Hey, radio DJ here! (Specifically a classic rock radio DJ on a handful of local stations that aren’t the big commercially own stations that do this).. There’s actually a reason for this.
This is going to be an extremely simplified version of how this came to be (along with many other genre stations), but basically what happened was that before the mid 1990s, most radio stations just let radio DJs play whatever they wanted. It was the disk jockey’s job to find and play music that they thought their listeners would enjoy, or even just records that they liked themselves. It was usually the radio DJs who would discover bands and songs to play on the air and bring them to a wider audience. Of course there were issues like station managers not always allowing the play of music by black artists, or payola (where the radio DJs were essentially bribed to play a record which is illegal), but generally you wouldn’t hear the same exact songs with every DJ’s set. You also had a lot of unique personalities with radio DJs, as well.. For example Wolfman Jack with his snarling and growling on the air and him crafting his show to sound as much like a party on the radio as possible (and one of the radio DJs of his time to bring many black artists to a mainstream audience), or Dr. Demento and his crew of silly people adding on a peanut gallery to the comedy music he would play (including Whimsical Will and “Weird Al” Yankovic). During the 70s and 80s it also wasn’t unusual to often hear Stevie Wonder and The Beatles side-by-side, especially with many radio DJs breaking barriers to de-segregate radio stations. In the mid 1990s, however, a law was passed.. While originally companies could only own a certain number of stations (and if I recall correctly could not own more than one station in an area), it was changed so that companies could now own as many stations as they want. So, of course, big companies started buying up as many stations as they could, especially smaller ones that would play more of the weird stuff and inner cuts… And of course when a company is that big, they don’t want to risk failing, so they essentially gentrified their musical selections. They look at the numbers of what records are selling, they put together playlists for their radio DJs, and they have to stick to that. So, if you’re listening to a station that’s playing a lot of the same tunes, don’t blame your local DJs. Chances are they were told they have to stick to a certain set of artists, or even a certain set of songs.
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