PDs conducting station tours in medium markets would proudly point to the huge racks of machinery that ran music on their FM frequencies. Many station owners pushed their staffers to make the automation sound “as live as possible.”
One station where I eventually ended up working had a set of automation control buttons at the receptionist’s desk because it failed so frequently.
And it was always the AM jock’s responsibility to run to the other end of the building to change the tape reels on the automation. Doing this after you’d cued up your next record and getting back to the AM studio in time to do the next break and go back into music was one of life’s annoying challenges.
Everyone had to run news back then, and since most systems weren’t sophisticated, the network news would usually come on mid-song.
There was never any doubt as to whether the station was automated. No matter how hard the owners pushed the engineers and jocks, the whole thing sounded canned. But the machinery could be depreciated for tax purposes. You can’t do that with jocks’ salaries. Hence, an automated station always looked better to the owners.
One station where I worked in a large market had an entire room dedicated to its machines. The station tried very hard to sound live, with pre-recorded time checks, disc jockey patter and music intros, news and weather forecasts. It all sounded good on paper, until one of the carts would miss its cue and run through the next track. Then everything was out of sequence and an engineer would have to be called in to cycle the recordings back to their proper sequence – that is, if anyone was listening and actually caught the problem.
A beautiful music station in the same market had several tape decks in racks, each with a 15 inch reel of elevator music. There was live jock coverage 24 hours every day, but all the jocks did was read liner cards – the ultimate dehumanizing job. Welcome to radio.
A logical person might assume that progress and intelligence would bring an end to automation. After all, doing away with sterility on the air and replacing it with a personal connection between the listeners and the station would be a welcome move. Give people a reason to connect with your station and they would listen.
It seems unreasonable to expect listeners to connect with an automated station. When there is no connection, no request line, no live person in a local studio talking with the listeners, why is there any reason to listen?
The station owners of the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s who chose automation to cut down on their expenses did so because they knew there weren’t many people listening to their FM stations.
What excuse do today’s radio executives have?
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