Radio 101

I really appreciated, back in the days when this was done, the really quick radio commercial breaks, back when it wasn't necessary to have eleventy songs in a row. Stations would play three songs, break for one or two ads, and be right back to the music. I have airchecks that illustrate this nicely. Back then, I was willing to wait when I heard, "More music in 60 seconds!"

However, today's bloated breaks send me straight to the preset buttons. But what makes this worse is that it appears that we are simply expected to sit through these commercials as long as it takes. I don't know about anyone else, but I am not inclined to wait around for something to happen when someone blithely says "We'll be back in 3½ minutes." (That would be you, Bobby Bones.)

That moment I heard that, I flipped to Bob FM, and sure enough, Bob got a whole song, "Devil Woman", in before Kiss-FM even came back from their break. "Devil Woman", by the way, is longer than 3½ minutes, so either Bob faded the song early, or Kiss took a longer break than promised. Either way, that's not a good way to get your listeners to stick around.