MOOD

Hey, radio DJ here! (Specifically a classic rock radio DJ on a handful of local stations that aren’t the big commercially own stations that do this).. There’s actually a reason for this.
This is going to be an extremely simplified version of how this came to be (along with many other genre stations), but basically what happened was that before the mid 1990s, most radio stations just let radio DJs play whatever they wanted. It was the disk jockey’s job to find and play music that they thought their listeners would enjoy, or even just records that they liked themselves. It was usually the radio DJs who would discover bands and songs to play on the air and bring them to a wider audience. Of course there were issues like station managers not always allowing the play of music by black artists, or payola (where the radio DJs were essentially bribed to play a record which is illegal), but generally you wouldn’t hear the same exact songs with every DJ’s set. You also had a lot of unique personalities with radio DJs, as well.. For example Wolfman Jack with his snarling and growling on the air and him crafting his show to sound as much like a party on the radio as possible (and one of the radio DJs of his time to bring many black artists to a mainstream audience), or  Dr. Demento and his crew of silly people adding on a peanut gallery to the comedy music he would play (including Whimsical Will and “Weird Al” Yankovic). During the 70s and 80s it also wasn’t unusual to often hear Stevie Wonder and The Beatles side-by-side, especially with many radio DJs breaking barriers to de-segregate radio stations. In the mid 1990s, however, a law was passed.. While originally companies could only own a certain number of stations (and if I recall correctly could not own more than one station in an area), it was changed so that companies could now own as many stations as they want. So, of course, big companies started buying up as many stations as they could, especially smaller ones that would play more of the weird stuff and inner cuts… And of course when a company is that big, they don’t want to risk failing, so they essentially gentrified their musical selections. They look at the numbers of what records are selling, they put together playlists for their radio DJs, and they have to stick to that. So, if you’re listening to a station that’s playing a lot of the same tunes, don’t blame your local DJs. Chances are they were told they have to stick to a certain set of artists, or even a certain set of songs.

Hey there! I wasn’t expecting my addition to blow up like it did since usually my additions to post go ignored, and I appreciate all the attention. But missing from the reblogs are the tags I added where I want to mention if you want to listen to radio stations that don’t repeat the same songs over and over, you wanna check out your local and student-ran stations! There are a lot of great smaller, independent stations out there to check out with radio DJs who still choose their own sets (myself included!). Supporting your local stations and DJs will help keep the creativity of radio alive, as well as expose you to some really neat tunes you might not hear on the bigger top 40 stations! Many smaller stations also have internet streams, too, if you don’t have a physical radio. Wishing you all lots of peace and love! <3

Fuck Clear Channel / iHeartMedia.

Support local radio!

Very enlightening. Because yeah, growing up, the rock stations I listened to played a huge variety of artists, and not just the few most popular songs from each artist. They’d play anything and everything, including lesser known B-sides. Now? Tune into my local classic rock station and it’s the same tiny selection of songs over and over. And instead of DJs discussing the local music scene, or anything local-related, it’s just some dude who reads off stupid little bits of information that he finds amusing, like ‘did you know that…’ and it’s like some piece of crap he picked up out of a tabloid that no one could possibly care about. And there’s far more commercials than music. And I can’t recall when I last heard anything played from the '60s, despite the fact that that’s when a lot of the classic rock bands got their start.