Uncategorized

Is It Time To Bring Back The DJ ?

We’re living in the age of consolidated radio groups, computerized song selection, voice tracking and random-play Jack formats.  And people are tuning out in droves…

Radio_20 "Is it time to bring back the DJ?", asks Jesse Walker in the Radio Business Report.  "…Aside from a few creative outlets scattered around the country – Indie 103.1 in Los Angeles, KPIG in Freedom, California – you aren’t going to hear a knowledgeable jock who picks (or at least plays a role in picking) his own music. Someone who knows how to mix old records and new ones, classics and Indie_1031_1 obscurities, songs that obviously fall into a station’s genre and left-field choices that fit in unexpectedly. Someone who has a personality that’s made for the intimacy of radio…a sense of how to experiment without turning people off…"

"That’s something you’ll never get from an iPod on shuffle…Radio is a medium with unique strengths – why not use them instead of burying them?"

In an increasingly fractured listening marketplace with literally thousands of choices available, an old-school thing like "personality" may be just what radio needs to stop it’s decline.

Share on:

2 Comments

  1. You may not get that carefully crafted mix from an iPod on shuffle, but it is exactly what you will get from an iTunes playlist, downloaded to an iPod. If you listen on iTunes, it’s complete with crossfaded segues. With a little effort you can make mixes with crossfades and “bookmark” the tracks, but I guess that’s still for us geeks.
    Personality on music radio is dead, buried and not coming back.
    I can’t be alone in making my own mixes. After many many years of laboring with crossfades and butt-cuts on my cassette deck, iTunes freed me, several years ago, to be the DJ I always wanted to be.
    Radio can bring back the DJ. Radio can bring back triple plays and no commercial blocks. But they can’t bring back listeners.
    Radio is the next casualty. Major labels were the first – they’re dead already but they don’t know it.
    Satellite radio is close, but no cigar. We don’t want to listen to something like what we want, near when we want, around the time that we want it.
    I want to hear what I want to hear, where I want to hear it, when I want to hear it. I’d really like to not be responsible for storing and maintaining it.
    The future is in portable streaming on-demand. At an affordable monthly subscription price.

  2. Yeah Radio is dead IMHO. It simply cannot compete with similar offering. podcast, auto shuffle or playlist in DAP, sat. radio, etc. All those are getting better, cheaper, ubiquitous.
    It’s the combination of sound quality, programming, and industry structure. They all conspire to stunt innovation. They should have gone digital 3 years ago.
    There are things like NPR or super specialized music show, that are still has national brand quality recognition. But that’s it
    With NPR start doing podcast… it’s over.
    Radio will be the domain of talk shows and incessant commercials.

Comments are closed.