People who have worked for radio stations, what are some interesting behind-the-scenes things listeners don't see?

I briefly worked in sports talk radio. There were certain people associated with the local teams that we weren't allowed to bash, but the callers were. Some of those "callers" were radio station employees calling in from the next room.

Didn't work in radio, but I won the 10th caller tickets once when I was a young teenager. It was the biggest prize I had ever won, so I was super excited on the phone. The commercials were still playing on the air, so my initial reaction didn't air. The DJ told me to re-enact winning the tickets when we were back on the air, and I said ok. In the meantime, he flirted with me a little, found out I was underage, then stuck to small talk and instructions. When we were back on air, I did my best to redo the excitement at winning. He then played another song, told me I did a good job, and hung up. Gave me a little insight into how those contests worked.

The boredom that comes from sitting there for hours. Once you've made a Playlist, it's kind of a shit around and interject yourself occasionally. Unless you do an actual show. I havnt worked in one since like 2006, so it might be better now.

I was at a radio station once and the DJ showed me a red envelope they kept in the radio desk which he said contained the message you were supposed to read on the air in case of a nuclear attack. You would get a code on the news ticker and it would tell you to open the envelope. He said a guy would come in and exchange the envelope from time to time. He might have been pulling my leg. I don't know. I saw the envelope and it was an official-looking envelope.

I had a female housemate/roommate for a couple of years; (I had answered a blind ad for a house-share); who was one of those "sidekicks" on the MAJOR local radio station morning show, back in the 80's ... and she was absolutely insufferable to live with. She NEVER shut off her radio personality. She talked in her morning radio voice, as if she were always "on the air", and never shut it off. It got old really fast, trust me. ^(She wasn't that great of a person to begin with, unlikable; but that's another matter.)

Back in 1970, I had a bud barely 18 just out of high school who played “easy listening” records weekends from 10pm till 6am. Boringgggggg. I got to see him read 2 minutes of news just off a teletype. He was terrible at it, but no one was listening anyway.

Not in radio but learned something interesting years ago. I live in Ohio and took a work trip to southern California. While driving around San Diego I turned on the car radio and was shocked that the local DJ was the same guy I had been hearing for years back home in Ohio. When I got home, I went to the local station’s website and found his email and asked him if he was quitting or what, because I had heard him in San Diego. He actually responded and told me he records shows for three different cities, pretending to be local to each city. That sort of feels dirty to me.

I had a basic radio broadcasting class in the 80's, which resulted in getting my DJ license when I was like 15. Knowing how to shut down the transmitter was a big deal for FCC reasons. The professor took us into the equipment room and said "If the FCC shows up and asks if you know how to turn off the transmitter, you bring them in here, point to this button, and say 'this here button right here sir.' You don't need to know about anything else in this room, but in particular, the equipment in this other rack here is for the Emergency Broadcast System [now Emergency Alert System]. If you touch ANYTHING in this rack, I WILL KNOW, and I'll come to the station, and I'll push you off the roof myself. Clear?"

There's a radio show in the morning about calling two people with a conflict and trying to get them to resolve it on air. They pretend that it's live and always get people to answer at 7AM even if they're calling their workplace. The whole thing is scripted and ridiculous, they always have a huge reveal in the middle then don't bother trying to resolve the BS scripted conflict. "This guy broke my camera I need a new one" "I found proof that you're cheating on your husband on the camera before it broke" "Ok, don't bother replacing it" Radio Hosts: OMG HAHAHHA Pisses me off how they assume the audience is so stupid.

When dj's speak to listeners, they often 'edit' the tape before playing it on air

1. Broadcasting school gets you nowhere in radio, it's being able to talk, multitask and be somewhat interesting. 2. The songs played are programmed by the program director (who has the ins with promotion companies and label guys) and the jocks have very little leeway in what gets aired - if you have a strict PD you can get fired for playing songs not on the approved playlist. 3. Prizes are frequently not picked up by contest winners. Many promotion assistants people go home with the abandoned prizes. 4. Very few studios have live people anymore since corporations took over. The same jock can be in many markets and pre records their show with different station IDs and automated times for local commercials.

