During the glory days of radio, the nation listened to the same hits

The Washington Post
Published Sunday, January 21, 2007

Think for a minute about the three or four songs you can't hear often enough. Can you remember how you first heard those songs? Maybe a friend messaged you about one, or you found another on somebody's MySpace page, or someone burned a disc for you.

The answer to that question -- how do you discover new music? -- used to be much easier: Kids heard music first on the radio. That's still a popular way to hear new tunes, of course; but with so many new ways to share music, radio isn't what it used to be.

Very Few Choices

Imagine living in a place where there were only a handful of radio stations and no other way to hear the hit songs. That place was this country in the second half of the 20th century; from the birth of rock-and-roll until the late 1970s, almost all young Americans listened to the same couple of stations playing the same hits over and over.

The downside was that there were only a few dozen songs on the radio. If you didn't like them, it was tough on you. But there was an upside: Nearly everyone knew the same music, so people had something in common no matter who they were or where they came from.

The idea of playing records on the radio was against the rules until the late 1940s. Radio stations employed bands and orchestras, and the musicians' union opposed playing any records on the radio because it thought that would take away musicians' jobs. But after television became widely available in the early 1950s and most radio shows moved over to the new technology, radio stations were desperate for something to put on the air.

Play It Again ...

A station owner in Omaha, Nebraska, named Todd Storz noticed that people eating at diners would play the same songs again and again on the jukebox. He wondered if a radio station could succeed by playing people's favorite songs all day long.

Storz revolutionized radio with a format called Top 40 -- for the 40 most popular songs in the country -- that dominated radio for the next three decades. (As it turned out, playing records on the radio made listeners more likely to buy them, creating jobs for even more musicians.)

The people who played those records, called disc jockeys or deejays, became local celebrities. They took calls from kids listening while they did their homework, played the hits at high school dances called record hops, and staged all kinds of stunts: Deejays locked themselves in the studio and played the same record over and over for days; they held goldfish-swallowing contests; they hid money in books in the public library and challenged listeners to hunt for the treasure; they tossed dollar bills off rooftops -- anything to win attention and publicity.

We're All Special

But by the 1980s and '90s, radio had become much more specialized. Separate stations offered formats including hard rock, light rock, oldies, country and music aimed at black or Latino audiences. No longer does everyone grow up with the same soundtrack. Thanks to new technologies that let listeners be their own deejays, today's audience is more sliced up than at any time since radio was born almost a century ago.

Still, radio executives believe that listeners crave a common musical language to share with people their own age. Will that be possible in the era of iTunes, music blogs and Internet and satellite radio? The history of radio teaches us that when new technologies develop, old media don't vanish -- they change their content and reach a new audience in a new way.

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