The Radio Dream

March 20, 2025

You wake up with a start. Cold sweat on the back of your neck. Your heart is racing, and you expect the hotline to ring at any moment.

You just had “the dream.” Anyone who has ever been on the air at a radio station has had a version of “the dream.”

An old college radio friend of mine, who has not been on the air since then, says he still occasionally has “the dream.”

The song is running out and you don’t have the next one cued up. If you’re of my generation, you start rifling through the records in the studio. None of them are in format. Or you can’t read the sleeves. When you do find a core artist, it’s the one album they released that had nothing but stiffs.

Maybe it’s the log. You can’t read it, or the commercials are nowhere to be found. (My recent iteration of this had the commercials housed in an office two blocks away from the studio.)

And throughout this process, the dead air begins … and goes on … and on … and you are paralyzed by what to do. You try to open the mic but have nothing to say.

Why does this happen? I’m sure there is a deep psychological reason for all of this, but perhaps it stems from the fact that for those of us who did live radio we were, well, live. When that “on air” light went on there were no second takes. You were in the moment and had to deliver. Everything that went out over the airwaves was controlled by you. Everything.

It was truly the definition of “live and local.”

Today, all elements come out of a hard drive. There are no frantic searches for a record or CD or – horrors! – a cart. In all too many cases, the “live” portion of the program has been previously recorded. I do not envy voice trackers because their job is very difficult. However, they have the luxury of a “take two” that live personalities do not have.

That moment when you go live is nerve-wracking, stressful and … magical. Much like a stage actor, you must perform and deliver in real time.

That is what makes radio special. At least, it used to. Today we are about avoiding “tune outs” and parsing what we do to eliminate anything that may be potentially negative to anyone. That has led to homogenization and sterility. Not everywhere but often enough that it devalues radio as an entertainment medium.

Entertainment. That is what we provide. We are in the “show” business. Regardless of the format radio is about serving an audience and connecting with them on some emotional level. We can make our listeners laugh or cry or stop and think. And this process is very, very messy. Unfortunately, in our efforts to streamline production and create a one-size-fits-all product, we have lost that ability to screw things up.

The root of “the dream” lies in that immediacy. That pressure to perform. That exhilaration we feel when we nailed the break. THAT is the power of radio.

My most recent version had me leave the studio, only to come back to find all the inputs had been changed but they were not labelled. No engineer would ever do that. Would they?

-Steve Allan, Programming Research Consultant

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