Radio Drops #11: Where Did Long Spot Breaks Come From?

It Wasn’t Always This Way

In the beginning, you played a song, you played some commercials. You played another song, you played some more commercials. In the late 60’s, FM Album Rock stations appeared. They were the anti-Top 40 and their positioning and formatting tactic was to cluster the commercials in one or two Spot breaks an hour. Worked for them. And it soon cut itself a huge chunk of the Top 40 audience away. But, lordy, that didn’t mean that everybody’s gotta do it this way!

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Twenty Commercials, Then the Most Music

I was driving north into Dallas what seems like a century ago and tuned in a station I had consulted, with great success, nine or 10 years earlier. About 20 or 25 past the hour it hit a spot break, and I counted. Twelve commercials in a row. Then traffic, weather, what appeared to be news, then eight more commercials. That’s 20 commercials in about 15 minutes.

They come out of that and say, “And now the most country music in Dallas, 20 gazillion songs in a row.” That station’s not the only one, of course. Anywhere in major market America, that’s what they’re doing. I’m sorry to break it to you, boys, and you may want to argue with me, but it’s crazy.

How It Started

In the first dozen to 15 years of rock and roll radio, you played a song, you played some commercials, you played another song, you played some more commercials. That’s how it went, 24/7.

In 1967 and ’68, progressive rock on FM started to bubble up out of San Francisco, the first place it came up. Within a couple of years there were progressive rock, or album rock, stations across the nation. They positioned themselves as the anti-Top 40s. If the Top 40 disc jockeys were up and hyper and cheerful all the time, the progressive jocks were whispering, mellow, up close to the microphone.

Top 40 was also very, very cluttered with commercials. The FCC maximum was 18 minutes of commercials an hour, and I worked at radio stations that broke that law all the time.

The album rock stations played the full album versions of songs, like the seven-minute “Light My Fire,” which Top 40 had cut down to three minutes. Then there was Cream, Hendrix, and all the other groups coming out at that time.

So you’ve got these long cuts, you don’t have very many commercials at first, and you’re the anti-Top 40. You give your audience long music sweeps, completely uninterrupted by commercials. That was the pitch.

They clustered their commercials, at first all in a break at 40. Once they started having success and sold more than five or six minutes an hour, they added breaks at 20 and at 50. Those were the prime positions. The 40 filled first, then 20, then 50.

That’s where the long break started, and it worked for album rock radio stations for a long time. Then came the 1996 Telecom Act, which lifted ownership limits. And here we are today, friends.