, where you could tell a story or have themes, and/or great segways, ect. I know of a few stations still around that do this and they are by far the best.

So a disc jockey has to play predetermined songs from a playlist ? Does management decide that a Huey Lewis song is going to be playing at 8:37 pm tonight ? Who gives management the orders ? Doesn’t that violate Payola laws ?

What about requests from listeners ?

Most stations now are programmed from NY or LA. Unless the station is independent and locally owned, someone far away is creating the playlist.

I did.

It was a while ago, but we had a company that generated a playlist for every hour of the day.

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#41

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I laughed.

I did back In the day. Was kind of at the end of the metal era and unbeknownest to everyone at the station except for the manager, they were planning on switching over to EASY LISTENING! F that shite! But check this, before they announced, this trio breaks into the station and takes us hostage to get their tape played. One of the guys, Pip I think, banged the receptionist! Talk about Stockholm syndrome. Anyway, our machine couldn’t play cassets and when we tried to respool it, the machine ate the tape! The only persons that had the other copy was the dope lead singer’s gf who hated him at the moment and had tossed it from her car. We were playing on all the stations and I guess she heard us so she went get the tape (I think a dog had peed on it!) and brought it to the station. Anyway, during all of this, the third band mate with the crazy eyes finds the box of easy listening stuff and shows me/the rest of the crew. At that point we basically all sided with the band against the station manager and managed to get their sound over the air. We ended up getting a make shift stage set up outside the station and they played to a huge crowd of headbangers.


Ahh, good times.

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Not sure where that list was generated. That was 30 years ago so I’m suspecting it was just the station.

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In the 1970s every station of any significance in a city had a production manager that made the set list. They usually had a paper format "clock for every hour of the day that was circular like a clock, and divided up by what would be played at any given time of each hour. For example top of the hour to 3 minutes past was news, half hour to 3 minutes past was traffic and weather. Sometimes the music sections were labeled "A, B,C, etc" which meant that in a "A" timeslot the DJ could play his choice from a small selection of songs in a list labeled 'A", same for the "B"", "C", etc.