MusicONE Search / Archive

Mike Joseph Invented The Tight List…in 1958.The question comes to me with some regularity.  How many songs does a successful music radio station have in its library.  My half-joking reply is: Probably half the number of songs you are now playing. There really is no winning number.  Top rated Current-Hits stations play fewer than 500.  Stations going after older demos…

That’s What the Man Said Bob Lefsetz is a bodacious blogger about all things and culture. Primarily, he is a music guy who seems to know every living person involved in the music business or else someone who does know the famous person. His blog post with that headline hit the first of the week and, of course, has gotten …

Why Radio Plays The Same Songs Over and Over You may know of Pat Holiday’s YouTube channel.  He’s a veteran program director from my generation now doing a valuable job teaching things we all used to learn by doing. From its invention in the 50’s to the end of the century, radio guys learned the craft by working with groups…

DJ Instructions for a CHR/Top 40 Station circa 1974

The thing guys coming into music radio today don’t have that the young radio guys of my generation had is mentors. There is still no school teaching how to do it. It is a craft that is learned by doing.  Top 40, the very first radio ‘format’ was born in the 1950’s along side Rock’n Roll music and the first…

It came out in 1983 and did change things, indeed.  For the first time, we had a small, light, very portable recording system.  The quality was crappy by pro standards, but listenable.  Soon cars had cassette players in the dash.  If you loved the Eagles album and the radio wouldn’t play “Desperado”, you could now carry the song with you…

Sub-title:  American Radio Tales (1946 -1996). I happened across this book on Amazon and have recommended it to many old-hands who remember many of the guys on the pages.  Published in 2009 by radio veteran Bob Shannon, he book contains short profiles of the radio careers of 58 people who participated in the invention and growth of modern music radio. …

This linked article below isn’t about M1 or radio, per se. It was an interesting read for me. I post it because we are all of us navigating our way through society’s media mix as we look for ideas and connections that might help us attract more ears to our station. What happens to the music business affects what we…

Almost every dime I ever made came to me either directly or indirectly from radio advertising. I’ve recorded thousands of ads and wrote the copy for at least a third of them all. For me, radio advertising has been a life-long topic of study. And it’s always been frustrating to know that the audio ad is the most effective medium,…

In case you missed it in the radio trade papers, here’s a link to the new report.  An AM signal at 1620 on the dial in Washington D. C. began playing a loop of traffic information on the day of Obama’s inauguration,  January 21, 2013. The loop broadcast continuously for the next eight years until this past March.  Nobody noticed.