> A good DJ kept you from just turning the radio off when you heard that same hit the fourth time today -- you wanted to keep listening because the DJ made it fun.
I'm old enough to remember when radio was king, but if that's what a good DJ does, then I suppose I've never heard a good DJ. Personally, I preferred the DJ who talked as little as possible and had good taste and variety in the music they chose to play.
But yes, we are poorer for their passing. They've been gone for a very long time, but I've still yet to see anything that can adequately replace them.
In commercial radio, DJs haven't selected the music in 40 or more years. I used to show up for my shifts to find a printed playlist from a software product called Selector. I had to follow it.
Also, most commercial radio DJs would talk and talk and talk all the way up to the point in the song where lyrics started, and then right after the last lyric, they'd start yacking again. A lot of music that was on the radio in the 70s, 80s and 90s had great instrumental intros and outros that you just totally missed because some garbage DJ had to get in one last "TODAY'S HITS, YESTERDAY'S LEGENDS, ONLY ON IDIOT ROCK 95.1!!!"
Back in the later 70s a Chicago three-letter AM radio station used to speed up songs so they could stuff in more commercials. And the DJ would do the parent’s talking when there’s no lyrics, even to the point of talking through the entire Love Unlimited Orchestra’s Love’s Theme instrumental.
I never understood the business reason for doing this. Do they really think listeners will switch away if they go 500 milliseconds without hearing a human voice?
It’s the opposite, they do it to fit in more commercials, because apparently people don’t switch away when they talk over songs.
There was that time I was tripping on acid at 2am and was offended by hearing the same Doobie Brothers song that plays during my drive in and my drive out and called up the college radio station thinking, "I'm either going to talk to the janitor or the program manager", turns out the program manager picks up the phone and I ask him, "Who picks this music out?" and he says "I do" and that it's programmed on the computer. I told him "Come on, you can play anything you want to play" so he put on a Miles Davis disc.
Your Miles Davis comment triggered a memory of college radio. In school in the early 90's, I had a 3-6am show Wednesday mornings, and mostly said and played whatever I wanted, as nobody was really listening anyway. One week, the guy who did the Friday night 6-8pm slot called me and asked if I could sub for him. I was way down on the call list, but nobody wanted to sub on a Friday night. So I took his slot and did my normal show. I immediately got a bunch of complaint calls that I was crap (which was fair, I was), and one guy who kept calling in over and over demanding I play Miles Davis.
On the other side of the coin, I also had a 10am Saturday news slot, which was just a quick 10 minute read of my pick of the top stories off the AP feed. I was on the city bus discussing the slot with my buddy who did the sports right after me, and the bus driver overheard us and said he listened to the station on his bus route, and loved us on Saturday mornings more than the other news readers. He was my only known fan in my very short lived radio "career".
I did college radio for a bit. You could play whatever you wanted up to a certain extent. At least where I was at, ~'06, you could play like 30? minutes of whatever you wanted, it's been a while might be more or less. The other x minutes of your hour you had to play a selection of music. It was a very wide range of things so you could easily find something to fit into your show but it had to be from the pool that college got.
Maybe other colleges did it differently but we didn't have a program manager or anything. Everyone was free to do what they wanted outside of some FCC rules and what I previously mentioned.
One time I tuned into college radio and not long after came on a song from my own band. The only recording of our music was from a jam session that we put on CD that we handed out to a few friends and we hadn't played together in many years by that point so it was quite a shock to hear it.
> In commercial radio, DJs haven't selected the music in 40 or more years.
Yes, I'm painfully aware. That was what got me to stop listening to music radio.