Way back in the day, when stations still mostly played albums and not CDs or tapes, I always had a list of songs that were six minutes or longer that I saved for when I needed to take a dump during the show.

Worked at a "guy talk"/sports talk radio station for almost ten years. -Those couple/neighbor/coworker feud segments where they confront each other on air are all fake. Either other radio station employees or paid actors. -"Caller number ten" giveaways are usually legit if the number is low. Past an arbitrary number (20 or so), we'd just let the phones ring for another arbitrary amount of time and then whoever we picked up first won the prize -The "hot" girl on the morning show at my station was notorious for sleeping with local team athletes. But not the stars, think tenth man off the bench of an NBA squad-level. This may or may not be true at other stations around the country. -We had a list of banned callers. Reasons for bans were myriad, and callers would often try to change their names or voices to get on air. Once we got caller ID (way later than we should have), it made our jobs a lot easier to weed out those people. I always enjoyed calling them by their banned name and hearing them get flustered trying to lie. -One nighttime on air personality used to have a woman in her 20s come to the studio as his "protege" and learn the business. She always wore very tight and revealing clothes. I don't know exactly what they did after-hours, but one day while cleaning out his office after he got fired for unrelated reasons, I found a rubber ass in a box. -I worked as a stadium engineer/producer for some of the pro teams. Nothing too crazy other than hearing the coach of a basketball team, who was the son of a Hall of Fame player, talk about how he always liked coming to the city we were in because he could "pound p**** all day" when he wasn't working. -Of all the industries I've worked in, the broadcasting industry is second only to the restaurant industry for coworkers banging each other. Married or otherwise.

Magical grime and enchanted filth. The casual listener might be shocked at how absolutely filthy the studios (can be). Not “jumbled and disorderly,” which can be a thing, but…grimy. Crumbs, sticky mystery substances, dust, hair you’re not sure what mammal it’s from, just…grossness. I was a board operator and late night on air personality for awhile. I don’t like complaining about things without also having a tenable solution to propose. I don’t have a tenable solution to propose when I complained to the station manager about the filth and grime… …which is how I also became the station’s janitor for awhile. When I moved out of state the studio went out of business, which can best be explained by me having destroyed the magical grime and enchanted filth that kept it running all those prior years.

That "the 10th caller" is nothing to do what number your call is. It's who will be entertaining on air

Those “callers” you hear sometimes? Not always real listeners. If phones are dead or they need to keep the segment moving, staff will step in or they’ll reuse pre-recorded bits. Radio silence is literally their worst nightmare.

Worked in a major market in the 90’s and early 2000’s. If you hear your requested song, 99 percent of the time, just a coincidence. Sorry. Stray from the playlist, very bad idea.

I worked for a local UK station in the 90s which, without fanfare or any mention on air, became part of a national chain. The breakfast show used to run phone-in competitions with big cash prizes. Every morning, listeners would be invited to call a premium-rate number for the chance to win, and the DJ would then talk to one lucky entrant ("How's your day going?" "What would you do with the money?") and then reveal they'd won. What was never revealed on air was that listeners to this local station were competing with listeners to every other station in the chain across the country. One w***** would be picked and then, on the playout system on all 30-40 of these stations across the country, clips would be delivered of that caller answering a couple of questions so each local DJ could ask "How's your day going?" (play clip 1), "What would you do with the money?" (play clip 2), reveal they'd won, then play the obligatory clip of them screaming. I used to wonder how many people would bother to enter if they knew they were competing not just with the town, but with the whole country.

mildly interesting BBC - let snoop dogg smoke weed in the no smoking studio. not being allowed to announce dr dre’s birthday on air because then people would realise how old he was. i was at a hip hop type of station. bbc have a ready to go somber music playlist in case of any royal deaths ready to go at all times. the daytime djs had set rules about how many uk songs they had to play, how many from playlist a, playlist b etc. prob 10 min of free choice an hour. not allowed ‘beef’ songs to be played as that would look like bbc stoking the flames / picking a side.

