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…
"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
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.
