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Disk jockeys do this by trying to arrange program segments in ways that please the audience as much as possible and yet still maximize the audience's exposure to advertising
In general, the items least valuable to the audience are played before a sequence of commercials, and the most valuable items are played after those commercials. To reduce station changes, commercial breaks are made as brief as commercially possible, and the valuable item following a commercial is rotated several times per hour. Commercial breaks may be longer at times when the audience is thought to be larger. In some countries the maximum time given to commercial breaks is regulated. Dead air time is considered wasteful. It neither produces profits, nor draws more audience.
Music radio has been helped by the development of semi-automated song-picker programs. Basically, these present the disc-jockey with a list of commercially-acceptable music selections, and other items for the current time slot. These give the disc-jockey some artistic freedom to select songs, promotions, jingles, etc., and yet still assure a cohesive station "sound" and good audience satisfaction. They also reduce a disc-jockey's workload, allowing him or her to develop news items, run the station, prepare gags, or take call-ins while a song is playing. The employer may as a result reduce staffing levels and thus trim overhead costs.
A station's value is usually measured as a percentage of market share in a market of a certain size. The measurement in U.S. markets has historically been by Arbitron, a commercial statistical service that uses listener diaries. Arbitron diaries were historically collected on Thursdays, and for this reason, most radio stations have run special promotions on Thursdays, hoping to persuade last-minute Arbitron diarists to give them a larger market-share. Stations are contractually prohibited from mentioning Arbitron on the air.
The classic item of music is a "single." This originally referred to a small phonograph disk played at 45RPM, with sufficient capacity to hold five minutes of music at good quality. This format determined the standard size of a song for popular music.
Jingles are the musical equivalent of neon signs, and they can be remarkably beautiful. Jingles are brief, bright pieces of choral music that promote the station's call letters, frequency and sometimes disc-jockey or program segment. Jingles were produced for radio stations by commercial speciality services. The most famous jingle service was called PAMS(External link), based in Texas.Gags are audible jokes, often with a (sometimes imaginary) side-kick. Talk radio evolved out of gags.
News, time-checks, real-time travel advice and weather reports are often quite valuable to listeners. The news headlines and station identification are often given just before a commercial. Time, traffic and weather are given just after. The engineer typically sets the station clocks to standard local time each day, by listening to WWV or WWVH (see atomic clock).
The station will usually have a policy of announcing time, station call letters and frequency as often as six times per hour, in order to build station loyalty. Jingles can very useful for giving the station a branded sound in a pleasant, minimal amount of air-time. The legal requirement for station identificaiton in the U.S. is once per hour or at the comclusion of a transmission.
While small stations may simply "tear and read" news items (from the teletype), larger stations may employ an editor to rewrite headlines, and provide summaries of local news. The summaries allow more news to fit in less air-time. Some stations can share news collection with TV or newspapers in the same media conglomerate. An emerging trend is to use the radio station's web site to provide in-depth coverage of news and advertisers head-lined on the air.
Most radio stations maintain a call-in telephone line for use during promotions and gags, or to take record requests. Jocks generally answer the phone and edit the call during music plays.
Promotions are usually the on-air equivalent of lotteries for listeners. Promotional budgets usually run about $1 per listener per year. In a large market, a successful radio station can pay a full time director of promotions, and several lotteries per month of vacations, automobiles and other prizes. Lottery items are often bartered from advertisers, allowing both companies to charge full prices while incurring wholesale costs. For example, consider a cruise vacation. Cruising companies often have unused capacity, and when given the choice, prefer to pay their bills by bartering vacations. Since the ship will sail in any case, bartered vacations cost the cruise company little or nothing. The promotion is itself advertising for the company providing the prize.
Some well-known music-radio formats are Top 40, Freeform Rock and AOR (Album Oriented Rock). It turns out that most other stations (such as Rhythm & Blues) use a variation of one of these formats with a different playlist.
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