Circa 1983 and my buddy was a DJ at a populat local rock station. I got to answer the phones all night. When it came time to be the 16th caller to win tickets etc.... I would be the one to keep track, but really didn't. I would go down the five or six phone lines that were lit up and answer rapidly for about five minutes, "you are the 15th caller" then move on "you are the 15th caller".......

Used to work radio promotions. The things we’d give away were almost always because of sales deals. Which explains why I once had to hand out cheese samples. The promo vans suck to drive. At the station I worked at, one of them had such a bad wrap job on it that we couldn’t see out the back window. Street team members have stalkers. We used to have the same few people show up to events and take pictures and post us on their personal Facebook and act like we were friends. Promotions is the lowest budgeted department at the station. The reason there are prize wheels and you don’t always get a prize is because there aren’t enough available. The station would send us to an all day appearance with just 2 tshirts. If time-sensitive prizes didn’t get picked up, we’d usually get to take them. I got to hook up friends with concert tickets every so often. You do get to meet celebrities, which is pretty cool.

I've always wondered about people who do live radio or tv. How early do you have to be there before you go on? I assume it's much earlier than most jobs because it's not like there's a lot of time to replace someone if you get stuck in traffic or get a flat tire. If you go live at 3pm, what time would you be expected to be there?

I worked at a grocery store and one of my coworkers worked at a local radio station. My mom and I were his callers more than once and he coached the entire call.

Everyones naked

Toxicity and shitty pay.

Nothing super special, but if it’s indie radio, the music library is going to be one of the biggest, wildest adventures of your life. People really do respect the ON AIR sign, and woe betide you if you waltz in yapping during a spoken segment or show. There are a million reasons why they didn’t pick up the studio line. You’ll never know. Every radio host who does pick up the studio line will get someone bitching about the show. If you’re calling anything but a corporate radio station, you’re going to get some good-natured clapback. Classical and jazz music hosts have the best time programming to just piss around. If you’re having stomach problems, you can just program a concerto for the first half and a symphony movement for the second half, and go c*** your guts out while it plays. During Covid, we recorded a lot of our shows from home. When we came back, we would literally put masks over the microphone wind sock. It didn’t really do anything to the audio. We just ticked up the voice audio slightly. Vinyl DJing for radio is harder than it looks. It’s always fun seeing an actual vinyl DJ cook a soul or psychedelic set. The guy who trained me had the wee-hours ‘60s groove set; it was a rite of passage to train with this dude.

I was at a Subway restaurant years ago and there was a radio station a few doors down. The restaurant had that station playing and I was talking to my friend about how over played a particular song was. A couple songs later there DJ came on and talked about how he was just at Subway and someone was commentating on one of the songs that they just played. Agreed it might have been played a bit too much but said they still got a lot of requests for it. Pretty sure it was that Sheryl Crow/Kid Rock song.

I pre-record my afternoon show. sometimes the night before so I can go to my other job (which is necessary because of the low pay. I do the show from my home studio, which is really just a USB mic plugged into a laptop in my living room. One day that I pre-recorded, we played a ZZ Top song. I recorded a segment about how Dusty Hill had unscheduled shoulder surgery, but the press release said they expected him back on stage the following Friday. The next day I was out driving, and heard on a newscast on my station that Dusty had died! I turned the car around to go home and delete the previous break and throw together a quick tribute so I didn't look like a dummy. Someone mentioned that a PD would fire them if they played an unapproved song. I had one PD that made it a physical impossibility to play anything but the automation computer. I would have had to have plugged in a cd player or other device to even try. In my current station, I have a little wiggle room to edit the playlist, but that's from trust I've earned over a couple years that I'm not just playing my favorite songs, and this would not happen in a larger company. The only times all three jocks and the owner have been in the same room have been Christmas parties and a surprise birthday party. Not so much now, but when I started in the 90s, the business was pretty cut-throat. Hosts sandbagging each other because they were worried about their spots. Stealing each others' headphones, hiding each others' mail, real petty office stuff. It was rare to have friends at competing stations.

