Music Radio - How IT Works

How It Works

The radio station provides programming to attract listeners, and profits by selling advertising. Young people are targeted by advertisers because their product preferences can be changed more easily. Therefore, the most commercially successful stations target young audiences.

The programming usually cycles from the least attractive item, to most attractive, followed by commercials. The purpose of this plan is to build listener interest during the programming.

Because dead air does not attract listeners, the station tries to fill its broadcast day with sound. Audiences will only tolerate a certain number of commercials before tuning away. In some regions, government regulators specify how many commercials can be played in a given hour.

Music is the main program item. There are several standard ways of selecting the music, such as free-form, top-40, album-oriented rock, and Jack. These can be applied to all types of music.

Jingles are radio's equivalent of neon signs. Jingles are brief, bright pieces of choral music that promote the station's call letters, frequency and sometimes disc-jockey or program segment. Jingles are produced for radio stations by commercial specialty services such as JAM, in Texas.

Jingles are often replaced by recorded voice-overs (called "stingers").

In order to build station loyalty, the station announces time, station calls letters and frequency as often as six times per hour. Jingles and stingers help to give the station a branded sound in a pleasant, minimal amount of air-time. The legal requirement for station identification in the U.S. is once per hour, approximately at the top of the hour, or at the conclusion of a transmission.

News, time-checks, real-time travel advice and weather reports are often valuable to listeners. The news headlines and station identification are therefore given just before a commercial. Time, traffic and weather are given just after. The engineer typically sets the station clocks to standard local time each day, by listening to WWV or WWVH (see atomic clock).

These segments are less valued by the most targeted market, young people, so many stations shorten or omit these segments in favor of music.

While most music stations that offer news reports simply "tear and read" news items (from the newswires or the Internet), larger stations (generally those affiliated with news/talk stations) may employ an editor to rewrite headlines, and provide summaries of local news. Summaries fit more news in less air-time. Some stations share news collection with TV or newspapers in the same media conglomerate. An emerging trend is to use the radio station's web site to provide in-depth coverage of news and advertisers headlined on the air. Many stations contract with agencies such as Smartraveler and AccuWeather for their weather and traffic reports instead of using in-house staff.

Most radio stations maintain a call-in telephone line for promotions and gags, or to take record requests. DJs generally answer the phone and edit the call during music plays. Some stations take requests by e-mail and online chat.

The value of a station's advertising is set by the number, age and wealth of its listeners. Arbitron, a commercial statistical service, historically used listener diaries to statistically measure the number of listeners. Arbitron diaries were collected on Thursdays, and for this reason, most radio stations have run special promotions on Thursdays, hoping to persuade last-minute Arbitron diarists to give them a larger market-share. Arbitron contractually prevents mention of its name on the air.

Promotions are the on-air equivalent of lotteries for listeners. Promotional budgets usually run about $1 per listener per year. In a large market, a successful radio station can pay a full-time director of promotions, and run several lotteries per month of vacations, automobiles and other prizes. Lottery items are often bartered from advertisers, allowing both companies to charge full prices at wholesale costs. For example, cruising companies often have unused capacity, and when given the choice, prefer to pay their bills by bartering cruise vacations. Since the ship will sail in any case, bartered vacations cost the cruise company little or nothing. The promotion itself advertises the company providing the prize.