Forum: Author Hangout

I have, on occasion, heard radio announcers say they retrieved a piece of music from the station's vault and played it on the air.
From that, I jumped to the conclusion that radio stations have available a big library of music from which they select something when the need arises.
If you were starting a new radio station, how would you go about acquiring such a music library? Do you have to go searching, one by one, for each piece of music you want - or can you buy an entire library at once? If so, where?

Ever since I found internet radio I have not listen to over the air radio since because they are to limited in range.

I remember back when the DJ's would play songs from a album that were far better then the singles the record companies wanted them to play.

I worked in radio for a bit where there was a library - basement of CDs and LPs. High rotation programming was kept in the studio, but later on moved to digital systems like Wizard where you ripped the stuff from CD.

Nowadays I imagine if someone was setting up from scratch, they would just use a pay service to purchase digital files, and get the dead media if if it wasn't available digitally.

No concern about special rights payments - those are the licensing fees that broadcasters/outlets pay to performance rights companies like BMI/ASCAP/APRA-AMCOS etc

What are the things you hate about over-the-air radio?

For me it was knowing they had a huge library but only playing a very small part of it.

Ever since I found internet radio I never looked back.