26 Facts About Music radio

Music radio is a radio format in which music is the main broadcast content.

Music drives radio technology, including wide-band FM, modern digital radio systems such as Digital Radio Mondiale, and even the rise of internet radio and music streaming services.

When radio was the main form of entertainment, regular programming, mostly stories and variety shows, was the norm.

Public and community Music radio stations are sustained by listener donations and grants.

Fewer Music radio stations maintain a call-in telephone line for promotions and gags, or to take record requests.

Related searches

Arbitron diaries were collected on Thursdays, and for this reason, most Music radio stations have run special promotions on Thursdays, hoping to persuade last-minute Arbitron diarists to give them a larger market-share.

See List of music radio formats for further details, and note that there is a great deal of format evolution as music tastes and commercial conditions change.

Original formulaic radio format was Top 40 music, now known within the industry as contemporary hit radio or CHR.

Progressive rock radio was freeform in style but constrained so that some kind of rock music was what was always or almost always played.

Freeform radio is particularly popular as a college radio format; offshoots include the recent eclectic-pop format known as variety hits, which plays a wide assortment of mostly top-40 music from a span of several decades; and podcast radio, a mostly talk format pioneered by Infinity Broadcasting's KYOU station in California and Adam Curry's Podcast show on Sirius Satellite Radio.

Conventional wisdom in the Music radio industry is that stations will not get good ratings or revenue if they frequently play songs unfamiliar to their audience.

Rock music has a long and honorable radio tradition going back to DJs like Wolfman Jack and Alan Freed, and as a result variations on rock radio are fairly common.

Alternative rock grew out of the grunge scene of the late 1980s and early 1990s and is particularly favored by college Music radio and adult album alternative stations; there is a strong focus on songwriters and bands with an outsider sound or a more sophisticated sound than the "three chord wonder" cliche.

Narrow-interest rock stations are particularly common on the Internet and satellite radio scenes, broken down into genres such as punk, metal, classic rock, indie music, and the like.

Decades worth of efforts at mainstreaming the format eventually paid off when country Music radio became widely popular among a large number of FM Music radio stations that signed on in the suburban United States in the 1980s and early 1990s.

Dance music radio focuses on live DJ sets and hit singles from genres of techno, house, electro, drum and bass, UK garage and big beat.

Some music radio is broadcast by public service organizations, such as National Public Radio or the BBC.

Community radio often relies heavily on the music format because it is relatively cheap and generally makes for easy listening.

Arbitron diaries were historically collected on Thursdays, and for this reason, most Music radio stations have run special promotions on Thursdays, hoping to persuade last-minute Arbitron diarists to give them a larger market-share.

Therefore, satellite Music radio rarely carries commercials or tries to raise money from donors.

The lack of commercial interruptions in satellite Music radio is an important advantage.

Much early commercial Music radio was completely freeform; this changed drastically with the payola scandals of the 1950s.

Satellite Music radio usually uses DJs, but their programming blocks are longer and not distinguished much by the time of day.

Outside of English-speaking world, several radio formats built around local musical genres are popular.

Music radio stations pay music-licensing fees to licensing agencies such as ASCAP and BMI in the United States or PRS in the UK.

Related searches

The popularity of offshore pirate Music radio stations in the United Kingdom was an early symptom of frustration with the often overly safe and occasionally politicized playlists of commercial Music radio.