Written in February 2023.
The thing guys coming into music radio today don’t have that the young radio guys of my generation had is mentors. There is still no school teaching how to do it. It is a craft that is learned by doing. Top 40, the very first radio ‘format’ was born in the 1950’s along side Rock’n Roll music and the first transistor radios. D J’s played whatever they wanted. There were no Oldies, it was all new music. The songs averaged around 2:30 and with newscasts and the commercial load, stations were spinning 15 songs an hour. If you played them all equally, every song would play again 2 and a half hours later.
Pat Holiday has the only video channel offering some classroom type mentoring. Recently he spent an hour with Bill Hennes, he being one of the still living practitioners of music radio in its best decades, the 60s up to the turn of the century. You being the radio geek will probably want to hear the whole interview, but if you pick it up right here (click), Bill is talking about how he managed music scheduling at his hugely successful Country station, WMAQ in Chicago in the 70’s.
SW
Written by
Steve Warren
Steve Warren has programmed radio since 1964. He built MdB, the first music scheduler for the Mac, in 1987 and Music 1 for Windows in 1994, and is a founding partner of MusicOne.
