How do radio stations physically get their music new songs? - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: Beamin
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 08, 2019, 04:02:36 pm
content: Does the record company take a 12" LP and air mail it? That would never work. Can you imagine how long a record would last playing it 24 times per day every day for months?But seriously how would they get a new release for the day it comes out? Download it off bit torrent? Think they just get the file emailed or log into the record companies site? I know on the classical station which is the only station I listen to they use still CD's, you can hear them screw up or skip the CD's, but that's not exactly the newest lady gaga that comes out tomorrow.I think from the sound of some stations the stuff is so generic and played all over the country they probably just have a stream they play. Like there is a station called "jack 93.7FM" in one state and another in a different state called "Zach 98.5FM" they plays the same nauseating soft rock fat middle age ladies listen to in the bank at work/dentist office music all day. And they still have the balls to play commercials when really the whole station is just a commercial to get you to buy the new album because they will never play anything but that one song. I had the misfortune of being in the hospital for a while and this one nurse would always listen to this same station with the same 12 songs everyday all day, they never changed them, just the order then 20 min of commercials. It was seriously torture being stuck in bed listening to that, It used to be they would repeat each day but every hour? I guess that's because FM radio has been listed as "no net positive growth sector" by the stock market so the investors take it out on us as they sell the stock off to foreign investors. .

author: dmills
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 08, 2019, 04:39:25 pm
content: The usual workflow in a modern radio group (And most stations today are not independent because the only way to make money is by having the scale) is basically file based.Audio from whatever source, sometimes CD, sometimes supplied by a promoter, sometimes FTP, sometimes email, sometimes something else is imported into the playout automation system with (generally for music) one track per 'cart' (Real carts were endless tape loops in plastic boxes, but that terminology has stuck), which are set up on ingest for things like embargo dates and scheduler codes, sometimes also dayparting (Do not play this before 9pm or whatever).The stations director of programming will have produced a set of 'log templates' that are like <Top of hour ID><News><Fast song><Fast Song><Station ID><Traffic(Adverts)><Station ID><Slow Song><.....Generally the way this is actually done is by defining a set of 'hours' and then building up your weekly grid by stringing hours together.Software then takes this grid, together with a database of what has been played recently and produces the days 'log' which is what gets loaded into the automation computer for playout. This respects how the PD has configured things like track and artist separation, so it avoids playing the same track too often (or at the same time on consecutive days) and avoids playing the same artist back to back unless configured to do so.Other software (typically shortly before the date in question) takes the log and merges in the 'traffic' (Which is radio slang for adverts).Depending on the extent to which the management trust the talent, the presenter may have various levels of ability to override the log automation by adding or deleting tracks or suchlike.After the log has aired, a log reconciliation run is done to ensure that the 'what was played' reports for both the copyright and advertising agencies are accurate.A clever trick is 'voice tracking' where a presenter can in advance sit at a computer, listen to the last 15 seconds of a cut, do the talkie bit, start the next cut, jump to the last 15 seconds, do the next talkie bit... It lets a presenter make a three hour program in about an hour flat, and can even be done BEFORE the traffic merge so you can make a program a week in advance if necessary.Long gone are the days of rooms full of long playing records, it is all stored on a file and database server these days, and any radio mans first instinct upon being handed analogue audio, is get that shit digital, quick like.Yep, worked in that space.Regards, Dan.

author: helius
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 08, 2019, 05:33:01 pm
content: College and independent radio stations still commonly play music on LP, 45, and CD. They do not typically have "heavy rotation" playlists, either, which eliminates any concern over record wear. The most they would play a single track could be a few times a week.Prominent examples are WFMU in New York and WHRB in Cambridge Mass.

author: Cerebus
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 08, 2019, 06:20:49 pm
content: Quote from: Beamin on July 08, 2019, 04:02:36 pmThat would never work? Well, it used to. That is exactly what happened 'back in the day'. You'd get the latest promotional copies (on vinyl) from the record companies turn up in the mail. If your station or your presenter was important enough you'd get a personal visit from the record company's 'pusher' who would hand over a stack of fresh vinyl and then take the local exec or the presenter out for an afternoon long liquid lunch. If something *really* got enough air-play that it was wearing out a phone call would get you a fresh copy. It takes a lot to wear out a vinyl record if it's played with proper care on well maintained professional equipment; I've seen copies of records in radio station libraries that have been played 10s of thousands of times and were still in acceptable condition (in well kept libraries there would be a record of literally every date and time that a record was played).Obviously it don't work like that nowadays. The last time I was anywhere near a production radio studio was in the 1980's so I can't authoritatively state how its done nowadays but I bet it ends with a large stack of network attached storage sitting in a server room somewhere in the radio station.

