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Longest commercial break ever?

J

johnbasalla

I tuned into WQAL just after 7pm to hear "The Hit List" countdown show. It wasn't there. What was there were wall-to-wall commercials. I tuned out after a minute and a half or so, but came back a few minutes later to see if the syndicated countdown was on. It wasn't... but more commercials were. I figured they had gone at least 10 minutes with nothing but commercials and station promotions. How strange or image damaging was it to hear them play "your music...your station" only to follow that up with more commercials. I kept half an ear on it and when they finally went to a different syndicated thing at about 7:25, I knew that they had just run more then 20 minutes of advertisements and station promotions.
 
If computers had a sense of humor (they don't), they woulda played "Want Ads" by The Honeycomb after that "block of non-stop, back-to-back-and-all-in-a-row, super(stop)set-of-greatest-hit commercial" break. Feh! It's Clear Channel doing what it does best. Ruining radio and people's lives along with it. (Followed close behind by Cumulus and Citadel.)
 
This sometimes happens when the Selector log has corruption in it. The automation system does not see the rest of the music, or has the wrong data associated with the music and only the commercial log for the rest of the day airs. Depending on the automation system, sometimes it will even start playing tomorrows commercials. Numerous failsafes or human intervention can put it all back on track.

Q-104 is a CBS property...but no one has an exclusive on corrupt data or computers gone awry. We have all had it happen.
 
Greg Brinda often has to do a 15 minute break on his Miller Lite 10th Inning post-game show, but that's because the "30-year veteran" never did know how to work a show clock.
 
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