As a kid I used to think radio stations just slammed the disc album into the reader and played the music they needed, but now as an adult and as most music releasing digitally I don’t think they just play Spotify songs
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Radio stations have specialized software that managers song libraries. There are services that they use that catalogues of music that match the kind of music they want on the station.
Generally, the software allows for mixing music automatically, allowing DJs to create pre-planned lists, mixing in advertisements, and playing prerecorded programs (the OG podcasts). They usually have some sort of advanced scheduling option that can filter out music (such as a Nothing But 90s long weekend that automatically plays music released in the 90s). The songs in the library contain a lot of metadata to handle this.
There will also be the option to stop after the current item and allow the DJs to actually talk, for things like news and traffic reports. The DJs will typically have to manually press play when they’re done.
You’re not as far off as you think. Record lables send stations things called electronic press kits. They’re basically a file folder, either a medium that used to be CDs but are now more like USB sticks or, more likely these days, a cloud storage medium.
Basically in 2024 Spotify isn’t *that* far off. Record companies send music files digitally to stations/give them access to/upload their files to a cloud storage.
Given internet speeds these days, more often than not radio stations are just playing what they’re streaming. So the Spotify example…isn’t terribly inaccurate.
in a way it’s like spotify in that they have digital libraries now. but radio stations don’t just pop on whatever they want whenever they want. They have to have a licensing deal in place to be able to play music on their station.
Spotify basically has a huge blanket license to allow their users to play music and then spotify (based on the number of streams a song gets) uses the fee you pay to them to pay out royalties. but radio stations are broadcasting music to thousands of people with a single play. So those license deals are different.
There are some interesting licensing disputes from the band Led Zeppelin from back in the day. Some of their songs get lengthy with guitar solos and what not, but they wouldn’t allow for radio edits. You either played the entire song or not at all. And if they (and the label) say you can’t play a song then you can’t play a song.
There was a time, surprisingly not that long ago, when there were people that sat in a room with two turntables and thousands of records or albums. Those are the black discs that you may have seen at “vinyl” shops. The person (DJ) would actually put the record on a turntable and play it, one at a time, until their shift was over, then rinse and repeat.
ASCAP has always been in the position to collect the royalties for any music played by a radio station. The stations would keep up with the number of times that any song was played and then paid ASCAP accordingly.
These days the DJ’s, if there are any, can voice track their entire show using the software mentioned by others here so that means all their talking is done in 45 minutes to an hour, depending on the length of their shift, and the music with the DJ segues inserted is programmed to play automatically from the files.
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