I often listen to streaming radio stations during late hours, usually classical or jazz stations. Are the DJs who host these shows usually sitting in a studio broadcasting the music live or do they usually prerecord their show and broadcast it at night?
I know many NPR classical stations use a syndicated feed so I imagine that is prerecorded.
Obviously, this wouldn’t apply to live call in shows discussing sports or politics.
Online only? Very unlikely they are live. Classical or jazz are usually non-commercial or public and likely to be live as they usually don’t pay their talent. But most commercial radio stations these days will have live talent for the morning show and afternoon drive-time, and taped intros and computer-driven playback the rest of the time. They can record 8 hours of programming in less than an hour, nothing but “That was…” and “…coming up next” and spend the rest of their time recording spots.
Outside of talk radio and sports talk, there are probably fewer than two dozen people actually earning a living as radio voices in any given mid-size market. The rest of it is all syndicated.
Just to clarify, by streaming radio, I am referring to actual stations that broadcast over the air somewhere in the world and happen to also stream their content. I’m not referring to online only stations.
Caveat to the following: my radio experience is in Australia, and this is all from that point of view. I started in commercial radio in the very early 90s before getting tired of it and moving to the ABC about nine years back.
Once upon a time, if you heard someone talking, yes, there really was someone in the studio. Before my time, sadly. Those mid-dawn or graveyard shifts were where new jocks could get a go - make your newbie mistakes with relatively few people listening, that sort of thing - or syndicated.
Then along came the evils of automation, and prerecorded shifts. I was good at it - on a real “I don’t give a fuck, just let me out of here” sort of day, I could lay down the talk breaks for a six hour shift in fifteen minutes or less. Once you’ve got the talk breaks down, the computer adds them up plus the ad break lengths and song lengths and lets you know how much over or under you are for the hour, allowing a fixed time for networked news breaks at the top of the hour - they usually ran a fixed length like three or five minutes, so they were easy to work in. Change the last song or two to make a good timeout to the top of the clock (one with a longish fade rather than a cold stop for preference) et voila, air shift done.
We had time calls recorded for every minute of the hour too - computer would play the right one.
Summary: if it’s live, it’ll be syndicated. If it isn’t syndicated, it’s prerecorded, most likely.
Things sure have changed a lot since my DJ days back in the 80s. I was going to say small radio stations do indeed have poor yokels sitting in the studio all night long, just like I did back in the day, but I’m very likely wrong.
I spent an entire summer after my freshman year of college working weekend nights at an FM station in southeast Iowa. Whenever one of the full-time jocks took a week off, I’d work midnight-6 am all that week while everyone else reworked their schedule to cover. But - that was nearly 30 years ago. I would imagine very few stations are actually staffed overnight these days. Either they have the equipment to run automated, or if they are too cheap to go that route, they just have something syndicated overnight.
Local example: there’s a small, locally owned station here that I do high school football play-by-play for in the fall. It’s already an aberration that it’s locally owned and not bought out by Clear Channel or Cumulus. It’s pretty dinky without a whole lot of fancy, advanced equipment - but even they use enough computerized automation capability so that there’s not a soul in the building during the evening and overnight hours.
That’s interesting. I would have thought an engineer would be on-site all the time to monitor systems and act immediately in case a feed was lost.
I would imagine that would be the case if it’s one of the main stations in the city, but if it’s small enough that they’re doing play by play for the local high school football team (unless that’s a really big deal) maybe they aren’t all that worried about dead air for a few hours if they do lose the feed from 3am until someone gets there at 5:30 in the morning.
But yeah, I would have thought at the very least there would be someone hanging around to keep an eye on the place. Even if it was a janitor or guard that could pop his head in the booth from time to time or keep a radio nearby and call someone if there was a problem.
Well, interesting story about that. This station also carries our local minor league baseball games. For the first few Friday nights of the high school football season, that means the football games are recorded and then played on a delayed basis immediately after the baseball game is over. Now, there is someone in the studio handling the live sports broadcasts (getting the commercials on in the proper breaks, essentially), so on these evenings that person is also doing the recording of the football game, inserting the commercials into the recording so it can play automatically once the games are finished.
On one occasion in 2010, the baseball game went into extra innings. This pushed the football delayed broadcast back so that it wouldn’t end until after midnight. Apparently, the station computer automation doesn’t like things that run through straight up 12 midnight, as I suppose it resets things for the next day and all. The fellow at the station knew that there was the possibility of a problem with that, but crossed his fingers (because he didn’t want to sit around in the studio until midnight, and hoped there wouldn’t be many high school football fans staying up that late) and went home anyway, with the football game running automatically. Well, he guessed wrong. The computer system reset at midnight, shutting off the game and starting up with the regular music programming.
What he also didn’t take into account were the football sponsors. One local car dealer (who had a son playing on the football team) was pretty upset that not all of his ads got on the air, and he let the station manager know in no uncertain terms on Monday morning. We had to give him some extra attention and on-air mentions for the rest of the season.
I have to admit, it still surprises me to some extent that this station runs completely automatically overnight. When I get back to the studio late on Fridays after the football games, to bring the remote equipment back, it’s downright eerie to go into those dark, empty rooms while the station programming is merrily going along in its automated way. It just doesn’t seem right to my old DJ self!