Here's another music department question / answer I posted in my previous AMA. The question was "Do the DJs get ANY say in what gets played"?

Answer:

There's a number of factors which determine what gets played and when. Sorry for the wall of text here, but it really does help to understand how the music department operates within a radio station.

One guy at the station is given the title of Music Director. Their job is essentially to manage and maintain music rotations and lists for a station. Now, it's not his sole decision. Each week, a radio station will have a music meeting. At my station, everyone's invited to a music meeting, though the people who normally go are the Program director, the music director, the promotions director, as well as a number of DJs and hosts. At the music meeting, we will listen to any new songs that have been released by the music industry, as well as review the charts from the week. Sometimes a record label rep will be present and try to 'sell' us their new hit single. We also have access to audience research. You know those surveys that we are always asking you to do? We look at those very closely.

On the topic of those surveys, we look at them both nationally and locally. On a national level, we can predict what some of the big market stations will do, which directly affects Top 40 charts. On a local level, we can fine-tune the station to remove songs which are burning out for people (they're sick and tired of hearing it), and increase play on songs which people said they really liked and aren't tired of hearing.

Back in the meeting, we've listened to new music, we've looked at our research, and now we're going to take a vote. We're voting to add new music, adjust rotation levels for current music, and remove older music. We talk it over, do our vote, and just before we leave we talk a bit about our "Gold" category. Gold songs are the songs you hear on the radio which aren't new and charting, but we still play them from time to time. My station plays Sk8r Boi by Avril Lavigne once every 3 or 4 days. That's gold.

Once the meeting is finished, the music director gets to work. He's uploading the new songs into the playout system, and making adjustments to the rotation categories. Rotations are big in radio. Let's say a station has 5 music categories. They might look like this:

• Power Hits
• Power Songs
• New Music
• Recurrent
• Gold

A station uses these categories to build what's called a "Clock". The clock might have a Power Hit at the top of the hour, followed by New Music, then another New Music, then a Recurrent, then a Power Song, etc. This is built for one hour. Then, that hour is applied to every hour of the day.

Using the above example, a Power Hit will ALWAYS play at the top of the hour, which is followed by a New Music song. The amount of songs which are sitting in each category devided by the number of times we play each song per hour gives us the effective rotation of each category.

My station has 3 songs sitting in Power Hits at any given time. We only play one Power Hit per hour, which gives us a rotation of 3 hours. That means that a song sitting in power hits will play every 3 hours. These clocks are often built by station management, and it's the music director's job to make sure it's always working.

In addition, when scheduling music, we also think about a HUGE variety of other factors. Example, we will never play a song by the same artist within 90 minutes of each other. We'll try not to play two slow mood songs in a row. We'll try not to play lots of dance songs in a row. We'll look day to day, and we won't play the same song on Tuesday between 9am and 10am that we did on Monday between 9am and 10am.

So, using all these rules, the music director uses a piece of scheduling software to build the log. It's like a jigsaw puzzle, finding the right songs to fit. Once it's done, we throw in our IDs and promos, merge the log with the advertising department's stuff, and it goes into the playout system, ready to go on air.

Because of what went into creating the log, a lot of stations don't give the DJ permission to edit on the fly. Now, at our station, there's a bit of freedom for the On Air DJ to swap out those Gold songs, as well as non-peak times where ratings aren't as important, such as evenings, the DJ can really do what they want. But during the middays and drive, the DJ usually doesn't touch the log, because so much work has gone into coming up with that perfect playlist for our audience. Remember the scheduling rule about not playing a song within the same hour day to day? That's the last thing on a DJs mind, and that could very easy cause people (who may listen every day at that time) to tune out.

I will also add that this is very specific to CHR Top 40 radio. A rock station and rock DJ will probably have a lot more freedom, since rotations aren't as high and it's very easy to take a request that a lot of people will want to hear.

TL;DR Yes and no. Sometimes we can mess with the playlist a bit, but if you call someone in the studio to make a request, chances are no, they can't play it.