It depends on who the "we" is. Sure there are a lot of people in radio who see it that way. The CEOs, the GMs the sales people all see things from a strictly financial point of view. And it's important that they see it that way. Somebody has to pay the bills. But they delegate the content to a group of people who are pretty divorced from advertising and sales. When I go to a conference of programmers and air talent, we're not talking about advertising. We're talking about either music or talk subjects. WNSH is bringing in some recording artists to co-host the mid-day show. Those artists aren't thinking about advertising. They're thinking about their music.
Back a few years, I was one of five national PDs selected for the "Super Session" at the NAB radio convention. I was joined by the national heads from Clear Channel, Urban One, and two others.
In the Green Room, three of them sort of separated to talk about their techniques... techniques of getting the annual budgets prepared and dealing with the accountants. Only Mary Catherine from Urban One and I actually talked programming.
So much of the commercial radio industry deals with costs and budgets much of the time.
And even if we can delegate some of that, we have to focus on programming that attracts the right audience and enough audience to sell. Even in your examples of artists to co-host, we think about which artists have the most core demographic appeal.
Even in my first PD position, which I obtained by naming myself to the post, I knew that we were a commercial station and that we had to have significant impact from the first day we were on the air... so that we'd eventually be able to sustain the operation.
Sure, in some cases management sets the budget and says, "here is what you have for the year for salaries, benefits, promotions, the prize closet, events and everything else". But the PD has to have enough management skills to know how to stay in the budget at the same time that they are scheduling music, picking adds, analyzing the ratings and research, doing airchecks with the talent and all the rest.
Obviously, when programmers meet inside a company with multiple stations, it's different. The budgets are done, and conversations are about talent, music scheduling, how much time to let artists talk during interviews and all the little details where discussion ends up honing skills and overcoming doubts the newer PDs might have.
But wherever I have worked in commercial radio, step one was always the combining of budgeting and targeting the format to achieve the highest revenue goals.
My internship in Mexico at age 17 was in pure programming. I ended up a year later building my own station because the only place I could be a larger market PD at that age was at my own station... but I quickly learned that programming had to be part of a business plan to be self-sustaining. Anyone in commercial radio that does not get that will not succeed.
If you look at another art form, look at the extremes. Most of the Impressionists in the 19th and early 20th Century could barely pay for rent and food. Today, works by Monet, Pissaro, Renoir and Sisley go for many millions, but the artists are dead. But the guy who does caricatures at Universal Studios theme park is rumored to bring in a nice six figure income; he can paint during his leisure hours if that is what moves him. For that matter, how many skilled artists work within very tight schedules and budgets at ad agencies? They are still artists to the core, but they work within a system.
