3 Misconceptions About Radio Announcers/Transcript

The following is a transcript from "3 Misconceptions About Radio Announcers", the 225th episode of the comedy web series A Dose of Buckley. It was uploaded on YouTube on January 4th, 2015.
== Transcript ==
Ah, terrestrial radio. I have such a love-hate relationship with the medium. There's so much potential and I hear it squandered every day while I drive around this city. I think my insider knowledge doesn't help. I can't sit back and just enjoy listening to the radio because I know too much about what goes on behind the scenes. So, if I have to suffer with that burden, so do you.
Today, I'm gonna debunk three pretty common misconceptions that the general public seems to have about radio announcers.
Number one: People you hear on the radio make a lot of money. 
That makes sense, right? It would seem like this should be the case. After all, Howard Stern makes millions of dollars, the guy or girl doing the afternoon show in your city must be making at least something in the high-five's or low six-figures, right? Plus, they're on the radio, so they're kinda famous which means they must make a few bucks. Well, you'd be right. They make a few bucks.
The percentage of people on air making a lot of money in radio is pretty low. If you have an OK full-time job, there's a good chance you make as much, or more than the person you listen to while getting to that job.
There are lots of announcers in mid-sized cities making less than thirty-five thousand dollars a year, and I'm aware of people who have worked in the industry for a few years that are making minimum wage. 
Minimum wage!
The guy talking into a microphone on the radio is making the same as the guy talking into a microphone at the McDonalds drive-thru. Sure, there are some people making money in the business, but they're slowly being phased out for cheaper "talent", because local terrestrial radio is simply not as popular as it used to be. And the supply of announcers is far higher than the demand, which means you can get pretty much anyone out of college to sit in the chair and introduce songs, run a contest and post memes on the Facebook page without paying them much.
Because someone will do it for cheaper. Usually, there will be one, maybe two people on the morning show making more than 50-60K. In bigger cities, you might even have a guy making around that six-figure mark, but in the average city of under a million people, the announcers from 10AM till 7PM are middle class at best. If they have a live host after 7PM, that kid's making shit, and the weekend announcers should be running Telethons to feed themselves.
Number two: The announcers pick the songs. 
Every year, kids enter Broadcast School because they want to change the type of music that gets played on the radio. There's always that one kid that's like: "Uh, they don't play enough hard Metal. I want to get that on the radio, and I'm gonna change it!" And every year, those kids end up quitting school around Week 3. 
I'll see Facebook posts on radio stations once in a while, where someone will say: "Hey, radio host! Great tunes on your show today, you picked some awesome stuff!" And the best part is when the host takes credit for it. 
Announcers don't do this, that's the job of the music director. A music director gets all the songs, categorizes them and schedules them. The song you hear today at 4:15 PM? That was potentially scheduled three, four days ago. The announcer had no say in it. They just press a button. 
They used to pick the music about fifty years ago, but not anymore! 
In fact, this leads to another misconception - that music labels pay radio stations to play their songs.
That's called Payola, and it was made illegal in the 1950's. In fact, it's pretty much the opposite now. Radio pays to play the songs. If your radio station is high-profile enough, the labels will send you songs for free, which is great, but many stations have to actually buy the music they play, either through iTunes or a service that provides radio-edited tracks. And then they also have to pay licensing fees to play the songs. 
Radio needs music content more than the music labels need radio anymore. People watch shit on YouTube, songs go viral via word-of-mouth on Facebook and Twitter, songs are best-sellers on iTunes before they're even played on most stations. This isn't the Sixties and Seventies, where the labels needed radio to make their songs seem cool.
The balls in the labels court now. 
And number three: radio hosts have writers and producers. 
Again, this is based on Stern, as well as people watching too much Frasier and thinking everyone gets their own Roz. On some morning shows, they'll have a producer, someone to press the buttons and play the clips, but a lot of the times that's also one of the co-hosts. The usual "Two guys and a girl" format. There's the wacky guy, the straight man and the girl. The wacky guy just talks, the straight man also presses the buttons and the girl does the news and laughs at their jokes. I don't know why this is the format for nearly every fucking local radio station, but it is. Too afraid to change it, I guess.
But every other time-slot where you only hear one announcer? That announcer does everything themselves. They press the button to play music, they turn their mics on and they come up with their own things to talk about.
And it should probably be apparent to anyone who's had to suffer through their local radio hosts' shitty bits where they just tell you about something they saw on the Internet, give you the rundown of something that happened to them yesterday after work or read a BuzzFeed list to you almost verbatim, but they write that themselves. There's no one there helping them. They don't have a staff of people coming up with jokes for them like Letterman, Conan, Fallon and all those guys. They do it all themselves. There are prep services that a radio station can subscribe to, which will give you a daily list of the things that are "top-of-mind" and may sometimes include a joke or some talking points, but for the most part, announcers are on their own. 
This shouldn't be an excuse for why some announcers are really, really awful at coming up with stuff to talk about, but at least when you hear something that sucks on the radio, you know it was only the work of one person, not several.
So now you know a little more about radio DJ's and radio in general. Did it all seem more glamorous than this? 
Well, it's not. 
But, as far as jobs go, you could do a lot worse than sitting in a room for a few hours a day, pressing buttons and talking. And, sure, to many people, radio seems bland and watered down, the same songs playing every hour or two and people interrupting those songs to tell you something completely inane. But you can't really blame the host for the music part anymore than you can blame the guy who works at the gas station for gas prices being so high. Of course, you absolutely can blame them for the inane chatter part, though, and I encourage that. The bosses could fix that by hiring better DJ's, but that costs more money, and they don't want to spend it. So, you get what you get. 
Don't like it? Buy an iPod. And, when you end up playing the same songs for yourself every hour, and you have to listen to your friend in the car telling you something you don't give a shit about, hopefully you'll appreciate the irony.
Category:Transcripts