Do they just play it from Spotify or YouTube? And how does it get decided which song to play?
In: Technology
As to what song they decide to play, sometimes it’s completely up to the DJ if it’s an independent radio station – they pay a general music broadcast license. Other times, the radio stations are owned by corporations that also own record labels and therefore push their own content on their radio stations in order to market it to the public. Sometimes those corporations also own luxury brands and so tell the music artists to include Gucci, Louis Vuitton etc in their lyrics (but you didn’t ask about that).
Radio stations have a giant database of music. All of it will be pre-downloaded, so they’re not worried about buffering anything or quality.
Those databases of music are tailor made for radio stations. In a single dealing, they pay for all the software involved, and all the licensing fees, and all the updates to keep them current.
Radio software will also have ad slot management, including how frequently ads play, timing things so that they have slots for news/traffic/etc, and so on.
They have a database of music on a computer or server that they tap in to, no need to pay for a third party service or stream lower quality audio from YouTube.
In the past they played directly from CD’s or audio cassettes.
Oh and how it’s decided – they can set up playlists (useful for those “90s at Noon” hours where they play 90s songs), play it at random, or manually select (useful for shows where they take requests).
It depends on the radio station. For example in the UK each radio station had its own remit of what it plays, bbc radio 2 for example is aimed at being 80% classics and 20% new music. Each bbc radio station then makes a play list of A,B,C music with A music being played more frequently, C less frequently.
This is radio 2 playlist for today https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/2qNJsnjYFvbLrK9CZ0CfYfM/radio-2-new-music-playlist
And an old description of how they reach that playlist
https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/radio/entries/6dc42e38-7c5f-3729-be7c-53f324fb7f09
A rock station obviously would have a very different remit and an upbeat radio station may still have similar A,B,C system etc but with different songs on them. Certain songs are pushed by record companies, request shows dont follow that format and obviously often each dj influences it (on some radio stations though for example they would be expected to play 50% songs from the a list)
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