It’s taken a decade or so before music radio finally realised it was time to stop pretending it had presenters and that they were important. But, at last the final nail is being hammered in the presenters’ coffins. The presenters are, of course, mainly oblivious to their cull.
In the beginning, music radio was actually about the presenters, the radio DJs, as much as it was about the songs they presented. Slowly, very very slowly, things changed. When the Musicians Union finally stopped blocking the number of songs that could be played (‘needletime’), sure enough the presenter was squeezed further and further into the background.
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| (A ‘presenter’ worthy of the axe or hammer falling on) |
For whatever reason, token presenters remained employed but eventually only allowed to quickly speak without any personality three times an hour to give out corporate information announcements and to plug the breakfast show.
(Plugging the breakfast show? What’s that about? If the breakfast show is the most listened to show, shouldn’t it be plugging the least listened to shows hoping to increase their audience figures? Yet it’s done the wrong way round! Madness!)
The craziness of having this person speaking three times an hour was that he’d also bother to tell listeners his name. Ha ha ha, how pointless! Get real, nobody cares what the name of the non-personality reading out platform change announcements at the local train station is either (“Hi, it’s Bob Jones with your latest departure information. More trains, more often”). Actually, the train station announcer speaks more often than a music radio ‘presenter’, yet without mentioning his name. So why do the three times an hour music radio ‘presenters’ bother mentioning theirs? Nobody cares.
The final death of the music radio presenter has been sounded, however, with a creeping American format (American? Yep, we are completely incapable of designing our own radio stations) known as “Jack FM”. Supposedly ‘playing what we want’ when in reality it’s playing a carefully researched collection of the usual 600 songs over and over and over again, the Jack format does away with the need for presenters altogether. There’s a presenter (or, the obligatory team of two) for the ever so funny breakfast show 3 hours, and then after that they turn the lights off, shut the door and go home whilst the remaining 21 hours until the hilarious duo are back again are filled by non-stop music, adverts, and ho ho ho, ever so witty pre-recorded re-enforcement statements about how wonderful not having presenters is (If presenter-less radio really is that wonderful why are they still plugging the presented breakfast show every 20 minutes throughout those 21 hours?).
Basically, the music radio presenter is dead. He’s been replaced by a burbling pre-programmed music playout computer just spewing out the same old stuff as before, but now without his three announcements an hour. This makes radio as cheap as putting an iPod on shuffle and leaving it plugged into a radio transmitter, and equally as boring. At least with an iPod, the listener can skip through the songs (and tedious commercials and ever so witty voice) they don’t want to hear right now. In this respect, music radio will always be a big ‘fail’ compared to an iPod no matter how much it tries to emulate it.
Bizarrely, the no-presenters format wins awards at shin-digs organised and attended by those presenters from other stations who haven’t been axed yet. I’m guessing that in the end when the last presenter has been nailed into his coffin, the Jack FM computers will attend these pointless human-free conventions themselves, like a scene from Terminator.
Eventually, when all that’s left in the world of music radio broadcasting is awards for the shiniest playout device, there will be no need for humans whatsoever. Indeed, all of this is so out of touch with what listeners actually want that the human race could be extinct for hundreds of years, yet, without a care, the machines would still be playing what they want.
England's England 