I worked in radio in the 90s, so I don't know how different it is today. When I worked middays, I was on my best behavior in the studio since the program director (my boss) and others were in the building, and actually listening to whatever I was doing, but on my weekend shifts hoo boy. Dancing around the studio, using the office computer to play solitaire between songs, using the production studio to rip songs onto a cassette, I did so much dumb stuff to stay energetic. When I had to go to the bathroom I had a designated 6 minute long song I slapped on. Oh and if we did a contest or request show and didn't get enough calls? Totally pretended. You were not actually the 10th caller, you were the third one who actually called in. I didn't get 15 requests this hour, I got two, and filled the gaps with whatever the f*** I felt like. Radio is a lot of never letting the listeners guess anything was weird, always keep chugging on, forward, act like it's all under control. And yes, I did have to talk over the intro of the song on purpose. It was to prevent dead air. I got so good I could do a full 36-hour weather forecast in 16 seconds - 12 if it was just going to be sunny for two days.

Worked in radio as my first internship job thing in high school: The DJ’s are regular, fucked up people who have no background in radio. One guy, was a raging alcoholic and roofer before he randomly got the job, another dude was a 500lb 5’6 dude who played Magic The Gathering competitively locally until he was blacklisted for being too gross and creepy. The lady DJ? Stripper before. Not yucking anyone’s yum, just saying that there’s no need for classic schooling for that type of gig. 🤷🏻‍♀️

Some of the “10th caller is the w*****” contests can be easily rigged. My best friend was a DJ in a mid-major city that had a lot of big name bands roll through town. We would pre record the “OMG! Are you kidding me?!?! I never win anything!!” call and it would be played at the appropriate time. I can’t begin to count the number of stars I met in the 90’s/00’s.

Here’s one I haven’t seen yet in this thread: for win-to-get-in events, like the ones that the station might be putting in for an anniversary party or exclusive listening event or something, they almost always give away more tickets than there is actually capacity for the event. When people don’t have any cash on the line, it’s super easy to bail on an event, and these shows aren’t c**** to put together. To ensure the room fills, they give away hella tickets and just say first come first serve.

Just finished a rewatch of "WKRP in Cincinnati". I'm disappointed these stories put the lie to that show!

Have you ever heard the phrase “A face for radio?” Yeah, that’s about 90% of personalities. Velvet voice and freak face. The 10th caller stuff was pretty much anything from the 8th to the 12th caller depending on what line on the switchboard I answered and how busy I was with other tasks.

The DJ putting on a long song so he could have sex with his girlfriend.

The in-fighting and incompetence. My god...the unprepared DJs...the sheer incompetence by management...the affairs. Just like any other work place, I guess.

All of it.  It's radio. 

Almost everything is recorded in advance and very little is still actually live on-air. One DJ may possibly be on a hundred or more stations all over the country and they play pre-recorded tracks to make it sound like they actually live in your city. 

The guy on the radio sounds like that in real life too. I worked with a small radio station for a bit and the on-air voice and the off-air voice are pretty much the same.

Even 20 years ago most of it was automated and the morning show I worked for was almost entirely pre-recorded. The call in requests and contests too.

After 20+ years on air I had to leave the 'air chair'. Corporate radio didn't want strong talent because they could have leverage against them. And I was on the older edge (mid 40's) and they wanted new young talent that would have no problem recording/voice tracking for several stations with no to VERY little live work.

Most “live” is actually live-on-tape. Do the job right and there’s no need to edit, but where I worked, we generally recorded everything about a break in advance, which gave us anywhere from 5-15 minutes to fix something, depending on which part of the morning show we were in.

I had a 7 minute song on standby I'm case I had to drop a deuce.

