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Strange to you but back in early days of Rock ‘n Roll Radio, most stations didn’t add Christmas music until the week before the day. Hard to believe, eh? For one thing, there weren’t a whole bunch of Christmas Pop/Rock records that would fit. Think about it. Bing Crosby/White Christmas. And a few minutes later, Chuck Berry/Run, Rudolph Run. They…

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,…

I was on the air at Gulf 104 in Tallahassee when Elvis died in August of ’77.  Today,  I don’t remember which song I played after making the announcement about it. The station was CHR with an Album Rock edge and we didn’t normally play Elvis. But this was certainly a cultural event it and it made sense for us…

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.

One of our long-time MusicONE users has a side-gig making Google and Alexa skills for radio stations. If your listeners can’t now say:  “Alexa play (my station)”, the contact Steven Brown. His email is:   songsintime@gmail.com He set-up Alexa for my station this week.  It is surprisingly pleasant to tell her to play my station and Alexa does her thing. Steven…

Pat Holiday and I haven’t met but we ran in the same small circle of traveling radio program directors a few decades back.  Radio journalist Sean Ross’s column recently mentioned that Pat has posted a YouTube series of tutorials, training sessions about the job of radio program director.  I’ve watched the first two and, speaking as a guy who published…

Lee Abrams was a major force in the music radio business before his 20th birthday.  The Progressive Rock  (aka: Album Rock) format was born in San Francisco about ’67 or so.  It was near-totally free form for its first six years or so.  In the early 70’s young Lee conceived a format that was soon known as “Superstars” and suddenly…