However, for a lot of listeners like me, there is something lost when you don't get live jocks and live conversation.
First there was automation, where all of the song titles were announced on the same reel as the music, verbatim every time a song played, with what localism there was coming from pre-carted newscasts, weather reports, and public service announcements.
Then there was voicetracked automation, which in its earliest incarnation still was four or five air personalities creating new song intros and outros each day that played from a separate reel ... still no localism outside of the news/weather/PSA inserts, and very awkward because those voicetrack reels had to stay pretty generic.
Systems like Prophet and the like allowed the importing of voicetracked talent into a computer-generated custom presentation for each station, and it sounded better than its predecessors because the tracking happened within a day or two of air (and could even be updated before airing in the case of something unforeseen happening in the interim). Still, talent would sometimes flub the pronunciation of a local town or landmark which gave them away as being outside the area.
Next came Jack™ and its clones, which have -- at best -- "personality" in the voice of Howard Cogan, who provides the snarky voice on station liners. But song titles? Fuggedaboudit. Conversation? Don't make me laugh.
The audience? Except for a relative handful like yourself, they don't care. They just want their music station to be playing their favorite songs whenever they tune in.
For a format like Smooth Jazz, like Beautiful Music before it, the less intrusion by talk, the better people seem to like it. But as has been noted, the audience has mostly grayed-out; that was the kiss of death for the latter and is rapidly becoming the same for the former.
