https://archive.nytimes.com/mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2...
When I was a kid in the 1980's I used to call the DJ and request songs A LOT. When I was a teen I used to call in to win contests. Now when I listen to a 'I<3Radio' station in the garage, its clear all the DJ segments are pre-recorded and everything is automated. Its all soundbites. Its all garbage. Its all advertisements. Its the same ~30 songs on rotation.
"Hello. This is Rosko. WKTU, New York." And then he'd segue into "Always and Forever" by Heatwave.
It was so scripted that at one point I started listening closely to see if it was recorded, but there were enough intonation and pacing changes that it was obvious he was doing it live.
Haven't lived in NYC in over 30 years but I miss that station.
I mean just look at boiler room and club culture in general. The amount of tastemaking DJs out there is pretty vast.
College radio stations aren’t dramatically increasing to make up for the vast consolidation that removed something like 80-90% of radio DJ’s.
40’s, 50’s, 60’s, 70’s flowed into each other but the stuff was all very distinct in a way that 2000’s vs 2010’s isn’t.
There were 12k broadcast stations in the 1980s [2]
Given we can assume little to no automation, or at least a DJ human making sure the equipment didn’t break, and 8 hour shifts, that suggests 36k people were employed as radio DJs in the 1980s if we only count their time on air, assuming a 24 hour broadcast. If we include their other duties, probably the total DJ time resource required would increase, and so would the number of employed DJs.
https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DA-24-1034A1.pdf
https://www.zippia.com/disc-jockey-jobs/demographics/
https://usinfo.org/enus/media/overview/press11.html?utm_sour...
A good radio-DJ might be hired to fill a key block of time in a major metro. They may select to play a local band's new song during evening rush hour and suddenly 3 million new people know about it instantly moving them up the charts. They were just as much a part of the tastemaking stream as the labels and often provided interesting color commentary, local community info, places for meet and greets, upcoming concert info, and so on.
I live in a top-10 metro in the U.S. and I think it's very telling that the FM dial mostly plays pre-2000 music, with very little commentary by DJs if any between commercial breaks. They may as well just be a streaming internet feed pumped through an antenna. Some stations just play the same songs I remember from middle/high school decades ago and they aren't even advertising themselves as "classic" or "nostalgia" in any way.
Once the big consolidation events happened, it seems like the ability for popular music to really get ahold of the zeitgeist died with it and now tastemaking seems to be almost as much a function of push by labels and artists/influencers than a pull-and-present by people sitting in curation seats.
Music has become "flatter" in a sense which in theory is good. But if everything is unknown, it's much harder for utterly unknown geniuses with bad marketing skills to break through.
Man, I read stuff like this and it's just so far out of touch it blows my mind. Let me introduce you to the internet. You'll never run out of geniuses if you actually make an effort.
Wonder if those Zippia estimates include internet radio. Imagine it misses quite a bit given how difficult it would be to break down streamers on every platform.
There were essentially no video game DJs in the 1980s, though, so maybe what we seek from what media is just as responsible for the shift.
