Singing The Play Liszt Blues

It's a Classical solution. Sorry, couldn't resist the pun.

Payola is the name given to a radio scandal in which the major record labels were paying bribes to usually program directors in order to make sure their songs became hits by virtue of repeated play. I miss the good old days. (SARCASM ALERT). At least someone profited from creating a bland programming day. Now, through playlist radio and the elimination of the human element, we do the same thing for free.

Take some time to listen to your local Christian Radio station. If you can avoid lapsing into a coma, you will find that you will have a virtually commercial free, certainly announcer free music period of 60-90 minutes in length, which will repeat. If you don't know the song or artist you won't be told, because there is no DJ. Wouldn't any record company exec live to know he is GUARANTEED 24 plays of his hit song per day. And with an average of 3 minutes per song you really only get about 15 songs per hour after you add in about the song intros, devotionals, and the ever present push to pledge money to keep the station afloat because selling ads is unchristian .

Let's scrap the whole system and start fresh. Sell ads, ditch the playlist, hire DJs, and play a wide swath of genres throughout the day. At first it will sound like the Wild Wild West, but people will discover new artists which will lead to more sales which will lead to more artists sticking with it for the long term. A better product all around.

Well my rant is over for now. I may take on the record industry at some point. Because they are a coconspirator in the problem as is the music store  But that is a whole new series. Until next time, I am Awaiting Your Reply.

Resistance is not futile: The Vinyl Virus

DJ. The term means different things. Saying that you are a DJ will mean something entirely different depending upon the hearer. To the rap crowd it is the person who used the turntables to add scratches. Based upon my listening to rap today, I would say it is practically extinct. In the EDM world the DJ is the person who uses turntables, synthesizers and various switches and buttons to create the music at a rave.

For me a DJ was the person at a radio station responsible for announcing and playing the music. The letters stood for Disc Jockey. They jockeyed or moved around the discs or vinyl records on the turntables to play over the air. He or she also took requests from the listeners and hosted giveaways.

There is one other job of the DJ and that is keeping a proper flow to the show. It was the DJ'S responsibility to keep a proper mix to the show and avoid overplay. You would think that a computerized playlist would fix the problem, but it actually increased after WENC went to computer. The program kept picking the same artists over and over and needed to be overridden on a regular basis. That was the job of the DJ. He was needed to make sure, in our case, that an artist was played only once an hour, and as we had 2 hour shows, if you did repeat an artist, you could not repeat a song. You know happens with a policy like that? You discover a whole lot more music, that's what. And that's something sorely lacking in Christian Radio these days.

And that brings us to our final post in this series. The playlist was created to make sure a DJ wasn't playing his favorite artists over and over. A noble goal. But it has resulted in exactly what it wanted to avoid. Until next time, I am Awaiting Your Reply.