"dave" wrote in message
m...
David Eduardo wrote:


The idea that there are musicologist-type DJs rummaging through thousands
of records is a myth, and in the few cases such exists or has existed,
most have failed.


Myth? How so? Community stations have such programmers to this day.

I have trouble documenting the effectiveness of this... since, even when one
creates custom geography areas, 99% of these suckers seem to have no
detectable listeners. This is, again, "if a tree falls in a forrest...."

When I was in Top 40 (50 actually) radio in the '60s we were told where to
choose the next record from, e.g. top 10 current out of the top of the
hour ID; power oldie out of news headlines, etc. We were never told to
play a specific song at a specific time.

That is how it worked even in the largest markets until computers took over
the manual job of selection. Still, you chose out of 10 songs that were on
the playlist at the top of the hour, not among thousands of songs. All you
did was manually shuffle them.

The defect is that a person given this power, as limited as it is, to
shuffle will skip the songs they don't like quite often... and never play
them, although much of the audience may wish to hear them.

We had music meetings where we auditioned new records and informally voted
on them. We discovered and broke new acts. Our musical knowledge and
opinion was valued.

That, in some form or another, is still how new music is picked. Only now,
we know fairly quickly with things like callout, if we had a hit or a miss.
And we get the bad songs out of the system early. 99% of "favor play" gets
nuked when the listeners vote .

I blame Lee Abrams more than Ron Jacobs.

Neither created the systems for identifying hits. And "hit" in radio simply
means any song listeners want to hear, today. And, conversely, it means any
song that a significant percentage of listeners would not like to hear and
which might cause them to tune out is not played.