Listening to terrestial radio today I noticed a weird thing on two different stations…
Songs had weird ‘edits’ where short parts of the song duplicated. Happened in each song.
Example: Plain White Tees “Hey There Delilah”
Regular verse goes “Hey there, Delilah, don’t you worry about the distance
I’m right there if you get lonely, give this song another listen”
The radio played “Hey there-hey there- Delilah, don’t you worry about the distance
I’m right there if you get lonely, give this song another listen”
Gets to the chorus - “Oh, it’s what you do to me
Oh, it’s what you do to me”
Radio plays “Oh-oh, it’s what you do to me
Oh, it’s what you do to me”
Each song had these repeats sprinkled throughout. And often it was jarring because the repeat would be be mixed lower or wasn’t a clean cut. Like the Delilah example actually sounded pretty seamless and if you didn’t know the song, it would not have seemed so weird. But other songs, it sounded like digital skip–which is what I thought it was the first two songs. I switched to a sister station and noticed it in one more song before I got to my destination.
So… is this a thing? Anyone experience something similar?
Do radio stations do this now–no idea why except it definitely made me engage with my radio more. Made me spend the time to make this post…probably will make me listen to the station again to see if it still happens rather than just connect my bluetooth to Youtube Music.
I’m guessing what you were hearing was your radio switching between the HD Radio and standard broadcast. Sometimes the two broadcasts are slightly out of sync. Your radio might be tuned to the HDR broadcast but then loses the signal so it switches to the non-HD broadcast, which is a fraction of a second ahead or behind the other one. I have definitely heard that on my car radio. I solved it by disabling receiving HD in the radio settings.
I’ve never actually heard it, but I’ve been told there was a radio version of “We Built This City on Rock & Roll” where the DJ talking turing the bridge was left out so it could be replaced with one of the station’s actual personalities.
Taylor Swift’s debut single, “Tim McGraw”, had a radio edit where the line “Someday you’ll turn your radio on” got replaced with a plug for Bob Kingsley’s country Top 40 countdown.
I’ve heard the “digital skip” from time to time on our car radios. I think @markn_1 may have it right.
For “slightly altered versions of songs”, the Huey Lewis song “Heart of Rock and Roll” has a roll call of rock music cities in the lyrics. At the end, my local radio station back in the 80s when the song was new added the names of a couple of local cities over the fade-out, either recorded by Lewis himself or a remarkable sound-alike.
You beat me to it. But I did actually hear this in the Chicago area when the song was released in 1985. And they (the radio stations) were apparently so pleased with themselves that they played the song repeatedly until I got to the point that I was thoroughly sick of it.
I’ve heard both versions on classic rock radio myself.
I’ve heard edits of Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side” that either omit the Candy Darling verse entirely, or change the line “but she never lost her head, even when she was givin’ head” to replace “head” with “I swear”.
Which doesn’t really make much sense and is a strange way to attempt to bowdlerize a song about transsexual sex workers, but I’m sure someone in S&P thought that was a good idea.
More to the point of the OP, I’m not sure how common this still is, but around 10-15 years ago or so there was a trend on Top 40 radio where pop songs that had a rapper doing a guest verse would have that part edited out. Katy Perry’s “ET” usually played without Kanye’s verse, for example, and Ariana Grande’s “Problem” would drop the Iggy Azalea verse. Taylor Swift’s “Bad Blood” had a completely different version that cut Kendrick Lamar’s parts and replaced them with an alternate chorus.
One of the most egregious offenders was Karmin’s “Brokenhearted”, where singer Amy Renee Noonan does both the singing and the rap parts, but the rap was cut from the radio edit.
They did this with The Pointer Sisters song, Fire, as well. I remember “turn on the radio” being replaced with “turn on WLS” or whichever station it was.
Seemed like any time the radio or the city was mentioned, it would get dubbed – like the other examples in this thread
That was the original version of the song, as it appeared on the album and as it was distributed to radio stations as a promotional single. Same deal with “Bad Blood.” In both cases, the remix was done after the original recording - a cynic might say, in order to get more streams from some different prospective listeners and possibly get a song that looked like it might be stalling out on the charts over the hump and into the coveted number one slot.
The theme from WKRP in Cincinnati never got higher than #65 on the charts, but radio stations played the hell out of it just so they could replace the final line with their own call letters.
Les Paul and Mary Ford’s instrumental “Magic Melody” ends with the five-note motif “shave and a haircut…”. After radio stations started reporting listener complaints, Paul & Ford obliged by recording “Magic Melody, Part 2,” consisting entirely of the notes “…two bits!”.
Steely Dan had a hit in 1978, FM (No Static At All) from the movie FM, which was by all accounts a terrible movie but had a legendary soundtrack.
Some AM radio stations wanted to play this hit, but didn’t want to boost FM radio, so they unofficially created an edit in which the syllable F in the chorus was excised and the syllable A from the title track of their 1977 album Aja was spliced in its place.
There’s no official version of this, but it is attested to on Wikipedia (which cites as its source two biographies of the band); you can hear a fan recreation of it on YouTube (e.g. at roughly 1:32):
