Nobody listens to a word they say. In fact, as soon as the speaking starts, they tune to something else.
I have been in cars and vans driven by others quite a lot recently. The default form of entertainment to accompany driving is music radio, and without exception nobody leaves a single radio station on. This seems to be happening across all age groups and both sexes.
What happens is that they’ll listen to the songs being played, but at the exact moment they hear the ‘DJ’ or ‘presenter’ or ‘talent’ or whatever today’s trendy label is for him, start to speak, whoosh, they’ve zapped away to another station.
The reason for this is the strange and badly designed, actually fatal, concept that nobody has ever given me a workable excuse for, of allowing 3 or 4 minutes of commercials to immediately follow the up to a minute of inane devoid of personality banter from the presenter.
Listeners know that as soon as he starts to speak, that’s it for the songs for up to 6 or 7 minutes, so they don’t wait to hear what he has to say. Instead they’re away, stabbing the buttons for the other stations to get away from all the noise and non-songs they don’t want to hear.
This means that those who are actually listening as opposed to having the station on in the background and not actually listening, never listen to the presenter. So, why does he/she bother speaking? The person who was listening to the songs doesn’t hang around to hear him, and the people who have the station on in the background don’t listen to him either. Nobody listens! It’s pointless him bothering to speak, apart from him being able to listen to himself from his snoop recordings or discuss for three hours with his Programme Controller the merits of how he delivered the information he was forced to cram into the bit of talking (called in the trade the ‘link’, even though it actually ‘links’ to nothing and is now just a little self-contained package of talking burble).
Now then, if a radio station dared to break away from the rest doing this irrational thing, and actually played commercials at other times and not after the presenter has had his minute’s waffle (complete with the special waffling-over tune, Jeez), then people might actually hear the adverts instead of carefully tuning away long before they play, and people might also un-learn that the presenter talking is a telegraph for a long commercial break. They may even listen to what he has to say.
It’s been a very long time since anybody tuned to commercial music radio has actually listened to the presenter, yet nobody’s bothered telling them, poor things!
England's England 
Wise words greeeeaaad made !!
If I remember correctly though, in the early days of commercial wireless in the UK (the watery type), commercials were interspersed around the hour between the songs as you suggest.
The problem and present blocking together of commercials came as a direct result of the rules and regulations imposed upon commercial radio when it was finally legalised in the 1970s.
Those in control, presumably paranoid that us listerners would all be hoodwinked, made it the law that commercials must be separated from the programming obviously and definitively – hence the commercial break (and the dreaded 40 second long Jingles!).
Added to this was further paranoia surrounding the possibility that a presenter reading a commercial script would be mistaken for endorsing the product, and so the break and the ruling that presenters could not voice commercials was born.
It is only now, 40 something years later that some of these rules have begun to be relaxed – thank goodness.
Go on Global – give it a go!
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