author: NottheDan
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: July 09, 2019, 05:35:55 pm
content: Like this:

author: Bassman59
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 10, 2019, 06:16:16 am
content: Quote from: helius on July 08, 2019, 05:33:01 pmWFMU's broadcast studio (and its live-music room, Monty Hall) is located in Jersey City, New Jersey. One of their t-shirts features the mighty goldfinch, the New Jersey state bird. They are proudly New Jersey!I remember when the studio was still at the (long-since-shuttered) campus of Upsala College in East Orange, NJ. It was loads of fun going there to do a live broadcast with a band.The live room downstairs somewhat fills the void left when the most-excellent small club Maxwell's in nearby Hoboken closed in 2013.Anyways, they still play a shit-ton of actual records, 45s and LPs, that their DJs find in the weirdest places.Listen to them on the web athttps://wfmu.org/and send them money.

author: VK3DRB
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 10, 2019, 06:46:38 am
content: There is a radio program on Saturday nights (Aussie time) on Oak FM called the Vinyl Graveyard. The presenter has a personal collection of20,000vinyl records, which he has digitised onto hard disk to use for the program. A mammoth effort - I would definitely not like to do it. They are not new songs, but some are unobtainable due to their rarity. Much of the music, focusing on the 50's, 60's and 70's is "long forgotten". I tend to find his program quite entertaining to listen to whilst working in the electronics room on a Saturday night. (My disco dancing days on Saturday nights are long gone.) It can be listened to via Radio Garden.https://radio.garden/listen/oak-fm-101-3/nY4VSwxR. I don't know why, but it does not seem to stream by other services; only Radio Garden.

author: Jeroen3
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 10, 2019, 07:35:18 am
content: During a documentary they described the following process:During weekly meetings with people delivering songs (labels) the playlist for prime hours is defined by which songs are cheap to play or yields most money. This means most songs are ads. They shuffle a few songs around each hour, since they bring the most. These you will hear every hour. Then they add with other "top list" songs, or maybe one non-top for diversity.I think it's cheaper to play few pushed songs a lot then a lot of songs once.Some stations non-prime hours some DJ might actually bring vinyl from their personal collection to play. But this needs to be registered and fee's have to be paid to the record owner.Other stations just run techno or other background noise in the non-prime hours. Since there is so much of that stuff.Anyway, many stations play from their database, but Spotify also works. (if registered that they played it)

author: Brumby
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: July 10, 2019, 08:37:29 am
content: A few years ago I was given a personal tour of one of the WSFM studios. The centrepiece was a dual screen computer system which supported the programming with a third screen to one side showing all the engineering data.I was given a quick outline as to how a programme was put together - and it fits whatdmillssaid above. Tracks even have markers showing when the introduction finishes and when the tail starts (not all tracks are the same), so a presenter can talk over the top of the "less important bits" without clashing with the core music.Digital all the way - and has been for some time.

author: rs20
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 10, 2019, 08:49:09 am
content: I'm surprised that CDs are still in use. Any modern streaming service can play an extraordinary range of songs from every genre at the click of a button, I'm amazed that licensing issues and/or fear of change has led to this not being taken advantage of.

author: mariush
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 10, 2019, 09:35:34 am
content: Around 10-15 years ago the radio station in my home town used to receive cassette tapes and CDs from music labels that distribute music from outside the country with instructions on what they'd preferred to be in "heavy rotation"The radio station also had an hour or two of "call live and dedicate the next song to someone" every day or every other day or during the weekend.. i forget now how it worked. They used that data to push some songs more compared to others because local "tastes" can be often different than the tastes of the people in the capital of the country.I remember they started to convert their audio cassettes and discs to MP3 160kbps (or something like that) as soon as MP3 gained popularity - hard drives were still very expensive back then. Nowadays I imagine they use FLAC or ALAC or uncompressed wav and NAS storage and they use automated software to queue audio tracks over the night for example .. they also used to switch for a few hours a day to a popular radio from the country's capital, or only for some particular show (if anyone remembers Midnight Caller... well, a similar show like that) - they picked the show from satellite as an encrypted stream and rebroadcasted it locally.Nowadays it's a bit more complex, with laws that require radio stations to broadcast at least 20-30% (or some such percentage) of music made by Romanian artists and I imagine record labels can't put as much pressure on them as back then (oh, you don't play our tracks this many times a week, the next shipment got lost all of the sudden, you'll get your new batch of music in a couple of weeks).

