"Nickname unavailable" wrote in message
...
On Jul 11, 10:11 pm, "David Eduardo" wrote:

About 99.9% of the radio stations in the Western Hemisphere have
"playlists." All that means is that the person in charge of programming
has
determined what songs can be played, how often and such.


that's right, in the free market, someone else tells me what to
listen to. it was not always so.

It was always so for the vast majority of decades and stations. Just as
someone at a supermarket determines what products, sizes and varieties of
products to stock... and not stock, someone in each radio station determines
what songs are played and not played.

And just like the supermarket, which uses research, sales tabulations and
such to deteermine desirable procuts, radio does the same thing to decide on
each song.

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.


most have been taken over by corporate america, then came the play
lists.

Not so. Playlists existed back to the time of live bands at local radio
staitons... someone determined the songs the bands would play. And since
recorded music has been a staple of American radio, going back to the
rejection of the AFM rules and Petrillo's policies, stations have
pre-programmed music in almost every instance. In fact, the format concept
that "saved radio" in the early and mid-50's, Top 40, was based entirely on
the concept of a playlist and zero deviation from it.

Stations had playlists in the 30's, just as they had lists of the
commercials they had to run, called a log.

yes they did. but the disk jockeys would not get fired if they dared
to play something not on the play list.

Hmm... in the mid 60's, the first person I fired as a PD was a guy who
played one song that was not approved.

And if you worked for Storz or McLendon or Burden or Crowell-Collier or any
of the big operators of music stations in the 50's and broke format, you
were gone.

nice try, in free market america, you have tons of choices, that are
almost all the same.

And that, in radio, is quite untrue.

i live in a metro area with about 3.5 million people, not only is
radio ****, so is t.v., and both daily papers. prior to 1981, it was
not so.

Probably the stations have adjusted to contemporary taste of the target
audience, which is generally 18-49 or 25-54, and you are either out of the
demographic or have not kept up with current taste.