Radio presenters talk in lumps

Why do people on music-radio talk in lumps?  Why are they so afraid of the songs the radio station plays? Where does the research say that the audience want lumps?

When music-radio first started properly in the UK it was in the hands of the offshore pirates and Radio Luxembourg.  The presenters, known then as ‘disc-jockeys’ because they would literally ride the songs, didn’t speak in lumps.  They darted in and out of the songs, whipping up the listener’s enthusiasm for them.  The listener felt that their pal on the radio was sharing something very special with them.  And he/she was.

For decades the interaction between disc-jockey, or presenter, and the record or song was what made radio compulsive listening and built fanatical listener loyalty.

Then we hit the worse decade for radio, the 1990s.  It had started in the 1980s, but by the 1990s the presenter was frightened of the songs and would talk in lumps away from the songs.  Again, this started in America, and the no-brains in charge of radio in the UK copied it.

A reason for this trend was automation.  Automation consisted of a single computer playing out all the songs and commercials and jingles and presenter-talk, rather than a presenter actually being there live.  It was much easier to pre-record lumps of talk (called ‘voice-tracking’), rather than try to pre-record the interaction with the actual songs that listeners were more used to and enjoyed.  Each lump of pre-recorded material would be played out sequentially, one after the other.  The randomly chosen songs would just play, the commercials, the trailers, the presenter-talk.  All in separate lumps, just appearing one after the other.  All of them no longer sewn together but just played out one after the other without any care or continuity.  Even with a live presenter available, he is only allowed to talk in lumps, and always ends up sounding like a railway station platform announcer – easily forgotten, personalty-less, boring.

For the listener, this comes across as if the presenter is scared of the songs or is too busy on Twitter or Facebook to actually care about them.  It comes across as if he’s shirking his responsibility to enthuse and to dart in and out of things to keep the momentum and excitement at fever pitch.

Today’s highly popular pirate radio stations don’t talk in lumps.  That’s why people tune to them in their thousands, just as the listeners in the 1960s did.  They hear a person wildly enthusiastic about the songs, a person passionate about the music they, listener and presenter, both love.

There is no research that says people actually enjoy presenters talking in lumps.  If anything, since there’s nobody on the radio ‘working’ to keep the listener loyal, most listeners press the button to skip to a different station just as soon as the songs stop.

What would be good is for commercial radio to give not talking in lumps a go.  Copy the way of the pirates, the way of the days when listeners were loyal and loved the radio station they were listening to, rather than today’s trend of not even knowing a radio station’s name.