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One thing I never did was show up to do my radio show drunk. I have come across a couple of people who did. It happened at this radio station where I was doing the evening shift. It was Friday Night. My relief showed up. Her name was Deana. She was wearing what looked like a bamboo skirt. She began to undress, and got into something more comfortable. She was modest when she changed clothes. When she talked on the air I could tell she was drunk. By the way its against the FCC rules to operate a radio station drunk. She turned to me and stated what would really be great at that moment was some sex. Now here's the perfect example of the devil on one shoulder, and an Angel on the other. What was this jock going to do? I mean no one was around. No one would know. Well I went into the production room, and called the Program Director. She was there in a flash, and sent the girl home. She was fired the next Monday. When I came into do my show later that afternoon, I was greeted by the PD and GM who told me I did the right thing. I felt pretty good about that. However the next Friday Night there was no more big breasted blonde there.
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I've been often asked what happens if a stream keeps dropping? Well you open a support ticket with your stream provider.
I did just that once and never got a response back. I ended up going with a new stream provider. So how does a station move listeners to the new stream? You update all the listing directories. In my case it was Windows Media, iTunes, and Tune In Radio. I also updated the player links on the website. One day my over 200 listeners were on the old stream, the next day they were all on the new stream. I've known people who just think if a station moves to another stream the listeners will do a search and find them. Sometimes this may be the case, but not as much as one would think. One day I discovered iTunes dropped my station. I submitted a support ticket and received a message back that they were not accepting new stations or updating existing stations. This meant the immediate loss of almost 100 listeners. Did they come back? No! They moved on. So migration is very important. I've known stations that act like it's not a problem for them. They lost an important platform which is Tune In Radio because Tune In Radio is not accepting any new streams for free. As of this writing a slot goes for around $300 per quarter. Tune In Radio is important with mobile listening as well as Smart TV's, Alexa handsfree, and late model cars. I've come across some disgruntled radio people. This also includes me. Some of the more fun ones would include the guy who was so pissed off at the owners he decided to tell the listeners by putting his message on a loop, and then left the station with his message running.
This guy must've been disgruntled because he would've had to know the end result would not lead to a positive outcome. He had the listeners call up the station and share their favorite dirty jokes. He put them all on the air to share. The PD showed up, and fired him on the spot. This one guy must not have liked his boss. The station was having a clothing and food drive. There was a place set aside at the station for people to leave off their donation. One couple came by to drop off their donation. This radio guy claimed he was his boss, and sent them over to the corp. office to drop off their huge donation. I've worked for some great GM's, and not so great GM's. This story is about a not so good one. It was in the 1990's. I had spent 5 years at this station. I started out as the production director ending up being the program director. We enjoyed high ratings. The station was sold, and a new GM came in. Most of the time when their is a management or ownership change we pretty much know we're done. In this case they seemed to want to keep us. It would've been easy to just dismiss me saying they need to make a change, and go in a different direction. This GM decided to use sabotage. This included covering up existing ads to unplugging the station ice cream truck so all the ice cream in the freezer melted. After I was gone this GM continued to ruin the station. After 3 bad rating books, and an alleged sexual harassment case involving his program director both of them were shown the door. I was not the only one who got this treatment. As far as I know this man never again managed any other radio station.
I've had my share of interesting things that have happened at radio stations. All the way from a jock seeing a ghost of a person who died at the station to a winner showing up in drag. One of the more funny ones was when I was working the evening shift. My relief showed up laughing because he saw one of the jocks making out with a sales lady in the parking lot. He shined his lights into their car. A few minutes later the jock shows up with a red mouth trying to explain what happened. She was still married, but separated, and he was divorced. He went on to say how virtuous this lady was, and that they were doing nothing wrong. We both looked at him and said "We don't care." He was so concerned we were going to tell someone. We never mentioned it to anyone. So their secret was safe with us. More to come!
We are a fully automated radio station. I was searching for a program that would create playlists. I found Station Playlist Automation. Eventually I started using their creator, studio program that plays the created playlists, and built-in streamer. I've been very happy with the program.
For in house recording I use a Mackie DFX 12 Mixer, a DBX 166A Processor, and a RE320 mic. The station also uses the DSP Processor Stereo Tool. |