Who Does What At A Classical Station?

Our fearless Inside the Arts blog leader and guru, Drew McManus, reminded me that not everyone is a classical radio nerd, and that I should remember to do a nuts-and-bolts post once in a while.

If you’re a listener rather than a radio employee, you might not know who does what at a classical station.

Announcers
The people you hear on the air are the public voice of the station, but they often are NOT the decision-makers. And it might surprise you to know that at a classical station the announcers are not like Don Imus and Howard Stern, pulling in the big bucks. Classical announcers are more likely to be the lowest paid employees. Announcing is considered a glamour job. I know of stations where the on-air employees earn just over mimimum wage. (By the way, we don’t call them D.J.s in classical music.)

A full time announcer might make about $50,000 at a unionized station (the union most belong to is AFTRA, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists), but most stations are not unionized. I worked full time on-air for many years and never even broke $20,000. Still, being on-air is the most fun of all radio jobs IF the announcer gets to pick some of the music. If not, the job can be very frustrating.

Stations usually have a handful of fulltime announcers, and a stable of part-timers who do weekends and sub when needed.

Management
Not all stations are configured the same. Many stations are licensed by universities or school districts, a holdover from when public stations were meant to be educational. Those stations often have a titular head, like a dean or university president who doesn’t deal with day-to-day decisions but can have the power to fund or not fund a station. Then there’s a CEO, General Manager, or Executive Producer who manages all the business of the station and is the top banana. As top banana, this person is expected to raise money and go to lots of parties.

The Program Director hires and fires staff and makes all big-picture programming decisions, like whether to air national shows, how much local community stuff makes it onto the air, how long air shifts are and which announcers do which daypart. Dayparting is very important to some Program Directors. They think you want upbeat music in the morning, non-distracting music at dinner time, and soothing music at bedtime. I have mixed feelings, but we can talk about that another time.

Some P.D.s actually program the station themselves. I’m so tempted here to tell stories, like the one about the P.D. who had 81 shows programmed and played the same 81 programs over and over again for 10 years. He may still be playing those programs, for all I know. The CDs were from the 80s.

Many stations have Music Directors who choose the music, usually according to a standard computer program that rates the pieces as to daypart, popularity, listenability, etc. The computer programs used at classical stations have search features that allow you to pick pieces by time, by composer, by genre, etc. There are only a couple of good CD library programs out there, and most stations have to enter a lot of the CD info by hand into their databases, especially now that the big record companies are producing less. Many CDs come in from independents or directly from artists and aren’t in any standard databases. Some have metadata embedded that can be read directly into the station databases, but most don’t. Managing the CD library is a HUGE problem for stations, and the Music Director usually has to deal with it.

Production
Classical stations need producers, because they have to produce their own ads. At public stations we don’t call them ads or spots. We use the euphemism “underwriting credits.” Our advertisers on public stations are called “underwriters.” It’s a fine distinction. On commercial stations, the spots are often 60 seconds and there can be as many as 15 minutes of ads in an hour. On public stations, there used to be a rule that you couldn’t (shouldn’t?) have more than 90 seconds an hour of underwriting spots. I don’t know if that’s changed — I’ll see if I can find out. The public spots are not allowed to have any call to action, like “come see us today,” or “call right now.” Public stations can only do that when they are begging for bucks during fundraising time.

Production means audio editing of commercial spots and public service announcements. We used to do the audio editing with reel-to-reel tape, razor blades, and editing tape. Now it’s done on the computer with editing software. A large station might have a Production Director and several producers. A small station might have a single producer. The producers often do air shifts, and sometimes they double as engineers and set up gear for remotes, concerts, interviews, etc.

Engineers
That brings us to the Engineer, arguably the most important person in the station. If the gear doesn’t work, or the transmitter goes on the fritz, there is no station. Therefore, knowing how much we need them and how important they are, engineers tend to be a little difficult. They range from the RF engineer who is willing to climb the transmission tower on a mountaintop in a snowstorm, to audio engineers who deal more with audio gear. And increasingly we have computer engineers.

Traffic
The traffic person is the one who schedules everything that goes on the air. Traffic has to gather the advertising/underwriting info from the sales staff, schedule the ads on the air, coordinate them with the printed music program, add the public service announcements, and get each day’s schedule to the announcer to use on the air. The announcers wouldn’t know what to do without the daily traffic schedule.

Sales
The sales/underwriting staff can be huge or can be a single person. Some commercial stations have Joint Marketing Agreements, where they farm out the advertising to an outside firm. Others have their own sales staff. At a public station, half the income comes from the listeners; the other half comes from underwriting, sold by the sales staff.

Most stations have administrative personnel, and some have additional staff, like event planners, marketers, and community service liaisons. But for the most part, classical stations are lean and mean. They rarely have the money to be fully staffed.

Was this more than you wanted to know?