If you go anywhere on the weekends, you probably at one time or another listened to the radio.  Heard the weekend announcers and disc jockeys, and knew that most likely they were there playing music for you… that was then…

In 1987 I started off on a pretty cool career path.  I got my first job at a radio station.  This was actually a surprise to me, since I hadn’t ever had the urge to work in radio, I just happened to be in the right place, at the right time, and gave the proper answer; yes!

Back then each radio station had an operator, usually the Disc Jockey, or Talk Show Producer. Each operator was licensed by the FCC, and either carried around their paper license, or kept the copy at the station.  Back in the day there was always someone there at the controls, mainly because it was the law; you wanted to broadcast on public airwaves, you followed the law.

That was my first job in radio, as a radio station operator, or as we were called: Board Operators. We would put in commercials that needed to play from a cart into the cart machines… We would ‘pot up’ satellite shows, start recorded shows, play the top of the hour station identifications and so on. We would also make sure the talk show host’s microphone was on, the callers were greeted and name/location placed where the talk show host could see them… not always though, we actually would have a person to answer the phone and manage the callers as well. Those were the real golden days of radio.

The pay wasn’t huge for those of us behind the scenes making it all work, hopefully seamlessly with very little silent time (dead air), or two audio sources going at the same time (such as news and a commercial feed), but we did it because it was cool. We had a passion for it!

That passion spanned not only AM stations that broadcasted talkshows, or shows about gardening… radio swap meets… But it also crossed over into the FM music realm… which I always thought was the more interesting, exciting and fun part of radio.

Well, those days are LONG gone.   These days most FM radio stations, at least on the weekend, have no one in the studio ‘spinning the hits’. Not a single warm body. Technology definitely has made that a reality, it has also caused it to become a reality.

Don’t get me wrong, there has always been a push in radio to get as much of the content  ’automated’ as possible. I remember the threats that if we didn’t start turning a bigger profit, corporate will most likely either sell us, or get rid of 90% of the staff and automate the station. We all worked a lot harder.

But these days, there are so MANY ways to advertise; print, radio, TV, cable, billboards and the new adventure of the Internet. This has caused the advertising to dry up considerably in most radio markets. This does a few things. First without a big revenue stream it’s hard to hire talent that would get more listeners to increase the revenue stream (see a catch-22 here?). Next it is much easier to take content from a nationally popular talent (like Rush), give up a few :60 second commercials per hour, and sell the rest locally, than to hire someone who is not only knowledgeable about national issues, but local ones as well and can put the two together and show what kind of impact national things have on the local area.  There is a major loss with radio stations connecting to their listeners on a local level!

Now I’m talking a little more about talk shows, but they actually took the lead on automation, in a way. Back in the day a radio station would have the local host and a board operator. Worked well. But then the national host came along… good rations, reasonable cost to air the program (barter)… So, fire the local host, keep the board op to manage the satellite show, instant increased profits.

Same thing goes for music.  My first job as a board op was for a format in San Diego called ‘The Wave’.  They broadcast The Wave out of the midwest, somewhere in a corn field (or so I was told). My job was to make sure the local commericals were loaded and fired, or played, when they were supposed to.  It wasn’t complete automation, it was satelite assist, but it was another step to where we are today.

Today a Disc Jockey can go into the studio (actually they could also do this at home and upload their recorded breaks via the internet to the studio computer) and record two or three shifts and set them up in the computer to play… 

Yep, I also did this in Colorado Springs.  I would go in on Friday nights, record a 4 hour Saturday Morning shift, and a 4 hour Sunday Morning shift… and get paid for 2 hours worth of work. I never understood why I signed up for it, or why the company wouldn’t pay me for the 10 hours I was ‘there’.. I would then show up on Saturday night and do a live 4 hour show,and do it again on Sunday night, I did get paid fully for those shifts. I covered a lot of the weekend…. the cyborg Disc Jockey… half live/half digital!

Why I write about this now; I have been on occasion a special guest on a weekend radio show.  I walk down the halls and there is literally no one there. Radio as I knew it, is gone.  The FM stations are mostly automated on the weekends, the engineering staff have been cut dramatically. The markets have changed, this is true. 

Radio is not really the way people are consuming all of their music. iPods, iTunes, streaming music to your phone, watching music videos on you tube on your computer… or even watching it on your phone. That is killing that cool tech called radio by sending everyone who worked at a radio station on the weekend home, and we wind up listening to a public iPod playlist.  Forget about calling up the station to request a song…

Most likely no one is there…