The radio station I listen to rotates its selection every three hours!-DEADLYACCURATE
Heh. That reminds me of Chicagos Loop 97.9fm. The Drive 97.1 isn’t too annoying so i listen to them often too.
Cisco: I still don’t know whether we agree or disagree. 
The thing for me is that hip-hop, like any other musical business, has always been filled with businessmen. There have always been rappers willing to make whatever sells the most records. The only difference between then and now is that most of these records will be sold to the whites.
It’s not like hip-hop used to be a pure, artistic genre and once the suburbs started paying attention the artists sold out. The artists are still being artists. The rappers that make music solely to sell records are doing the same thing they’ve always done.
I’m not sure I follow you on your second point. By catering to people with more special tastes in music, which are known to be a minorty, the station will increase its ratings? Huh?
Also - tje DJ can talk to the music or prrgramming director if s/he wants to change something in the playlist. The computer doesn’t tell them when to speak. It’s just a tool.
Of course, it depends on what station you work for. Some are more strict, other give the DJ more liberty. But we do know hos DJ’s think. I was one myself for way too many years. I want to play the hottest new single on my hours and so does the next guy. If the station decides to go with a strict format, and a limited playlist, it needs to keep track on when songs are played.
For more info on the software - check out RCS, which is indurty leader with their softwares selector (for chosing the order of songs) and MasterControll, which is the software in the studio.
Please remember - software is only a tool. If rotations of songs is sloppy or the DJ’s bitch about not being able to be creative, it’s decisions and/or sloppy work by manegment.
Um, where do you think the “America” in United States of America comes from? It is North America, and Canada is part of it. All Canadians are actually Americans, if you want to go down that road. Citizens of the USA are just hogging the term for themselves. You should actually call yourselves “United Statesians”. 
I have decided that radio has officially gone to hell in a handbasket. At home, we have one rock station WZZL 106.7 (The Best New Rock and Killer Classics), which plays a steady diet of:
Pink Floyd
Rush
Led Zeppelin
The Doors
Def Leppard
and the occasional new song. This is not a classic rock station, this is a rock station. Tell me, is “Pour Some Sugar on Me” “Best New Rock” or a “Killer Classic?”
Compare this to Z-Rock 103 in Lexington, which I love now. Their typical playlist:
Pearl Jam
Alice in Chains
RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE!
Nirvana
Metallica
Megadeth
and the occasional older tune from the other group, as well as new stuff.
The Clear Channel station (Double-Q) is an unappealing mixture of the two other stations. It sucks, pretty much.
-brianjedi
I’m not really the target audience for classic rock radio stations, but I had a funny listening experience the other day, hearing REM’s Everybody Hurts, followed by the DJ’s “GOLD-FM, nothing but good times and classic rock”. I really struggled to see how that song fit either of those categories 
Eh, like the United States of Mexico?
Darlin’, we’ve done this ad infinitum in GQ. The upshot is that Merkins don’t have a unique name. Anything you could logically call us (American,' United Statesian,’ `Anglo,’ etc.) is claimed by a close neighbor.
(I realize featherlou probably participated in one of those threads. I’m posting this as a courtesy to newbies.)
There goes the last DJ
who plays what he wants to play
and says what he wants to say, hey hey hey.
And there goes your freedom of choice,
there goes the last human voice.
There goes the last DJ.
–Tom Petty
Perhaps catered is the wrong word, and included is a better choice. Don’t play just the most popular songs of any one band, or have a limited playlist. Play those now unfortunately rarely heard songs.
As for people with broader tastes being the minority, I think we’ll have to agree to disagree on that point. I think it’s a well-hidden fact that most TV and radio rating systems actually work to exclude a large part of the target audience (Fr’ instance, Neilsen’s not available to anyone who’s moved in the past 5 years, or who rents…)
With audiences tending to shrink, what has a station got to lose by coming up with a new format, instead of blindly playing the same stuff as the next station on the dial?
And hey-- with that whole “African-American” thing. North of the border we use the terms black, white (occasionally caucasian), Asian, and Indo-canadian.
Of the 6 people I’ve met who were actually born in Africa, 4 of 'em are white…
Gaspode:
I think what we’ve got here is one of those situations where, if everyone acts in their self-interest, it’s bad for the group as a whole.
Like you said:
The best bet for a radio station, on any given day, is to play those familiar songs, because they score high. But my understanding is that overall radio listenership is dropping; anecdotal evidence, at least, suggests that part of the reason is the mind-numbing repetition, and little chance to hear anything genuinely new.
So there’s my claim: a bit more variety would be good for radio in general (as well as for us listeners), while in the short run, at least, it’s bad for each individual station. What’s the way out?
I think it’s pretty obvious. At one time, radio wasn’t quite such a big business - as recently as 20 years ago, one licensee could own no more than 7 radio stations. This allowed a lot of smaller operators into commercial radio. And the musical ferment of the 1960s was aided by the existence of the FM airwaves that were, for a time at least, shunned by the commercial broadcasters, allowing people into the business who were totally there for the music, and considered themselves successful if they could pay the station’s electric bill and keep the FCC filings current. A fair amount of music popularized on FM radio when AM was king, eventually found its way onto the commercial airwaves. That freshened the music supply, and was good for everyone.
We need that again - a place where people with a few thousand bucks and a bit of practical experience can run a radio station for the fun of it, and introduce us to some music we’re not already hearing, so we get a chance to get familiar with some new stuff. Low-power radio within the FM band had the chance to be that, but it was killed. Commercial radio in the USA has been confined to the same AM and FM frequencies for the last eon; why not open up a piece of new frequency for radio, setting aside part of it for low-power radio, with nobody allowed to own multiple stations of that kind at all?
Maybe Internet radio will fill this role. But I’m still thinking that, what with drive-time still being the key radio-listening time, opening up the broadcast airwaves would still be the best way to go.
So what you’re saying is that Elvis, James Brown, Smokey, and Aretha aren’t “classic rock” because they’re part of some other format? It seems to me that that boils down to a tautology: they’re not “classic rock” because they’re not “classic rock”.