No, we call it "reality". Times change, and what was once appealing no longer works and new programming techniques are developed.
Stop there. When radio programming slowly morphed from network fare to "music and news" it took over a decade to happen and involved factors as diverse as James Petrillo's loss of control of radio's programming of recorded music to the lifting of the TV freeze and the "invention" of the Top 40 format in Omaha and the birth of rock and roll.
The truth is that radio became about playing recorded music... much more recorded music than in the Petrillo controlled days. Add in the huge growth in the number of stations where AM license counts grew more than three-fold from the end of the War to 1960, and there were lots of hours to be filled with records. In most cases, the model for music presentation was more "Martin Block" than "Alan Freed". The DJ evolved, also over a very long period of time.
In many cases, the DJ spoke excessively and irrelevantly. In other cases, we found stars. But for every Gary Stevens or Dan Ingraham there were dozens of guys with much less talent reinforced by a decent voice and a gym bag full of joke service booklets with tired one liners. Your statement wildly exaggerates the role of the DJ, which in many situations was simply the same as the person who does the presentation for a famous singer's concert: the folks are there for the music, not the presentation.
Those statements are patently contradictory. If you hire jocks away from other stations, you have to pay more, not less.
For many decades, from the 50's up to the Internet / PPM era, stations tried to get the best talent they could afford in the formats where it mattered. Good small market stations became farm clubs for larger markets, and people's salaries rose as they progressed in market size or got better shifts if they stayed in-market. Managers were pleased to pay for measurable results.
While payola did cause many stations to develop better music policies, most Top 40 stations already had playlists and rotations and had removed music decisions from the DJs. And when the owners exercised their responsibilities as licensees to avoid illegal practices, they did not immediately gain any benefit from the record companies... it would be more than a quarter century later that the changed role of independent promoters could garner a few boxes of T-shirts or some bumper stickers for a station.
The Drake stations like KHJ, WRKO, CKLW and KFRC were amazingly personable and incredibly tight. Drake actually brought personality back to radio when it was declining into a quagmire of long jingles, long jock raps and tired phrases and gimmicks. Some of the best talent in radio was on those Drake stations... Robert W Morgan, Dale Dorman, Dr. Don Rose, The Real Don Steele and many others. They sounded great because, like a good NFL team, they had good coaching.
That was not what a Drake station was about. Some imitators confused brevity of expression for just limiting talk, but those Drake stations were exciting, fun and full of forward momentum.
The "zero evidence" in 1965 was that KHJ beat KFWB and KRLA in just a few months. Later, real research found that poor jocks that talked too much were not liked by listeners. By the time we got to the PPM era, it was found that audiences had changed and in many formats the jock's role had to be adapted or modified. Today, we have much of the Millenial generation which prefers mixers to presenters and thus rejects most traditional style jocks entirely.
In many cases, that's an observation appropriate for times long past. Today, many listeners want to know what gossip or tidbit Ryan Seacrest picked up last night rather than listening to a bit in between songs. Many hugely popular talents from the 70's and 80's don't work in PPM, as moment by moment meter counts will show that audiences often go away when they do the kinds of bits that worked in the diary days of decades past.
Cheap shot. I've known far, far, far more responsible, ethical managers than crooked and deceitful ones. And that goes for people in the same company as well as competitors. All fields have their bad apples, and I don't think radio is any more prone to having them than, say, insurance companies.
A well programmed AC station with a curated, listener-researched playlist (again, WBEB is not elevator music) is vastly preferred to a computer algorithm driven pure-play. That's why WBEB is the #1 station in Philadelphia in cume, reaching 1,400,000 persons weekly on average. It's also, on average, the #1 station in 12+ in the market... showing that, despite commercials, a well programmed and well promoted station will attract listeners in huge numbers.
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