author: GlennSprigg
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 10, 2019, 09:56:44 am
content: Back in the early1980's, one of the major radio stations in Adelaide South-Australia, wasRadio 5AD.1323 Khz. At the time, they had a 10 stack (I think?) high 'Cartridge' Player!!, which they would pre-load with music they wanted to play that morning, between all the other talking/comedy/ads.Some Aussies here may remember "Bazz & Pilko" (Barry Ion & Tony Pilkington) breakfast show back then !I was an electrician, working for the Advertiser, which included the stations 10th floor occupancy. At times, I wouldswap-out some of their cartridges while they were talking live, much to their annoyance !!Barry Ion also played the 'voice' part for a pretend Character called "Peter Plus", who was like a young schooldropout, always getting up to mischief. At one stage, the 'character' was missing for a while... When 'back', theyasked where he had been, telling them he had a job in the country as a 'Jackaroo'/'Roustabout'. Here'shisstory!!...."We had to herd 20,000 Goanna's from Central Australia to the Coast, but they kept bloody well running up trees!So we ended up tying 80,000 empty spaghetti tins on their feet to stop them from doing that!! Although you shouldhave heard the racket that made with those 80,000 tins rattling & banging down the main streets of many Towns!!That's what people woke up to every morning with their Radio alarm clocks !! hahaha....

author: tooki
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 10, 2019, 02:35:09 pm
content: Quote from: dmills on July 08, 2019, 04:39:25 pmI remember how in the days following 9/11, some radio chains caught some serious flak because it took some of their stations several hours to stop their voice tracking and switch to live news coverage on the morning of the attacks. They'd relied on the automatic systems, with no physical DJ in the station (but rather having voice tracking done centrally in NYC or LA or whatever), for so long that they didn't have any real procedure in place for reverting to live.

author: steve30
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: July 10, 2019, 05:12:23 pm
content: Quote from: dmills on July 08, 2019, 04:39:25 pmIts always funny when they botch that up.10 years ago, when our fairly new local station ran out of money, they had the same presenter do the (almost) same show, but across several stations. Listening to 86.7 ABC FM and hearing announcements like "Such and such a song playing here on 102.3 XYZ FM!" was fairly common.A few years back I was listening to the 9am 'rewind/classic hits/whatever' programme, and the next announcer was recording his 10am talkie bits and managing to broadcast them live as he was doing it. That was quite humorous to listen to.

author: Beamin
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 10, 2019, 07:29:19 pm
content: Drool drool drool my payola!My guess was that stations were paid a certain amount for each time they played a song. With each station only concerned with maximizing profits they would take the songs that were paying the most and playing those, over and over. The reason why you heard such a narrow selection was because record companies would try to out bid others or sign contracts with the station to promote new albums. If you think about it as far as I can remember the radio would only play one or a few songs off albums, such that no matter how old an album is you will NEVER hear certain/most of the songs on it. This kind of forced people to buy albums if they wanted to hear the rest of the songs. Even bands like the beatles or rolling stones that have been around so long and are so popular you would think all of their songs would be played, but if you only listened to the radio; all the stations all the time you still would never hear most of an artists songs.Its reasons like this why I think artists like taylor swift win all the same awards and get as popular as bands that had real talent, its because the system is rigged basically. Think about it, taylor swift, Britney spears and who ever is popular now (I have no desire to find out either even though I am huge music fan with hundreds of pounds of vinyl) have no talent originality and no way would they ever compete with the talent that came out of the 1960's. They can't even sing the right notes. If bands had to compete on a fair playing field people would never listen to most pop music. The internet has sort of fixed that in that there are real bands with real talent that get popular because they are good, but still exists the old payola profit system. The best example of the band "linkin park" or how ever its spelled; are they a bunch of guys that met in a garage as kids? No they are the face of a business where PR and focus groups compose the lyrics, the people, the look, and even the name. 100% opposite of what I like in music.Did you know two guys in their fifties have wrote most of the popular songs by taylor swift and other pop stars? So when they are singing about bad relationships with their past boy friends it's really two middle aged men writing it who are tuned into what pop bull shit they know is catchy and sells kind of like commercial jingle producers with the super annoying songs that get stuck in your head. There is a youtube video on these two guys but I can't find it. Very interesting and explains why pop all sounds the same, it by the same people trying to make the same sound.Sure in the 60's you had "the wrecking crew" write all the music (mamas and the papas, the monkeys, Spanish flea...) but that's because they were really talented. The monkeys couldn't even play the guitar to the songs "they" had written.Led zeppelin concerts are all the rage: they buy cocaine for jimmy page!

