Radio Station Play Lists!

So, when was the last time that you sat back and enjoyed an incredible mix of songs that some DJ did on your local radio station? Before you scratch your head trying to remember, I submit that time was probably a while back. Now before you toss up your hands and exclaim here comes another old school DJ complaining about the state of the radio business these days; that is not what this is about. I recognize that the business has changed and that corporately controlled play lists and automation have pushed more and more into the national radio experience, even to the point of tightly controlling the play lists of the relatively few live DJs still on the air.

What this is about is the freedom in song selection that used to reign over the AM band. It’s not completely gone; it is still around in pockets, usually on college and community run stations. When, I come across one of these gems, even if the genre is not one of my favorites that pushbutton remains depressed while I enjoy the skill of the live DJ creating that mix, even if it includes a “train wreck” or two. For those of you who may not know DJ lingo, a train wreck is when two songs are played back to back that really don’t go well together. Sometimes it is a matter of the music key in which each of the songs are written, sometimes it is the musical beat. For example, “Diary” by David Gates And Bread doesn’t really match up well with “Fire” by the Crazy World Of Arthur Brown. A good DJ knows that he or she must put something in between them to “cleanse the palette” of the listener’s ear.

In the old “Wild West” days of top 40 radio, the typical radio station play list consisted of the Top 40, a few songs that were bubbling under that list, usually called “The Up and Comers” or “The Future Hits” and a small collection of songs that have come off the Top 40 at least a year ago. These songs were called “Golden Oldies” or “Oldies” even back then before all our music was called Oldies. Other than a few restrictions concerning playing two female artists or two instrumentals back to back, kicking off the musical segment after the news with a “kicker” or fast song and playing an oldie after the weather at 15 past and 15 till the hour, we were pretty much left on our own about music selection. Despite being limited to around 100 songs or so, I could easily go through a five hour shift without repeating a song.

The by-product of this is that each DJ on a station had a slightly different sound to his or her show. For example, the playlist for my evening show was laden with more hard Rock and Soul, while my buddy’s mid day show tended to be filled with more pop and what we call “Light Rock” today. Why was this? My audience tended to be more high school and college aged kids while his was more housewives and office workers; the young folks being in school. Sure I played Oliver’s “Jean” and he played Steppenwolf’s “Born To Be Wild” every so often. But we made a conscious effort to match the music to the audience.

He had it a bit harder than I did making musical choices. He was able to take requests only once every half hour or so during “Instant 60 Request” times, while I was out at Doug Broome’s in a constant wash of requests from the part of my audience that was on site with me. I guess that is when I developed my love of taking requests. It was the interaction with the audience that floated my boat. He was a bit more isolated in that he could not take phone calls. They were intercepted by the receptionist in the front office who was given the command to tell the caller that you could only request a song during an instant request.

Left: A typical Radio Format Clock Wheel. Man, those were heady days with nearly unlimited freedom to explore the relationship between songs. Slowly that gave way to the broadcast “Clock Wheel” that narrowed down the choices the DJ could make during each five minute slice of the hour. Added to that the concept of heavy and light rotation meant that the same songs were popping up every couple of hours or so. In my opinion, that is when the nature of the audience changed from one that stayed with a DJ most of his or her show to one that was in a constant state of flux with folks tuning in for a while then tuning out. Back then, I had certain audience members who stayed with me for the entire 5 hour shift, listening at home and work and in their cars.

These days, a significant portion of my DJ friends who still have control over the music they play start their shows with their queue completely filled with carefully selected songs. That is not my style. I love the spontaneity pulling songs as I go. I rarely have more than 10 songs selected for a show when I kick it off and those are mostly new songs I’ve pulled from my music library to add to the on air play list for the first time. The other exception is songs for a special segment that I’m going to feature, like the Glen Campbell Tribute I’m planning for tomorrow. The rest of the show is request driven; because that’s the way I roll. There are a few artists that I can’t play on one station; The Beatles, Aretha and the Stones for example. They are still getting air play on other local stations. But that still leaves me a lot of room to mix up the oldies for “all the cool cats and hot kitties.”

This is why I consider independent stations and community and college stations to be the gems of creativity strung across the radio band. Look across your dial, they are out there in nearly every city. I’m proud to be a small part of one of the top 10 college radio stations in the country, doing oldies on WUSC-FM (90.5) a paramount of musical diversity and the only place that plays oldies in that 50’s, 60’s and early 70’s radio experience. Charleston SC has a great example of community radio; WYLA-FM (97.5) features primarily local and regional music, contemporary and independent music in many genres.

So the next time you tune across that dial and encounter a live DJ who has control over their play list, stop and listen for a while. What you will hear is a dying art form; a live DJ mixing tunes on the fly. It doesn’t get much better than that. Oh MY!