I worked a couple of shifts at a talk radio station about 20 years back, the amount of times the host would mute his mic on-air and talk shit about callers to the production booth blew my mind.

lmaooo the fake callers thing is so unhinged. like imagine being paid to pretend you're some random dude from jersey just to defend your boss's buddy. i respect the chaos but also that's peak radio station energy

Every time the power goes out, the console needs rebooted in a very specific way once it comes back on. There was an instruction sheet next to the console.

A mouse running up my leg at 3:30 AM.

Major fear #1: nobody's listening Major fear #2: somebody's listening

Worked in radio in the 80’s. Called a friend, off air, asked him if he wanted tickets to an upcoming concert. He said, “of course!”. Low and behold, he was the 10th caller! And Won! We had a great time.

The singers aren't actually there singing their songs live 😔

They don’t see any of it; it’s radio!

I did morning radio as a college intern and then an assistant producer in 2004. I had to be there by 5am. Our show started at 5:30, at which time I was supposed to be as loud and obnoxious and "peppy" as possible. That song you're sick of hearing? The station has a list of them. We had to play a certain number of AAA list songs per hour. They annoyed us too. Yes, there really was a list of "I have to go to the bathroom" songs you could call up as needed. Cool thing: the promotions dept had a literal closet full of free stuff, CDs, concert tickets, and we had to clean it out constantly. If the DJ doesn't like you, he might whine to the program director and have you fired. Two weeks before I was to be hired on full time post grad. Misogyny was rampant in the early 00s still and he felt women should only work in sales. Sigh.

It's radio. Nobody sees anything.

>things listeners don't see? Literally everything, I should think. It's radio.

My brother's gf used to do a bit of stuff on air. It's mundane answer, but she said that it's hard at times to fill a minute or so of speaking. Sometimes they have nothing really good to say, other times a minute isn't long enough.

They normally tell you to say this or that. I remember on b105 years ago I went into a draw to win a Les Paul guitar and a placard. And it was a question I had no idea of the answer but he gave me the answer. And guess who got the phone call Monday morning. Yep me

Not behind the scenes but a radio station in Atlanta had a whoever does the craziest thing wins the tickets at a bar. If I remember correctly a girl gave a co-host a b****** in the bathroom and won the tickets. The station manager was furious and the tension on air the next day was crazy. 

I want to read the one where almost no one is wearing pants.

I’ve always wondered how much of it is actually scripted

We use a f*** ton of AI... Weather, trafdic, sometimes even the news. I hate it! We mostly only have human moderation for 6 hours a day, everything else is more recorded or AI. :/

a lot of it is staged

Include [bracketed word] if it's used in the forum post. I've been on-air a handful of times and each time I learn something new that nobody would ever know about without being behind the curtain. One thing I find fascinating: every station has a "music director" who curates what goes onto the playlist. This is technically an artistic decision, but it's also legally risky because radio programmers have to be careful not to play too much of one artist or album in a row. The music director has to balance making sure everyone hears something new with avoiding copyright strikes.

I was an intern at a station and I worked with a DJ who sounded so happy and gleeful on air. In person, grumpy as hell and nobody liked the guy.

I was surprised by how much ad business is done via trade. Trading ad time for goods or services the station or the advertiser needed.

Most radio feels live but much of it is timed and edited

I can play any song you want, as long as it's on this list. F*** clear channel. 

No. DJ's don't create a playlist.

I had a roommate who wanted to get into sports journalism,  and he was the exact failure that radio guys loved to interview and f*** with to keep their hopes up and share it.  Basically any highschool/college athlete who didnt make it pro and tried to enter into the RTF crew based on his experience was fucked with purposely on every Job application. Why did I his history and philosophy major friend know this? I was the tech theater kid in high-school and my friends worked the radio station. And my dad was a Mother Bell union man, I would have had an easy job application process to get every job he applied for and he could never get one.   Well why didn't you recommend him and vouch for him? M*********** never cleaned shaving hair out of the sink. And smoked weed in a housing arrangement the US Navy Military Police visited (other roomate Computer Science ROTC guy) f*** you college roommate. I ain't setting up a job career for you.