author: dmills
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 10, 2019, 08:46:09 pm
content: Actually, believe it or not the real reason for the stupidly heavy rotation of generally about 20 odd songs is that when you do the experiment you find that that is what WORKS!People actually like familiar music by and large, with just a little bit of variety.The only stations that can really afford to play a wide variety of interesting music are the essentially state funded ones. Commercial operations need to run far smaller main rotations because that is what gets the audience numbers (Even classic FM does this).Agreed that voice tracking going badly sideways is always good for a giggle.

author: steve30
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: July 11, 2019, 01:43:21 am
content: Quote from: dmills on July 10, 2019, 08:46:09 pmThis was quite common 10 years ago on a Sunday evening:http://stevecoates.net/rotherfm/truly_local_teaser.oggNow, who can guess the truly local teaser without Googling? No need to phone in because there's no one there.Back on topic, there is a community radio station a few miles away. Being not-as-commercial, they can have more freedom in what they play, and they do seem to have people bring their own CD and records, but the majority of their music is on a computer. A handful of songs have the same digital glitches in them each time they're played, so I'm assuming they got the music there by ripping it from CDs and not paying attention while they were doing it.

author: GlennSprigg
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 12, 2019, 11:38:47 am
content: Apoint of interest, for the 'Worldly Folk here !!! (Initially the 'old'AMBroadcasts referred to...)There is a simple fact in Mathematics, that ALL the digits of numbers that are a Multiple of 9, add up to 9...The old station I mentioned earlier, was 1323 Khz. (1+ 3 + 2 + 3 = 9). But only in Australia!! (Well, not the U.S.).OUR stations were ALL on 9-Khz steps/boundaries of separation. So you could ALWAYS tell if you were dialing into a valid frequency, by adding the digits!! Maybe you needed to add or subtract 1 or 2, to be correctly on frequency.This didn't work, in the U.S. though... as they used 10-Khz separation for station/usage boundaries !!Some 'digital' PLL receivers had a SWITCH to toggle between 9 & 10 Khz steps, for this reason......It's ironic that this attempt at 'metric', was at a time when it was NOT needed !!

author: Brumby
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: July 13, 2019, 02:53:13 am
content: Australiausedto have 10kHz spacing on AM - but it was changed to 9kHz (in 1978, I think). In Sydney, there was only one station that did not have to change frequency: 2CH on 1170kHz.

author: VK3DRB
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 13, 2019, 10:57:52 am
content: Quote from: Brumby on July 13, 2019, 02:53:13 amNo quite correct. None of these needed to change their transmitting frequency either....2VM in Moree (1530 KHz)3SR in Shepparton (1260 KHz)4QL in Longreach (540 kHz)4QN in Townsville(630 kHz)6IX in Perth (1080 kHz)Each of these these frequencies divide nicely by both 9 and 10 to an integer.I once bought a Technics receiver when I lived in the US in 1992. It divided by 10kHz of course. No problems in the USA, but when I got it back to Australia, I found it could not be practically changed to 9KHz, because the PLL controlled local oscillator could ONLY go in 10kHz. 9 kHz was not an option at all. FM worked fine though.I also bought a answering machine where the timer tick was 60Hz from the American mains. Because we in Oz have 50Hz mains, it would only increment 50 minutes every real hour. I was able to hack the machine by injecting 60Hz using a 60Hz generator chip that used a TV subcarrier XTAL 3.595545 MHz. It worked a treat. I cannot remember what the chip was, but it was a 8-pin PTH chip.

author: GlennSprigg
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 15, 2019, 11:39:22 am
content: I was not aware of the CHANGE here in Australia FROM 10-Khz to 9-Khz !!It makes sense though, as there would have been so much 'noise' and inefficiency regarding boththe transmitters & receivers sensitivity/electronics that 10-Khz would have been a 'safe' margin !!