Whilst radio presenters dress up in ill-fitting posh frocs and pat themselves on their backs at the rather incestuous ‘Sony Awards’ (a kind of really cheap scaled down Bafta awards thing but just for people in radio in the UK), they are oblivious to the creeping cancer that is spreading across their industry.
You see, they don’t have long to live. However, sadly, they are in denial.
 |
| Greg James – possible one of the last ever radio presenters! |
Once upon a time every hour of every day on every radio station across the UK was occupied by a radio presenter, disc-jockey, or announcer, who was usually also looking after the technical operation to ensure that listeners were left with no gaps or anything other than the wonderful ‘sound’ of the radio station.
This meant loads of employees. Lots of people were working in radio, even after midnight and ‘through the night’.
But, along came the ‘new’ radio station owners. Generally these are bad people who don’t think of ‘radio’ as an art form but as a way of making them extremely richer. Where once there were a lot of different individual radio stations in a lot of different areas, slowly these all became the property of just one or two ‘owners’ between them ‘owning’ all the radio stations everywhere.
The one main thing these new ‘owners’ had in common was the hatred of the iPod. They envied it so much. They so wanted its success and its intimate relationship with its listeners. Carefully they started re-designing their radio stations to emulate the iPod. iPods just play the songs back to back without any announcements. The radio station owners couldn’t get this completely right because, for no reason that has ever been explained, every 20 minutes they stop the songs in order to play a jarring collection of adverts for 7 or 8 minutes.
Then, two things started happening. Networking and automation.
Networking meant that local radio stations around the country were no longer local radio stations. Instead, a single presenter in, say, London, could make all the announcements for all the radio stations anywhere. Obviously this made a large number of ‘radio people’ redundant in all those local areas, as they were replaced by the homogenised sound from London. Most radio stations now spend most of their time re-broadcasting what’s coming from a central place, with maybe a few hours of locally originating programming.
Automation meant that computers could actually replace the human beings. At first the humans were expunged from the overnight hours, invited in once a week to spend half an hour pre-recording all their announcements into the ‘playout computer’ that had replaced them. This technology would ensure all recordings were slowly played out during the 20 hours a week they’d have previously made their announcements ‘live’. This process is called ‘voicetracking’.
Eventually presenters from other times of the day were replaced by the ‘voicetracking’ monster. I say ‘monster’, because, like Frankenstein’s monster, it seems to the listener that the presenter is still alive when sadly they are not.
When the owners realised this was still costing them time and money, they dispensed with the ‘voicetracking’ altogether. Their rival the ipod doesn’t have voicetracking, so neither will they, they barked! Whole periods of hours were abandoned to the playout computer just burbling away in the brave new dehumanised world of radio.
The eventual idea is that there will be no humans allowed to ‘present/announce’ on radio stations whatsoever.
Slowly this is happening via a radio station ‘brand’ called ‘Jack FM’. Jack FM works by not having anybody there at all. Just more or less the same songs playing all day, every day. For some inexplicable reason, probably to do with getting round the rules of the otherwise pointless regulators ‘Ofcom’, Jack stations still have a ‘live’ breakfast show. Well, it’s a breakfast show during which the presenters speak four or maybe five times an hour just before the adverts play, and is almost as ‘soulless’ as the rest of the day.
The country started off with just one Jack station. Slowly but surely they are multiplying at an alarming rate, gradually taking over in this relentless crusade to emulate the iPod.
Indeed, at their rate of expansion, and the corresponding rate by which commercial radio station staff is shrinking, it looks likely that by 2020 all song based commercial radio will be ‘presenterless’ as well as soulless.
England's England 